Author: JP Samuel

Death stings.  It’s deadlier than any other sting that one may have experienced.  When a bee stings, it leaves its stinger in its victim. When death stings, it leaves its stinger in the hearts of those who dearly loved the one who died. The wound takes a long time to heal especially for those nearest to the one who left us.  The pain is real, deep, and agonizing.

Philip Yancey in his book, “Where is God When It Hurts”, talks about different thresholds of pressure and pain various parts of our body can endure, ranging from the cornea of our eyes to our foot.  For example, he writes about how our cornea has a threshold of 0.2g of pressure before it experiences pain while our fingertips have a threshold of 300g pressure. How I wish that we were able to measure the pain threshold of our hearts.

There is no pain that is greater than watching our loved one die.  My earliest traumatic experiences in pastoral ministry were holding the hands of a 9-year-old daughter of young parents and staying with a middle-aged mother of three as she passed away.  The debilitating experience of sensing a person’s body go cold in front of your eyes numbs your inmost being. I cannot imagine what Inba’s dear wife went through as she held her husband’s hand and felt it turn that telltale cold.

A few weeks before Inba’s last day, another family in New Jersey lost a loved father to cancer.  Inba wept bitterly for that family and especially for the daughter, the father left behind. My wife asked me if perhaps her brother, Inba, was prophetically mourning for his own wife and son.

The only one who can provide healing and hope is someone who has experienced that very same pain themselves.  And there was only one who experienced it profoundly. It must have hurt God the Father to see his own Son suffer on the cross and especially to know that his own Justice required that He turn his face away even while his Son cried out “My God, My God why have you forsaken me…”  So, if anyone understands pain, our God does. If anyone understands hurt, our God goes. If anyone understands grief, our God does. Yet, it is out of that pain and that hurt on the cross that healing flows for all who hurt.
How can healing happen? When can healing begin?

While there can be no timeline for healing, it is healthy to begin pursuing healing so we can come out stronger and not let this crisis debilitate us forever.  A life without healing is not the life our loved ones would have wanted us to live, despite our love for them. For healing to begin, three things need to change with respect to the present, past and future.

The Present

Time heals.  Or does it? Time sure does enable us to start getting relieved of the shock and face the reality that the one we love is gone.

Questions of why and if only may surface with anger once the shock has waned away. There is no running away from these.

But, at some point, one has to face the reality that our loved one is no more and no amount of questioning or anger or any other emotion we experience is going to bring them back to us.

It is fruitless to get frantic or busy or silent and get into a shell. Neither of these is going to help bring our loved one back or help us begin to heal.  The sooner we embrace this reality, the faster the healing can begin. What helps is to acknowledge the sovereignty of God even through and especially amidst pain.

Job was the most righteous man in all the Earth.  He lost his health, wealth, and his dear children whom he loved all in the flash of lightning.  Even his own wife cried out to him, “Curse God and die”. That would be what many who do not know God personally would suggest even now. But, Job was able to embrace his suffering as ordained by God for God’s glory and said, “The Lord gave and the Lord took away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

A week before Inba died his uncle visited him in New Jersey and preached on suffering in a church nearby.  After that, during a coffee conversation, Inba reiterated his points as they discussed the death of a young friend saying that one cannot question the wisdom of God and that they need to trust.  He perhaps unknowingly wanted to prepare us with what we would need to hear for questions we would ask once he was gone. The last words in Inba’s prayer journal were “We should expect suffering.”

The Future

The biggest mountain before us that prevents us from healing is fear of the future, the unknown.

Why should we die?  Why should anyone die?  What happens when we die?   Is it just the natural, biological end of the human life cycle that just happens and has no meaning?  Or, is it an escape from the brutal realm of human existence and an opportunity to merge with the absolute?  Or, is it just the result of human greed, selfishness, and pride that originate from within all of us which the Bible calls as sin? This is no place for philosophical reasoning as it would probably generate more heat than light for many of us seeking answers.

Christ conquered death and makes us victors.  The Bible says we will join our loved ones and have glorified bodies and will be able to say “Oh, death, where is your sting?”  Now, that is more than just healing. It’s conquering. It makes us more than conquerors through Him who loved us. Though for a while, we feel the sting of death, it is only for a short while.  The sting of the bee does not last for long. So is the sting of death. We will join our loved ones and come out as more than conquerors.

