Live IN Him Now and Death Will Take Care of Itself!

For most of us the first experience of the phenomenon of death came in childhood when we lost a goldfish or a much beloved pet or perhaps even an elderly neighbor or a grandparent. Slowly, with the passage of time, we came to know that we too would die someday, but that day seemed always so far off as to leave us feeling semi-immortal anyway.

Time has continued to pass and every day the reality of our own mortality is becoming more and more concrete, more and more something to be faced and integrated into our thinking and our living. It's not an easy task.

We have in today's passage from St Paul's letter to Timothy a glimpse of how he faced this very experience with confident hope, not just stoicism: "I am already being poured out like a libation. The time of my dissolution is near… A merited crown awaits me…"

Where did that powerful confidence come from? Nowhere else than a from whole life lived single-mindedly with the Lord as his partner: "The Lord stood by my side and gave me strength… That is how I was saved from the lion's jaws…" From the very beginning, Paul was clear about where his life and his power came from. It was from a loving Lord who had never let him down and never would.

If we hope to die well, with confident and peaceful hearts, we have to live through him, with him and in him now. Do that and death will take care of itself.

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