Ending or Beginning

I'm almost packed for tomorrow's flight to London. What was a to be a happy Christmas holiday with family and friends turned out to be a sad occasion as we are all grieving for the loss of Francis, my brother-in-law who had a kidney transplant and we thought, a new lease of life. A thoroughly sociable soul, he was so looking forward to our visits to London and had made lists of visitors, things to do, etc But then he died suddenly of a heart attack, alone, just a couple of hours before this wife reached home from an overseas trip.

Death, although the most certain event in everyone's life, when it actually does come, is always unexpected. And we weep for more time and asked ourselves 'why' and 'what if' .....

And so 2011 will end on melancholic note but it also starts off for me a search into the meaning of death. The pioneering French sociologist, Durkheim in his famous research, Suicide, maintains that even the very individual and lonely act of suicide has actually a very social dimension. Henri Nouwen, my favorite writer, concludes that death unites us. For in death, there is not rich or poor, clever or stupid, handsome or ugly, good or bad and we shed the externals and become all equal.

How can a God who is loving and a creator, allow something so fearful as death to enter our lives? How can He allow His wonderful lovingly designed creations who were made in His vey own image to just vanish into nothingness?

So is Death an End or the Beginning of something else. Has the Creator another plan for us? Is Death then actually an entry into something marvelous? So amazing that even the creative Steve Jobs could say nothing but 'Wow, wow, wow' when he joined the Dead.