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Dealing with Impending Death
© 2023 Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com
I just now, read a well-written (but, sadly, posthumous) article in the Atlantic, “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death,” by TIMOTHY KELLER, a prominent Presbyterian Pastor, about his coming to terms with a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer at only 70.
I was amazed at how deeply he had to plumb his substantial scriptural knowledge, in a rhetorical method of finally making peace with his own impending death. And that, after a lifetime of being at the deathbeds of others, and even seeing some take their final breath. In the end, he was able to do it. I suspect this was more the work of God’s Spirit than the (human-created but possibly obliquely God-inspired) “wisdom” in the Bible. I was truly glad, for him, his wife, family, friends and his flock, that it worked.
On my blog, the main thrust is not that the Bible, and religions are all good or all bad, per se. It’s just that they are unnecessary to have a conversation with God.
In the end, Pastor Keller, was comforted by the same realization that I’ve come to —solely without reference to scripture:
There is life after death, and the Great God of the Universe is in charge. And, that both human joy and human suffering are for an eternal purpose, one that transcends anything on this beautiful but violent earth.