But it's days like today when I'm sobered by the reality of mortality. I saw the news of Amy Winehouse's death and initially thought "well, no surprise there" because it was just last week (I think) that I heard on the radio that she had cancelled several shows due to showing up one night incoherent and detached from reality. I read a couple of articles, saw where people had tweeted about it, and then kind of went on my merry little way with this attitude of "well, she had it coming." Then, on a message board I read way too much, the topic came up and someone said "the real tragedy is the 30 dead teenagers in Norway." And for whatever reason, that comment woke me up to the reality:
Death is always a tragedy. Always.
Honestly, Amy Winehouse hits a little closer to me for a few reasons. First, because I knew who she was. It's probably not right, but it's human nature to at least be more interested in people we've heard of. But the second reason is probably the one that is the most sobering - she was 27. I'm 26. Yeah, she did drugs and made some pretty bad lifestyle decisions, but the fact that somebody my age could be alive one day and dead the next is still kind of a crazy concept to me.
But, the story about what happened in Norway is pretty crazy too. I mean, thinking about it, it's nuts. Here you have like 90 people just going about their day, minding their own business, and then all of a sudden they die.
And it's not like things like that are isolated incidents - they can happen anywhere, at any time. And it's horrible. Death surrounds us. We live in a culture where we try to fight it as much as we can, but even people who are "living right" are still a gun shot or a bomb blast away from being dead. I mean I remember what happened at Pearl High School in 1997, I saw what happened at Columbine on TV, we all remember September 11. Nobody on any of those days imagined what was going to happen, those kids in Norway had no idea what would happen, and I'd guess Amy Winehouse probably didn't think it would happen to her, either.
The real tragedy, though, is that this isn't the way things were intended to be. Death, in all of its forms, is a direct consequence of rebellion. Genesis 2 lays that out pretty clearly - eat of the tree, die. And we're bound in that as long as we're here. And so to see anyone die, whether they are (by our standards) "innocent" or murderers or drug addicts or any other number of things that cause us to say "well, that person deserved to die" is a tragedy.
The fact is, though, we're not guaranteed tomorrow. Just because Amy Winehouse was more likely to die young doesn't mean it was any more certain than it was for those people in Norway. And it's one of those things that when I see it on TV or whatever I can just kind of blow it off and be like "well we have Jesus and we'll never die" or whatever, which IS true and IS his promise to us, but when it happens so far away or to people I don't know it's easy to be callous about it.
I don't know. I'm not sure where to go from there. You just kind of sit there and think about life and death and all of that and it puts things into perspective I guess. But, it does remind me of one of my favorite hymns and keeps me on my toes thinking about this conflict "between the now and the not yet" - the promise we have in Christ but the time we must wait for that promise to be fulfilled. When I think/hear about tragedy, death, it reminds me of "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand" (which I found out a week or so ago was played at my grandfather's funeral, which I was too young to really remember much from it) and this particular stanza:
No chilling wind nor poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore
Sickness, sorrow, pain and death
Are felt and feared no more
We don't only have the promise that sickness, sorrow, pain nor death will no longer be felt, we have the promise they will no longer be FEARED. 1 Corinthians 15:55:
O Death, where is your victory?
O Death, where is your sting?
But we also know that Christ conquered the grave, and that our final enemy, death, has been defeated:
But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is DEATH. 1 Corinthians 10:20-26 (emphasis mine).
I hope this made sense to anyone who would be so kind as to read it.
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