Readiness
Be Not Afraid Readiness
Chapter 8 Readiness
Xaverie, an energetic, cheerful woman, was a devoted wife and mother. Her illness came in the prime of life – she was thirty-three – and it struck suddenly, just after the birth of her second child, Gareth. First her eyes ached, then she had stomach pains, then lumps on her scalp. She began by taking Tylenol; within a week she was on morphine. Several days later she was gone.
When Xaverie found out she had cancer, she was almost awed by it. To her husband, John, she said, "Well, God does not ask us to carry more than we can bear, so he must feel that I can carry this." And to her mother: "You know, my greatest fear in life was that I would get cancer. Yet the minute I heard I had it, I had absolutely no fear." Later her mother, Sibyl, wrote, "When we heard her diagnosis, she said, 'John, Mama, I want no long faces, no tears. I don't want this to be a big holy experience. I want it to be a joyful, childlike one.' I gulped inwardly, and possibly John did too.
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How in the world were we going to put on this brave face?"
Xaverie saw her illness as a call to give up her love of life and her family for the greater love of God, and
her years of daily surrender to Christ gave her strength to make this new, greater sacrifice. Naturally she loved her children dearly, but she felt she now had another task – to ready herself for dying – and she did not cling to them emotionally. When arrangements were made for a neighbor to take over their care – something most mothers would have found difficult – she accepted the help gratefully, and thanked the woman from her heart.
Incredibly, she never once expressed any anxiety about the future, and from the time she became ill until her death, no one heard her breathe a word of complaint or saw her shed a tear.
One day when my wife and I came to see her, she asked for the laying on of hands, a blessing described in James 5, which reads, "Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord."
A few days later, in answer to this request, we held a service for Xaverie. The gathering was quietly hopeful, but it was also heartrending. Everyone present was
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shaken, and there were many tears. We all felt the presence of eternity in our midst.
Xaverie arrived on a gurney, with an IV-line and oxygen, and as she entered the room, she waved
cheerfully and tried to sit up. In a photo that captured this moment, you can see the anguish on John's face. But hers is shining with expectancy and joy. As I laid my hands on her, she looked at me trustingly and said, "With God, everything is possible!" But while she was certain that she could be healed if that was God's plan, she was also completely ready to die.
The next morning my wife and I visited her again and said, "Xaverie, we trust in God's will for you. Are you ready for eternity?" She assured me that nothing burdened her conscience, and that she was at peace: "I will accept God's will, whatever it is. I am ready." In the evening of the same day she died.
It is nothing less than a grace when a terminally ill person is able to set things right and find peace with God – when there is time to beg forgiveness and to forgive, to overcome estrangement and heal old wounds. But time is not granted to everyone.
Rick, an accomplished carpenter, had always suffered from asthma, and there were times when it was so severe that his doctor feared for his life. Nevertheless,
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he was a cheerful, outgoing person who enjoyed a good joke and loved children.
Then one day he died from a hemorrhage of the brain, leaving his wife, Liz, and eight children between
the ages of one and fourteen. There was nothing unusual about the way the day had begun. After getting up early to see his eldest daughter off to high school, he had eaten breakfast with the rest of the family, and left for his job at a nearby factory. Liz was surprised when he showed up at the door sometime later, apologizing for not having helped her get the children up that morning. But there was no indication that anything was wrong.
Toward the end of the morning, however, Jeff, a coworker, found Rick leaning against a stack of lumber complaining of a severe headache. It was not like Rick to take breaks at work, so Jeff knew it must be serious. Helping him to lie down, he sent someone else running for a stretcher. Minutes later, Rick was not responding. He was rushed to the hospital, but was beyond help. He died the same evening, snatched in the prime of life. Everyone was stunned.
Ephesians 4 advises us to make peace every day "before the sun sets." Rick did this, and the same day the sun went down forever on his life. It has always been a source of comfort to his wife that there was peace between them when he died.
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Fred, an engineer, died even more suddenly. Supervising work at a construction site one morning, he began to have chest pains. An electrocardiogram taken at a nearby doctor's office showed signs of a
heart attack, and an ambulance was called. Fred's wife, Margaret, was called and arrived quickly, but soon left again to pack for a hospital stay. Moments later, Fred, who was still lying on the examination table, complained of dizziness and then lost consciousness. Desperate attempts were made to save him, but they were of no avail. Advanced cardiac support was not yet developed, and defibrillators were not standard office equipment. When Margaret returned, less than an hour later, she was met by the unbelievable news that her husband was no longer alive.
Back at the construction site, news of Fred's death spread quickly. Work stopped, and before long, flowers were laid where he had been busy only hours before. But there was little conversation. Fred had been a man of few words, and now that he was gone, what better way to pay him respect than to stand in silence?
