As an avid listener to BBC Radio 5Live I’ve been saddened this week to learn that one of the presenters, Rachel Bland, has died of cancer at the age of just 40. She endured her treatment with great fortitude and tried to give other sufferers courage by doing a regular podcast called You, Me and the Big C.
However happy and sheltered our life has been up until now, all of us will one day have to face the death of a parent, a sibling, a friend and our own demise. That is a fact of life, more certain even than taxes! Life on earth always ends in death.
How do you cope with that thought? Some bury it preferring to ‘think happy thoughts’ or by a hedonistic lifestyle ‘eat and drink for tomorrow we die!’ If this life is all there is, we may be wise to do that. Without God and an eternal hope and purpose to life our lives, our loves and our achievements simply do not matter. We are like the flowers of the field, and we quickly fade away from memory.
But the Christian has a great hope in the midst of the darkness. A far greater ‘C’ than cancer, who broke the power of sin and death and opened up the gates of Heaven for all who repent and believe. In the face of death: we have Christ Jesus.