Rachel was dying of cancer. Yesterday God took her home.
The world wants us to feel the tragedy - to wonder why God would take someone so young - to mourn over her faded beauty - to give her husband an excuse to neglect Christ and his family - to give her children an excuse to hate God. The world wants us to excuse her joy and peace in dying as something that dying religious people do, not as something supernatural and the result of a life lived in Christ. That's the world's view. I know it from experience.
Christians need to respond differently. Unfortunately (and I know this from experience, too), often we don't respond any differently. Here are four ways (there are more!!) that I am purposing to respond to Rachel's home-going.
1. Praise God for glorifying Himself and making His great name known through her life and death.
2. Thank God for giving her rest and reward from the suffering, and for giving her the strength to endure to the end.
3. Pray earnestly and consistently for her husband and two children. Don't forget about them in a week, but mark it down somewhere that I'll see as a reminder to pray for them, especially for the children, that God will use this to bring about their salvation.
4. Pray that God will use this testimony as a means to do something revolutionary in my life.
"Of course there is but one real preparation for Christian dying, and that is Christian living. . . . We must not forget that God is honored or dishonored by the way a Christian dies as well as by the way in which he lives. There is great significance in the description given in the Bible of the death by which John should 'Glorify God' (John 21:19); to my mind it implies that to die well is to live well."
Elizabeth Prentiss, Stepping Heavenward, Barbour Publishing, Inc., 1998, p. 227
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