The Past
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Once we are able to ride the present and future, the past can transform from bringing tears of sadness to smiles of celebration.  We can start celebrating things the person cared for and emulating the best about them in our lives. That way, the person, though dead, can still live and be celebrated and honored.
Healing cannot happen in isolation.  The best catalyst for healing is love.  A person who is hurting needs love and care more than empty phrases, such as, “if you need anything let me know.”  Though well-intentioned, very often a person in grief cannot think of what they need. So, just show up. Do what you see is needed, but don’t fail to show love.  We cherish people, like Inba, who showed love and care.

This is where the healing begins. We accept the present, celebrate the past, and anticipate a glorious future.
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For me, I still go back and forth between grieving and beginning to heal, as the memories are still fresh.  But, I hope and believe and pray that the time will come soon when I will be able to say “Oh, death, where is your sting”, not only in the distant future of rejoining Inba in eternity but even now.

It was an odd Friday night.  I was working in my newly refurbished office reading a passage from the Bible for a series I was preaching on titled “soul care”.  Just a week ago I had begun this series and had quoted Jesus saying “what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet loses his soul”.  The  longer you are in pastoral ministry the deeper you see the pains, tears and struggle  that people go through which hurt and can at times destroy our souls.  Add to this the challenge of reaching people living in the richest place on earth with  an overdose of affluence, distractions and pleasures of the world that gets even the most spiritually oriented.   For many who live here relishing this extravagant lifestyle, God starts diminishing from their radar and disappears like a slow truck you pass on a California freeway driving 20 miles over the speed limit if we do not watch out for our own souls.

The passage I was reading was from Psalm 103;..  as for man  his life is like the grass of the field…the wind blows over it and it is no more..”.  Just as I was reading this I heard my wife rushing into my office with her phone (as she was here along with my mom who had just come from India to recover from a health issue and were attending our Friday night exchange group in one of the rooms nearby).  Her face panicked and her voice quivered.  It was from another pastor friend calling from my sister-in-laws phone at 30 mins past midnight from New Jersey.  He broke the dreadful news to me in less than a minute  that my dear brother-in-law Inba who turned 40 recently had collapsed while playing Volleyball preparing for a fundraiser to provide homes for destitute children.  He could not be revived despite the best medical intervention and left us a few minutes ago.  I did not have much time to break it to my wife who was sensing something unimaginable and kept asking what happened to her brother.  This was her younger baby brother Inba whom she dearly loved.  Having no time to process and being in a state of terrible shock myself I broke the news in two words “Inba died”.

It took us three days before we could see Inba in a funeral home.  My heart almost stopped seeing my brother-in-law who had become my own little brother too.  He had just visited us a couple of months ago to meet our newly adopted children and we had wonderful times together.  It was even more traumatic for me to see my darling wife hurt terribly seeing her baby brother lying speechless, cold and leaving us in a hurry without any hint.  My lower jaws began quivering (and still does) which I guess is my body’s way of expressing grief.

Shock is the first of several phases of grief according to those who have studied this in-depth.  The manner in which Inba left us aggravated this shock for all of us.  Some cry, some don’t, some get busy, some shutdown and become still.  Everyone’s different and express grief differently.  I could see myself going through all of the above within the first two days as we rushed to take the last red-eye flight out of San Jose and crying the whole flight along with my wife and getting busy with all the arrangements to help take Inba back home once we landed and finding a few quiet moments in between to be still.  We went to the place where Inba collapsed along with his friends less than 24 hours since he died.  I felt helpless that I could not be there for my brother when he needed help the most.  

Healing cannot begin without grieving.   In some cultures men don’t cry as it is seen as a sign of weakness or being less masochistic.  For some crying symbolizes lack of faith in God.  Jesus wept seeing his best friend Lazarus die (though he knew it was going to happen and that he will be brought back alive again).  The Bible does not tell us not to grieve.  It only reminds us that we don’t have to grieve like those who don’t have hope but never encourages us to suppress grief.  It is never healthy to suppress grief.

