I have a friend in New Zealand. Actually, he used to live in Australia, but he met a younger woman who was from New Zealand and the two of them relocated to her father's family farm outside of Dunedin. My friend plays Flamenco guitar, and he's the head of a professional association of psychotherapists. He had begun to reinvent his practice in New Zealand, along with helping to care for his father-in-law, who was aging. I received a message from him indicating that his wife's father passed away at 3.30 in the morning. He had gone down hill rapidly the afternoon before, and when my friend arrived after work he and his wife and her sister decided to camp in the hospice for the weekend. They stayed up playing Beethoven. The elder man deteriorated further, needed an anxiolytic near the end, and passed peacefully in the early morning hours.

This month I hope to share with my own brothers and sister, and also with our various children, the passing of my own father. He died last month. My brother sat with him as his breathing slowed and then stopped.

I'm going there too some day, to that place of death. Will it be in my sleep or will I go out in a flash from some sudden calamity? Will I need strong narcotics to keep me from suffering? Will I be aware of what is going on? Will there be people I know around? Will I be in pain? Will I be afraid? My mother was sure of her faith in Christ and where she was going, but when her dying was upon her, she grew troubled. She did not want to go.

We cling to this world. From space the earth is alive with colour. There is life here, but so far we have not found it anywhere else. This world is all we really know. We have imaginations about other worlds and about life beyond this life, but when it comes to dying and leaving life as we have known it, we only have our faith to accompany us. And sometimes that gets shaken.

John the Baptist, when he waited his execution in Herod's prison, sent word asking Jesus if He really was the one they had been waiting for – the Messiah of Israel. Now, you'd think a compassionate man might simply say, "Yes!" to someone like John, who was just a few steps away from having his head cut off, but Jesus said, "Go and report to John what you hear and see: the blind receive sight and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who does not take offense at Me." When faith is all one has by which to die, what strengthens that faith? Is it the claim of one person about him or herself? We see people routinely engaged in self-serving hyperbole trying to sell us one thing or another. Claims don't cut it. Actions do. Show me what you can do, not what you can claim to do.

Jesus pointed John to what He had been doing. So, when I think about my own mortality, and when I contemplate that one day I will die, just as my own mother and father have died, just has my youngest brother died, just as my aunt and uncle have died, just as my grandmother died, just as my wife's mother and father have died, and just as my friend's father-in-law has now died, what do I have to consider with regard to the claims of the Bible about the one in Whom I have put my eternal trust? What do I know from my own experience about Him?

I know that my soul yearns for Him in a way that it never did before I came to believe in Him and before He put his Holy Spirit inside of me. So, I have experienced that part of the Bible in which Jesus asserts, "I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may be with you forever; that is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it does not see Him or know Him, but you know Him because He abides with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also. In that day you will know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you." This intimacy with God will not die; I know it abides forever. This is also what the Apostle Paul understood, even as he awaited his own execution while in a Roman prison. He said, "For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God. For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God…"

This is not an empty claim that I attempt to take like a drug to make fears go away. This is something I know as surely as I know the humidity in Bermuda. You can't see that either, but you can sense it. You know what it feels like to walk outside and feel it hug you. When I contemplate someday dying, I know that I will be hugged to the heart of God, just as I have already been hugged to Him, and that's all I need to know; He will not leave me to face it alone.