7. Your Decision Matters to God
To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.
1 PETER 2:21
Whenever I begin to think my efforts don’t count—or even when my quadriplegia and wheelchair feel like too much to handle—I think of a young woman named Kim.
I first learned about Kim when an elder from her church in Pennsylvania called to ask if I would contact her with a few words of encouragement. “Kim is a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Christian woman who has always been active in our church,” he said, “but last year she contracted a motor-neuron disease and now must stay in bed. She can hardly move and must be fed with a feeding tube.” The elder paused for a moment and then added, “Kim is very depressed, and she’s wondering if her life is worth living anymore.”
I telephoned Kim right away. Her mother tucked the receiver under her ear. Her breathing was so faint that I could hardly hear Kim’s voice. We discussed many things, including our favorite parts of the Bible, the subject of heaven, and prayer. Finally, Kim said with great labor, “Joni, they want to give me a ventilator to help me breathe, but I don’t know whether I want one. I’m so tired. Do you think I should go on a ventilator?”
I was speechless. I took a deep breath, whispered a prayer, and replied, “Kim, there are a lot of things to consider, not the least of which is that your decision will affect many people around you. But of the two choices facing you, I think there’s a better one.” I then proceeded to share with her a simple but powerful Bible verse that has encouraged and guided me through the toughest of times in my fifty years of quadriplegia.
Second Peter 3:8 reads, “Do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” We all know the old adage that God looks at the last two thousand years as a couple of days gone by, I told her, but what about the other half of the verse? The part about seeing each day as a thousand years? It’s like divine arithmetic. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out God’s mathematical formula. If we see each day as comparable to a millennium in eternity, then each twenty-four hours is chock full of opportunities to invest in a thousand years’ worth of eternity. Each day God gives us the precious gift of hours to invest in the lives of others—investments that will have eternal repercussions for us and them.
Kim perked up at this idea. “But I’m in bed. I can’t go anywhere or do anything. How can my life count in this condition?” This is what I told her: “First, Kim, you can pray. No matter how feeble or fainthearted your prayers may seem, they have very special power with God. Psalm 10:17 reads, ‘You, LORD, hear the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry.’ The Lord cups his ear to listen when someone like you prays, someone who is enduring great affliction. He bends over backward when people offer him a sacrifice of praise. God is going to use your intercessions to shake the lives of everyone around you.”
That intrigued her. “And your obedience counts for eternity. Now is your chance to stretch your soul’s capacity for God, Kim. Your patience and endurance will resound to more glory to God than you can possibly appreciate right now. As the apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:18, ‘I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.’ If you keep a godly response, then it must multiply out to at least 558 years of eternal benefit to you and glory to God!”
She laughed, and I shared more. I encouraged her to think of the impact her patience and endurance would have on others around her, like her mom and dad. Philippians 2:4 tells us to always look out for the interests of others before our own. We are always called to think of others, no matter how difficult our circumstances.
I suggested to Kim, “The next time your mother tube-feeds you your lunch, why don’t you ask to say a blessing on the food before she syringes it into your G-tube? Do the divine math on that one. It’s got to pan out to at least 784 years’ worth of eternal benefit to you and your mother, as well as glory to God.”
What a way for Kim to live out her remaining days! She became a living example of 2 Corinthians 4:16–18: “Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”
Kim ended up living another month and a half after our conversation on the phone. But as her mother told me later, those forty-five days—she looked at them as forty-five thousand years—were some of the most meaningful and important weeks she ever lived.
Friend, if Kim made the most of every opportunity to reflect Jesus Christ during those difficult last days of her life, you and I can reflect Jesus as well.
Perhaps you’re not facing the decision to accept a ventilator or refuse it. You may not be dying, debilitated, or terminally ill. But still, you’d give anything to feel the peace Kim found. Trouble is, you still might be tempted to believe the lie that peace is found by prematurely ending your life.
