I guess there is a fair chance that if you are reading this, then like me, you are over fifty years old. How old? Over half a century! Hard to believe isn’t it? I can remember, as though it was only yesterday, thinking “Well – I’ll soon be twenty”, then it was “I’ll soon be thirty”, then it was forty, and it seems to be only when you get to fifty that you look back and think “How did I get here so quickly?”
Last week I had a rare opportunity to visit the last surviving members of the previous generation in my family – an Aunt and Uncle who are both now in their nineties. I tell you – although it was lovely to see them both – and they are both remarkably healthy, getting older doesn’t give you much to look forward to. Hearing, eyesight, memory, ability, agility, mobility, strength, and many other things too (things that perhaps only at fifty do you begin to realise that you shouldn’t take for granted!) are all failing.
My Aunt did say that continuing to live is better than the alternative, and we didn’t pursue that line any further at the time, but is it? The thought of dying, and in particular of how death may occur is not pleasant, but what happens after death?
Have you ever given that any serious thought? As one who drives over 60,000 miles every year at work, many times I come around a corner and pass a pile of flowers, a shrine at the roadside, and I can’t help but think that if whoever it was had known what lay around the bend, they would never have gone round it. I wouldn’t have. Would you?
I know someone who knew what lay ahead down a certain path, yet He still went down that road, and He died an agonizing death. Do you know Him? He went that way so that you don’t have to.