When death strikes as unexpectedly as it did for Rick and Fred, numb shock is usually the first reaction. Understandably, fear is not far behind. As German writer Christoph Blumhardt once noted, most of us are so consumed by the mundane obligations of the day that almost anything can frighten us, simply by
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catching us off guard. And to go about life this way is nothing less than dangerous, for it is, as he says, "to go about unprotected, unaware, distracted, and removed from reality."
What, then, does it mean to be ready for death at any time? Can we stand before our Maker to give an account of our lives? Life simply is fragile, and any of us could be snuffed out at any time. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus exhorts us to watch day and night, "for no one knows the hour of his death," and in his Parable of the Ten Virgins, he warns us what will happen if the "Bridegroom" returns and finds us indifferent and unprepared. But should that frighten us into going around with long faces, expecting the worst?
Martin Luther once said that if the world were to end tomorrow, he would still plant his tree today. A deeply religious man, Luther was no superficial proponent of the old saying "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." But if his feet were firmly on the ground, his eyes and heart were set on heaven, and this gave him a confidence and conviction that no calamity could shake. And insofar as we live in a similar awareness of the eternal – and the security of knowing that we are always in God's hands – the same can hold true for us too. No matter what the future holds, it will find us at peace, because our underlying attitude is one of readiness for anything.
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When Aaron and Katie and their seven teenage children finally left Ohio for war-ravaged Honduras, their impatience was as great as their exuberance. Volunteers in a 1994 disaster-relief effort sponsored
by their Mennonite church, their bus had long been packed with equipment and supplies, and they would have been on the road already, if reports of violence in Central America hadn't thwarted their plans. Now they were finally heading south.
Traveling in a convoy of relief vehicles, they crossed one state after another, and then Mexico, without incident. But one morning several weeks into their trip, as their bus descended a winding mountain road near Tegucigalpa, calamity struck. Daughter Shirley remembers:
I was drowsing when suddenly Dad began to pump the
brakes hard and fast, and Mom and Mandy asked him
worriedly, "Are the brakes giving out?" I sat up instantly,
fully awake. Dad did not answer right away. Then, in an
anguished voice, he said they were, and grabbed the CB.
My brothers were driving the vehicle behind us, and he
told them what was happening. "Pray!" he begged them.
"Pray hard!"
We were picking up speed now and heading for a
curve. On one side was a huge rock wall, and on the
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other, a cliff. We yelled at Dad to try steering into the
wall, though we knew it could be fatal. But Dad couldn't
bring himself to stop the bus that way.
We raced faster and faster, and suddenly we were
bearing down on a group of men loading stone into a
truck parked on our side of the road. Dad realized he
would hit it and began to shake uncontrollably, then
tried to swerve around it and lost control of the wheel.
"We're heading for eternity!" he cried out; at the same
time, I felt the wheels lifting off the ground. Boulders
rushed up toward us, and glass rained down everywhere.
Then I couldn't see anything…
Sliding down the steep hillside from the highway a few minutes later, Shirley's brothers found her and her sisters badly injured, but alive. Miraculously – considering the crumpled frame of the bus – they had even managed to extricate themselves from the wreckage. Seeing her brothers huddled not far away, Shirley dragged herself toward them. They were trying to console their dying mother:
Mom was gasping hard, and her expression was agonized
and helpless. I told her, "Mom, we love you." She seemed
to focus and looked straight at me for a second, but then
went blank again. That's when I saw Dad lying twisted
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and lifeless only a few feet away. My heart sank: Dad had
always been so strong and comforting – always there for
us.
Looking back at her mother, Shirley struggled to "allow her to go," as she later put it.
I was deeply torn. Part of me wanted to cry out, "Mom,
live! Please live!" But another part of me wished she
could be released from her agony immediately. And so
I told her it was all right to go, and promised her that
we would meet again someday. Then I turned and tried
to comfort my sister Mary, who was lying nearby and
seemed near death. When I looked back at Mom, I saw
that she had just passed away. I knelt beside her for a
long time, numbed by grief.
Aside from Aaron and Katie, everyone on the bus survived, but the next days were still a nightmare. Housed in a government hospital in Tegucigalpa, Shirley and her sisters underwent one battery of tests and surgeries after another. Medications provided relief from pain, but nothing could erase the images
that still kept them awake at night: they seemed seared onto their brains. Nothing, that is, except the
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unexpected peace that washed over her as she viewed her parents before their bodies were flown back to the United States for burial. To Shirley, it was clear: they had both been ready to go.
When I looked into Dad's casket, a deep peace flooded
my soul. I saw heaven on his face. He had the most
contented look I had ever seen. And when I looked at
Mom, I saw the same expression. They looked so happy.
There was no doubt in my mind that they were both in
heaven.