True, you may feel that no one seems to care. And maybe not a soul does care! You may feel as though life is not expecting a single thing from you, and you simply cannot live with depression. Sadly, you are even willing to stake your life on the belief that nothing awaits you after death.
If so, you need peace! But remember, peace of mind comes not in the form of a death sentence, but through people. There is a Person who cares about you, even if no one else does. He calls Himself the Prince of Peace. And it is His perspective on life I want to talk to you about.
The Bible Speaks Out on Euthanasia
You may think that euthanasia of people who are dying or disabled is a rather recent phenomenon, but not so. The Old Testament records an incident involving King Saul of Israel, who became seriously wounded on the battlefield. Fearing the advancing enemy, Saul took his own sword and tried to fall on it. He cried out to a soldier, “Come and put me out of my misery . . . for I am in terrible pain but life lingers on.” The soldier deferred to the wishes of the king and killed him. Then, acting most likely on his supposed innocence, he brought some of Saul’s armor to David and said, “So I killed him, for I knew he couldn’t live.”
There were no laws on the books back then about assisted suicide, but that did not stop David from banging the gavel of Israel’s justice. He ordered the soldier put to death. Perhaps onlookers were shocked by the verdict. After all, Saul was dying anyway. He was in great pain, and if captured, he feared torture and abuse in his final hours. These things were probably on the mind of the soldier who performed the mercy killing, but his actions stand in contrast with the response of Saul’s bodyguard, who, minutes earlier, had been too terrified to commit the act.
To be fair, it seems that Saul’s status as king of Israel added to the guilt of the deed, and David was outraged that someone had the nerve to harm the king who was anointed by God. But I believe it’s fair to draw a principle that is as true for people today as it was for people several thousand years ago. Whether for a monarch or a common man, carrying out a mercy killing is wrong; the fact that Saul was king only heightened the criminality of the soldier’s deed.
God clearly opposes active euthanasia, whether it involves plunging a sword into the bleeding body of a king on a battlefield or plunging a syringe full of phenobarbital into the veins of a dying patient. The prohibition against murder in the Ten Commandments logically includes murder of the self. Mercy killing, whether committed actively or passively, is always presented in a negative light in the Bible. In Scripture, people who either killed themselves or sought to be put out of their misery are always seen as disobedient.
And as for those who will say, “I’ll do with my body as I wish,” God has a response: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”
No, there’s no biblical account of someone refusing medical treatment to cause death. But what we do have is the example of Jesus and the choices He made in His dying. When Jesus was hanging on His cross, He was offered one drink—which He refused—and a second, which He accepted. Did He change His mind? No, the first drink offered Him was wine mixed with myrrh, a narcotic drink. The second was a sour wine vinegar, a drink intended to relieve thirst more effectively than plain water. David Mathis writes, “This first wine represented an offer to ease the pain, to opt for a small shortcut . . . But this offer Jesus refused . . . And the second (sour) wine was given to keep him ‘conscious for as long as possible,’ and thus have the effect of prolonging his pain. This is the wine Jesus drank.”
Similarly, Dr. John MacArthur says of the second offered drink, “On the one hand this would quench a momentary thirst but over the long haul it could . . . [bring] the kind of refreshment that allowed a person to live a little bit longer.”
So very much was accomplished in the death of Jesus, and I’m not saying that in His death, Jesus made a definitive statement on end-of-life choices. Yes, Jesus was an example for us, as 1 Peter 2:21 tells us, but His example encompasses far more than our end-of-life choices. What I am saying is that Jesus did not allow the threat of prolonged suffering to influence His decisions. Jesus chose not to sidestep suffering—not to take a shortcut—but instead to meet pain head-on.
In short? The Bible teaches that any means to produce or hasten death in order to alleviate suffering is never justified. Or in the language of the Bible, it is never right to do evil.
