As I was writing the three posts below, I started pondering about death. I thought if I died today, would I be ready? Would you? Would all the things that have kept you so busy be important? Would you be ready to face God? I shiver just thinking about it, and I have been walking with Christ for 40 years. I am not sure I would be ready; I hope I would be. For sure I would throw myself on the mercy of God. So my friend, get ready. Get in touch with God by learning how to talk with him in a daily conversation and ponder his being all day. Please click on the link on the left bar entitled Seven Steps Through The Whispers Prayer Process. The seventh step is “Ponder” To Ponder is to be conscious of God all day. It is a form of prayer and what the Apostle Paul meant by “Pray Unceasingly.”
Kathy says:
Dr. Don
I don’t believe any of us are ready for things that are unknown, and death is the ultimate unknown. It is the door we must all pass through, at the end of this life, in order to step into the next.
Jesus only referenced His own death to His disciples as He came closer to the finish of His ministry, but even then, they didn’t truly understand, because what He was trying to tell them wasn’t about death. It was about sacrifice.
He wanted them to understand that there can be no love, if there is no sacrifice. Something of the self has to be given up, to die; to be sacrificed, in order for another to live.
We will not be ready for death Don until we have all experienced some type of personal sacrifice in this life.
But society wants to make death and sacrifice, sterile and impersonal. We see this in the simplest aspect of our lives, our daily meals.
Imagine what it would be like for us, instead of going to the market and picking out our sanitized plastic wrapped meat and veggies, we had to sacrifice our time growing and hunting for food.
I guarantee that our sense of gratitude would be much more significant for our daily meals than they are nowadays.
So we see that sacrifice and gratitude go hand in hand. Without sacrifice, there can be no gratitude, and no love.
But modern living has infused us with a detachment to life, and an unwillingness to sacrifice our time or our personal desires. As a result, we are unfamiliar with any real sense of gratitude.
This detachment extends to everything in our lives, even to the people who provide us with the necessary services that bring the items for life, to our very tables.
In a recent book that I read called the “Hungry Soul” by Leon Kass, MD, he mentions the enormous amount of time and energy expended into growing, harvesting, rearing, butchering, preserving, storing, transporting, stocking, selling, buying, preparing, cooking, and consuming food. The manufacturer of tables, chairs, stoves, refrigerators, dishes, glassware, utensils, kitchen gadgets; the provision of homes with fuel for cooking, with water for drinking and cleaning, with electricity for refrigeration, the operation of groceries, bakeries, supermarkets, restaurants, service for garbage collection, and the science of new fertilizers and animal feed.
Think about it, for most of us living in this wonderful country, we don’t really experience intense sacrifice, so neither do we fully experience full fledged genuine gratitude.
Without these two things in our lives, true sacrifice and true gratitude, we most likely will not have made the most of our lives and probably not helped another with theirs; thus making us unprepared for our final destination, which is to be in the loving arms of God.
Dr. Don says:
Kathy, I am sorry your reply got by me. I never saw it in the file. I must confess I am still learning how to navigate around in this Word Press blog. Forgive me, please. Your comments on my ponder about death is so true. I was thinking the same thing on a recent Disney cruise I took I watch all the food that was being thrown away and thought about how easy it comes to us and because of that, it is so easy to throw it away. If we grew it and sacrificed for it, wow, would it be different? I also wondered whether all those kids appreciated such an amazing child experience. It is true sacrifice and gratitude paves the way for a glorious death. Thanks for contributing.