Grieving is even more complicated and traumatic for children for whom it happens in short  on and off bursts according to Norman H.Wright and others who have written good resources to help children deal with grief.  It tore my heart to hear Inba’s three and a half-year old son experience nightmares during the first two nights asking for his dad who usually puts him to sleep.  He wanted to put on his blue shoes and go to the hospital to see his dad in the middle of the night as he was rushed the night before wearing his blue shoes to the ER where his dad would leave him while he waited outside.  I had to break the news to him through a story that he is no longer with us.  He watched his dad being buried and said he does not want his dad to be trapped in the box under the mud.  What do you say to a child who is not supposed to experience these feelings.  Still, he is learning to grieve watching us and we ought not to fake it or suppress it for him as he will find other unhealthy ways to release his trauma now or later.  And so we grieve. Not in hopelessness but out of love and the fact that Inba will be terribly missed on our sojourn here.

I began reading C.S. Lewis who penned “A Grief Observed” in his journal as he was mourning the loss of his beloved wife whom he loved dearly.  C.S.Lewis has the gift of giving voice to our deepest feelings, fears, doubts and grief and articulating them in vivid manner.  He wrote, “The death of a beloved is an amputation….The same leg is cut off time after time”.  A limb lost is a limb lost.   A prosthetic can pretend to be the limb and even do most of what it can do but it still is not the same.  And so we grieve –  not in hopelessness but for love’s sake.  After all it’s the first inevitable step toward healing and hope.

“Quinn Cook learned the hard way not to take a single minute for granted in the NBA.”  That’s the headline of a recent article in The San Jose Mercury News.  It’s playoff season for NBA fans and my home team The Golden State Warriors are on the brink of making a dynasty.  Yet, when our star player, Steph Curry, got injured, a relatively unknown and low-profile player, Quinn Cook, got recruited and earned a spot in the playoffs because of his shift in attitude, even while playing games that may appear to not matter.  Previously, according to Mercury News, he regretted his blase playing in other blowout games. However, with the Warriors, he has resolved to play as hard as he can. So much so, that he scored 11 points in 5 minutes in one of those blowout games. He then said, “I have learnt the hard way not to take a single minute for granted in the NBA”.

Life is bigger than basketball or any other sport for that matter (though ardent sports fans may strongly disagree).  For me, personally, the events of the last two weeks have come to reinforce the idea to not to take a single moment for granted in life, especially when life is good.

In the last two weeks, I lost my little brother and almost lost one of my elder brothers-in-Christ.  Both of them collapsed suddenly. One while playing volleyball and the other while sipping coffee. Both of them had the best medical care given to them within minutes. One was lost and the other was almost lost three times before we got him back miraculously.  Both of them had been among the most amazing people I know who live life while serving and caring for others.

I am writing this blog, sitting beside the fountain in the picture above, in a hospital in Boise, Idaho. This hospital is the best hospital in all of Idaho for dealing with strokes. This hospital is also where my other brother who suffered a stroke suddenly while sipping coffee was brought in at the right time.   He just got restored and took a stroll around these grounds some time ago.  None of us thought that he would be alive or that he would be able to walk, even if he was alive, but he is. We thank God for that. I still do not understand the wisdom of God and why he took away my one brother and gave life to the other. But I know one thing: I do not want to take a single moment of life for granted.

So, how then should we live?  Here are a few things I’ve resolved to do, after these events:

1. Live for something bigger than yourself – Life is too short to worry only about me, myself, and my family all the time.  God has given us life so that we can know him and live for him by loving him and others. How that happens is unique for each of us. When we are intentional and pursue that attitude, life becomes fulfilling, irrespective of the amount of time we spend on earth.  Jesus said in his famous Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6:19-21, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
2. Live your dreams and don’t worry about what others will think of you. – Very often, we get too consumed by what others think about us or feel about us and so become too careful and fake about what we say, so that no one gets offended.  As a pastor, it is very hard not to offend people when part of your job involves addressing the problems that are deep in our hearts and the world. But if I were to care too much about that, I might have a growing church of happy people but they would also be unhealthy people.  I need to strive every day to please God and do what is right in his eyes alone while being sensitive to those around me and loving them as God loves. The Bible says in Ephesians 5:15-16, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time..”
3. Live like today is the last day of your life. – When I work to do that, I will want to be more kind and loving to everyone around me.  My brother Danny, who survived three massive attacks here in this hospital, joked that he will never again complain if he’s stuck in traffic or worry when a nurse wants to prick him to draw blood.  He is just so thankful that he’s got a new life all over again and wants to appreciate every moment that he lives.

Maybe there is more we could do. But, for me, if I can just consistently do the above, I’ll be happy to leave this world anytime knowing that I’ll be leaving behind a wonderful legacy and heritage for the world and my family.  This is my prayer.