The Bible Speaks Out on Dying
However, letting someone die is another matter entirely. Allowing a person to die when he or she is, in fact, dying is justified. The Bible is full of examples of people doing all they can to help a person live, but when it came time for a person to die, Scripture doesn’t do much more than record the death. No paramedics were called to the scene, no CPR administered, no Heimlich maneuver carried out. The Old and New Testaments do not specifically address many of our present-day problems and questions related to “letting someone die.” Scripture is probably silent because those problems didn’t exist in biblical times. There were no ventilators, drug therapies, pacemakers, or feeding tubes to confuse the difference between prolonging the process of dying and sustaining life.
In fact, the Bible speaks about death not in technical terms, but in the everyday language of ordinary experience. Today, doctors generally agree that a person is dead if the functions of the brain and brain stem cease, but Scripture does not formally define death in those terms or any others. It simply assumes we understand what death is.
But what Scripture lacks in absolute definitions, it makes up for in absolute decrees. There’s a kind of medical dictionary exactness to a verse like Job 14:5: “A person’s days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.”
That verse, along with others, rightly influences our judgments. “Keeping a comatose person alive by a machine, one who has an incurable disease and is irreversibly dying, is unnecessary,” writes evangelical theologian Norman Geisler in his book Christian Ethics. “In fact, it could be viewed as unethical . . . Extraordinary efforts to fight the divinely appointed limits of our mortality are really working in opposition to God.”
Exchange Fear for Peace
People’s intense interest in euthanasia can be summed up in one word: fear. Ever since the days of Eden, we’ve been haunted by fear of each side of the grave we look at. As the old song goes, “I’m tired of living and scared of dying.” On this side of the tombstone, our fears are aggravated by strange new diseases, machines that dehumanize, and treatments that rob dignity. Yet peering beyond the tombstone, we’re afraid of the abyss—the unknowable hereafter.
Peace is the opposite of fear. As I shared earlier, we are all in search of peace when it comes to life and death decisions. And the Prince of Peace is the only one who can rid us of fear, no matter which side of the grave we look at. The Bible calms our fears with these words:
Since we, God’s children, are human beings—made of flesh and blood—he became flesh and blood too by being born in human form; for only as a human being could he die and in dying break the power of the devil who had the power of death. Only in that way could he deliver those who through fear of death have been living all their lives as slaves to constant dread.
Read it again. God became a human being—that’s Jesus. Jesus, through His death, broke the power of the devil and his lies. He also wants to deliver you from your fears, whether fear of life as a living nightmare or fear of death as a permanent and total separation from God. To believe in Jesus gives you peace in the here and now and peace about the hereafter.
How? Well, remember that scary abyss? What makes it so foreboding is our guilt. And guilt is no psychological fiction: you’ve broken Somebody’s law and no matter how much others may flatter you on the outside, on the inside a guilty conscience nails you for lust, pride, and prejudice, just to name a few. The punishment for breaking the law is death. But like the verse says, Jesus delivers! When He bore God’s punishment, Jesus raised His cross as a sign marker, arranging a right turn away from hell and into heaven.
To place your hand in the hand of the Prince of Peace does not necessarily guarantee protection from suffering, nor does it offer immunity from difficult deathbed decisions. But it does give you a steadfast hand to hold on to, including the certainty that a loving and all-powerful God who knows everything is standing by your side. Putting your confidence in Christ will free you from living your whole life as a slave to constant dread—dread of facing life as a living nightmare, and dread of facing death as the dark unknown.
God loves life. He despises death, for “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Jesus said, “My purpose is to give life in all its fullness”—life not only in the here and now, but in the hereafter. There are good reasons why God wants you to live. He wants you to have peace. He knows your life can have value in the here and now. And He wants you to choose the joys of heaven.
God Knows You’re Heading for a Hereafter
If you were to ask the brother and sister duo Paige and Tyson Snedeker which truth from the Bible gave them the most peace in the midst of their ever-increasing limitations, they may very well respond with Romans 8:18: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”
That’s saying a mouthful! Some people find it difficult to think realistically about heaven. Even the spiritually minded feel awkward working toward “eternity” because it seems so far away, almost unreal. Even when we try to imagine what it would be like, we come up short of having a real desire to go there. Who wants to live forever tucked behind a galaxy where birds chirp, organs resound, and angels bounce from cloud to cloud?
