Were you smitten by the flu virus over the recent festive season? The excitement of all the Christmas services - and I felt like death warmed up. Yet Christmas is all about birth.
The contrast seemed too obvious to ignore. I remembered reading a book by Jim Thompson from which I freely draw and in which he suggested that we should take the two facts of life together. Birth is a step into the 'being', a step from the unknown to the known. Death is a step from what we have known and have been beginning to understand back into the unknown.
Others, of course, have seen it as the opposite process:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."
We have come from somewhere, a home to which we shall return when death signals that it is all over for us. Then we shall know and understand. "For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face."
The process of conception, gestation and birth, about which so much is known, nevertheless remains a profound mystery. Scientists can explain in great detail the amazing biological events, but even their minds stumble when they are faced with explaining us, you and me, each of us as individuals. You are an incredibly complex human being and you are unique. You are a person and, though others may resemble you in many ways, there is no-one exactly like you.
Probably the most important lesson all children have to learn is who they are - a lesson that many adults are still working at. Do you recall thinking you were a fine footballer or a great man at business - or even a poor man at business - only to have to reverse your steps as you realised that you had made a mistake? It is quite true that we are not necessarily who we think we are.
Sometimes parents recognise the real potential of the child they love, only to have him or her feel sure that the right way for them is the way they fancy; sometimes, with the best motives, parents point their child in the wrong direction. In either case, he may subsequently become confused, depressed and unhappy, and you have to go back to square one to try to find out again who he really is.
The person we are is there at the moment of birth, the person whom God created. "You created every part of me; you put me together in my mother's womb. When my bones were being formed, carefully put together, when I was growing there in secret, you knew I was there. You saw me before I was formed. You knew me before I was born."
Some of our dissatisfaction with life, our feeling that "there should be something more", our vague feeling of need, is the need to regain our relationship with God, who knows us as we really are from even before we were born -; no pretences, no hypocrisy: he just knows us and accepts us.
I may have felt like death warmed up, but I did not die.
But one day I shall, and I find it too difficult to think that I shall come to nothing. Why? Simply because I know that God knows me and will never allow me to be lost into nothingness. Nor you. Nor any one of the least among us.
"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust.
Thou madest man. He knows not why.
He thinks he was not made to die
And Thou hast made him. Thou art just.”
Jesus, born as a baby at Christmas, grew into a man, who, because He loved us, loved me, loved you, died for us, and his resurrection assured us of his unconditional love for ever.
The scientists who explain the intricate processes of birth can also analyse the biological processes of death. But they still can't explain where I, where you, come from or where you have gone.
Birth and death both involve us in a journey through the unknown. We cannot know, but what we have is faith, faith that is surer than any scientific knowledge, that God knows us and loves us and has a place prepared for us.
Rick