On Death and Dying - A New Way to See Things!

Death and dying can be taboo subjects for most of us yet we will need to confront them at some point. We go through "deaths" throughout our lives in order to learn about grief and loss.

We may lose relationships or suffer a divorce;we may lose a beloved pet or an item that had sentimental value to us.

Friendships might change or a person we care about may move away from us. As we get older, we are asked to give up our sight or our hearing or our health. All these things are teaching us to "allow" things to fall away, as they surely must. The problem is we all try to avoid death and dying as much as possible and tend to put it on a back-burner in our minds, thinking that it is a long way away.

Recently, I went to a friends' funeral who had died of stomach cancer and these are the thoughts that came to me soon after.

God has a huge lending library and when we are going to come down to earth, he allows us to borrow parents, siblings, friends, houses, gardens, animals, birds and all manner of things and people, who will help us on our way.

The thing is we forget that they are all borrowed for a time because, unlike a library book which has a stamped return date on it,the people and items we have borrowed have return dates that we are unaware of.

So, when God calls them back to him, we do not want to give them back because we have held onto them for so long that we feel they belong to us.

We forget that God has been without his precious treasures for such a long time, while he gave them to us for safe-keeping and that it is his time to be with them now.

We are all going to return to God's loving arms when our due date arrives and we couldn't be in better hands when that time comes. Angry as we might be against God for taking our loved ones from us, he would not have taken them if it was not their time to return.

Our problem with death and dying lies in the fact that, we become so attached to everything in our lives; it becomes such a wrench to let it all go when it is time. If, throughout life we practice "letting go" of the small things, realising that nothing is ours to keep, that it has simply been entrusted to us for a time, then we will find it a little easier to face death when it arrives on our doorstep.