If that were a true picture of heaven, an awful lot of people would be lukewarm about going there.
The fact is, descriptions of heaven aren’t as important as grasping the fact of heaven. Heaven is the place where God is going to give His family the biggest welcome-home party in history. Entrance into heaven means no more suffering, no more tears, and a life free from pain and filled with joy. Perhaps that’s why people who are dying, debilitated, or terminally ill are often those most ready to believe in God. Maybe the devil couldn’t care less about whether or not you believe in hell, but God definitely cares whether or not you believe in heaven!
Believing in Jesus is the first step to a life that goes far beyond this world. Once that fundamental point is settled, there are a few facts we can hold on to until we cross the other side of the grave and step into a bright eternity with God.
You were made for one purpose: to make God real to those around you. Don’t think He has left you without any means whatsoever for fulfilling that end just because you are confined to bed or struggling with pain. In a mysterious way, each day you live; each hopeful thought you think, however fleeting; each smile you muster—all of it brings God incredible joy. That’s because your positive attitude and actions, however small and faint, are fingers pointing others to a God who is larger and finer and grander than they thought. That’s what it means to glorify Him as you lie in that bed, sit in that wheelchair, or persevere through that depression.
Your suffering has meaning now and forever. This is what Romans 8:18 is all about. Your present suffering isn’t worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in you. How can that be? Loneliness, feelings of total abandonment, pain, and the like are capable of being exchanged for something precious, eternal, weighty, and real—so much so that it’s hardly worth comparing the two. God will one day reward you for enduring suffering with an uncomplaining attitude. When you exchange anger for faith in Him, then your life in heaven will be larger, finer, and grander because of that very suffering.
God works in your life up until the final moment. It may appear that nothing is taking place in the life of a dying loved one, an individual in a coma, or someone with a severe disability, but God is not hindered from accomplishing His work in a life just because nothing seems to be happening. The work of God is spiritual activity, often separated a long way from one’s cerebral, neurological, or muscular activity. Only eternity will reveal the work that was accomplished.
Life is more fleeting than we realize. We act as though this world is all there is. It’s little wonder we don’t care about eternity. We need the perspective of David, who wrote these words in Psalm 39:4–6:
Show me, LORD, my life’s end
and the number of my days;
let me know how fleeting my life is.
You have made my days a mere handbreadth;
the span of my years is as nothing before you . . .
Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom;
in vain they rush about, heaping up wealth
without knowing whose it will finally be.
The brevity of life ought to open our eyes to what it means to live beyond time. When you put your pain in that perspective, not only does time seem shortened, but suffering has an end in sight.
Dying is your final passage. The stripping away of all human powers, mental as well as physical, is a part of the process that George MacDonald calls “undressing for its last sweet bed.” When we who believe in God die, we leave behind our claim on our earthly “clothes” and become clothed with immortality.
God knows we’re heading for a hereafter. For those who, apart from Him, prematurely end their lives, hoping to find relief, there will only be a hereafter of vast and utter disappointment. For those who believe in Jesus, the dying process becomes the most significant passage of their lives. Theirs is a hereafter of more joy than they could possibly imagine.
God Knows You Have Value in the Here and Now
I once cornered Dr. J. I. Packer, a prominent evangelical theologian, and asked him this question: “What would you say about a man whose cerebral palsy has left him totally bedridden, nonverbal, and relegated to a back bedroom in a nursing home? No one visits him, and no nurse takes time to benefit from his good attitude. What can that man do?” I knew plenty of real-life examples, so the question wasn’t hypothetical.
Dr. Packer folded his hands, thought for a moment, and then replied, “A man like that can worship and glorify God.”
That response almost sounded as though Dr. Packer was piously patting this man on the head and trivializing his plight with a platitude that was too heavenly minded. But I’ve encountered enough people who are isolated and limited, like the man with cerebral palsy I used as an example, to know that Dr. Packer is right, and I’ve looked into the Bible long enough to know his advice is well taken.
I think of Tracy Traylor, a beautiful blonde-haired college student who suffered a severe head injury and was in a coma for five and a half months. She came out of it unable to walk or talk well enough for people outside her family to understand her.
I met Tracy and her mother at a conference. Tracy, sitting slumped in her wheelchair, slightly lifted her bobbing head and shoved something in her lap toward me. It was a necklace made of clay and colored beads, and one of the clay pieces had an imprint of a leaping deer.
“Oh, Tracy,” I said, “this is beautiful. Thank you for the gift.”
“My daughter was a design student in college, and she directs me on how to craft each piece of jewelry,” her mother proudly explained. I could hardly imagine the enormous effort it took for the two of them to communicate.
Just then, I noticed some words typed on a piece of paper twist-tied to the necklace. They were from Isaiah 35:4, 6: “Your God will come . . . Then will the lame leap like a deer.” I couldn’t hold back the tears. Tracy and I have enjoyed a marvelous friendship since that day. We both delight in taking the leaping-deer necklaces she makes and sharing them with other folks who eagerly await God’s coming. Although Tracy can hardly speak, her smile and her witness speak volumes. Her brilliant and shining hope has cast long, lingering shadows on me.
I know that hundreds of people rush by Tracy in her wheelchair, each of them oblivious to the powerful message she carries with her. Maybe millions of people wouldn’t care one iota about this woman’s lovely attitude, but Someone far more significant cares, and He has a purpose: “The purpose is that all the angelic powers should now see the complex wisdom of God’s plan being worked out through the Church.”
Whether a godly attitude shines from a young woman with a brain injury or from a lonely man relegated to a back bedroom, the response of patience and perseverance counts. God points to the peaceful attitude of suffering people to teach others about Himself. Not only is He teaching those we rub shoulders with every day, but He is also instructing the countless millions of angels and demons. The hosts in heaven stand amazed when they watch God sustain hurting people with His peace.
It matters to God not only that you live, but how you live.
God Can Be Trusted Even When There Are No Reasons
The message was scribbled and rain splattered: “Laurel Ledford needs to talk to you.” We met in an office at the retreat center where I was speaking. I was surprised when she entered the room carrying her three-month-old baby. It was cold and windy, not the kind of day to run errands with an infant. But then again, it wasn’t easy for Laurel to find someone to babysit her son with spina bifida. She sat across from me in a heavy sweater, holding her child bundled in blankets.
Laurel relayed her story—one incident after another of heart-twisting disappointment. First they moved after selling all they had so her husband, Steve, could go to school. Then their baby boy, Stephen, was born. Next she carried and lost a baby girl. Then again. Immediately after the loss of this second child, she accidentally became pregnant. When she was six months along, her husband had surgery, which further drained their already limited bank account.
She tugged at her little boy’s blanket and in tears said, “I thought I could handle losing another baby, but I could definitely not handle a baby with a birth defect. Shortly after that, my doctor told me that the baby I was carrying had severe hydrocephalus and spina bifida. He told me that one option would be to have a spontaneous delivery.”
“You mean abortion?”
Laurel nodded. I mentally added the phrase “spontaneous delivery” to that list of pleasant-sounding euphemisms.
“But I would not choose to lose my baby,” she said. “Still, that’s when depression and thoughts of suicide came to mind. I spent a long, gray Midwestern winter on the couch watching a lot of TV.”
Laurel went on to say that after the birth of David, her baby with spina bifida, she struggled with more feelings of hopelessness. “David’s head size looked terrible, and I was struggling with bonding. I didn’t want him or even like him. I had so much guilt and confusion—”
I had to interrupt. “What kept you going?”
Laurel hiked David up on her lap to think. “I plastered our walls with Scriptures. Psalm 34 says, ‘The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.’” Then she paused for another long moment. “But sometimes I still get so depressed. There’s no rhyme or reason for why all these awful things have happened.”
She had a point. Any information I might have given Laurel at that moment would have come off sounding like clichés. Sometimes the magnitude of a person’s suffering seems to outweigh any potential benefit. The puzzle of suffering doesn’t always get completed. There are sometimes no reasons that will satisfy. As Laurel pressed her lips to the bulging forehead of little David, I thought of Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God.”
“Joni,” Laurel said, startling me from my thoughts, “how do I face tomorrow?” Her liquid brown eyes looked at me with such pleading.
I took a deep breath. “I have to confess I wonder the same thing. I get weak-kneed thinking about the future stretching on and on in front of me. But God does not expect me to accept what may or may not happen to me years from now.”
Laurel gave a questioning look.
“God doesn’t give strength to face next year’s headaches or even next month’s heartaches. He won’t even loan you enough strength to face tomorrow. He only gives you and me strength to face today. To live one day at a time.”
She nodded in understanding.
“I’m sure that’s why Jesus said, ‘Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.’ You’ll have to face tomorrow, Laurel, without answers to your questions. The best you and I can do is hold on to the One who holds the answers.”
We spent the rest of our time together in silence, mostly listening to David breathe softly and sigh every once in a while. We both sensed that enough words had been spoken. Yet in the quiet, a bond was growing between us. After a while, we hugged and said good-bye.
A month or so later, I received a letter from Laurel. Life had not gotten easier. One evening, her son Stephen disappeared. She was sick with panic. Neighbors were telephoned and the police contacted. A search began. When Laurel heard a patrol car calling for the K-9 unit, she fell apart. She said, “It was as if a demon was screaming into my ears, ‘Do it now! Kill yourself! End it now!’”
A half hour later, her son was found. He had been hiding in the house the whole time.
Why? What reason could there possibly be for the torment and pain? There’s no answer. But I noticed a P.S. at the close of her letter, a message that was better than any answer: “I’m trying to reach out to at least one person a day and do something for them that counts for eternity. It works!”
Your Decision Matters to a Personal God
Laurel heard the devil screeching in her ear one moment, and God whispering in her other ear the next. Should she shut her ears to the devil’s lies, or should she wall herself off from God’s words? Laurel teeters almost daily on the edge of eternity—that’s why she sees every day as a choice. And her decision goes far beyond whether she should “Do it now! End your life!”
Laurel and many like her who have been tempted to sidestep all the suffering grit their teeth and decide daily to live. For these friends, life has value both now and in the hereafter.
It’s something they remind themselves of each day. It’s a decision they act on, a decision that matters to God.
Questions for Discussion and Reflection
In Heaven’s Eyes
In the discussion and reflection section of the last chapter, you spent time lying. Now you get to be a reporter for heaven! On the left are hypothetical headlines from planet Earth. Opposite each headline from Earth’s Gazette, write a contrasting headline of victory from heaven’s perspective for Heaven’s Hope, the angels’ daily newspaper. The first headline has been provided as an example.
Earth’s Gazette
Heaven’s Hope
Supreme Court upholds assisted suicide as constitutional
Assisted suicide declared a passing fad as thousands of Christians provide friendships and assistance to persons with disabilities
First 24-hour euthanasia clinic opens in Toledo
Abortion named as the number one reason for dramatic decline in children born with disabilities
Thousands of disabled denied health care by the Health Rationing Committee
Consider the following scenario:
Barbara is a young Christian in the last stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. She is totally paralyzed, and for her, the next step will be a ventilator to help her breathe. She wants to do what God wants but is unsure whether or not to get “hooked up.”
1. What would you tell her?
2. Have you ever had to trust God when there seemed to be no reason for the crisis you were facing? What was it that brought you through?