Death Swallowed Up

A week ago, my friend Dawn died. She was a campus minister at KU, a dear friend of two of my dear friends and a role model for years. In fact, she lived with my mentor-figure-turned-friend, Naomi, at the house that first enticed me into living in community with the beauty of their relationships.

Dawn was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a disease of the lungs that tends to take people’s lives before the age of 25. All the time I knew her, she struggled with breathing, and had to spend a good hour a day strapped into this machine that would shake loose the mucus in her lungs. But this wasn’t what defined her. Dawn was a daughter of the Lord, confident in him in spite of the many, many prayers for healing that seemingly went unheard. With broken young women, she showed deep compassion; with her friends she was frankly wise and sassy. She had the deep love of her husband, Austin, and loved him well in return.

There’s not a lot you can say or do in the face of the years in and years out suffering of a young woman; there’s even less you can say about her death. Surely, all of us who sat at her memorial service yesterday afternoon, watching a slideshow of pictures from her life, were wondering on some level how it is that a good God lets good people die. It’s the same question I asked several years back when I lost my 54-year-old mom to cancer, and a version of the deep ache I felt as I lost my three remaining grandparents the last year and a half. Death, death, death, sorrow and pain. Why death? What do we do with it?

The timing of Dawn’s passing in my life is interesting. The Boiler Room as a whole is experiencing a great move of Joy, and learning what and why that is. On a personal level, I’ve been more joyful in the last few months than maybe my whole life combined. This joy isn’t simply happiness, an ignorance or an ignoring of the difficulties of life. Instead, it’s a perspective that there is something above hardships that is and will be overcoming them, transcending them.

Often, these days, as I worship God in song, I also worship him by imagining him, Jesus, at the right hand of God, in an unimaginable heaven. He’s a man who knew suffering as well as any other man—better than most, it’d be fair to wager—and died a torturous death. But he’s free of death! He’s not bent over, as I am, sobbing his guts out, hopeless and despairing. He’s joyful, because though he sees death and the package of pain and grief that comes with it, he sees equally, below him in the stretch of eternity, life that includes no death and no tears, life as he intended it from the beginning.

As I mingled with old friends after the memorial service, someone said to me, “You know, so many people here were looking at Dawn’s beautiful life, and asking why bad things happen to good people. But Dawn answered that question with her life.” In Christ, Dawn conquered Death. She was not squelched by it; it did not take life away even though she physically stopped living.

In the book of Hosea, God says this to Israel: “I will deliver this people from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, are your plagues? Where, O grave, is your destruction?” Though Dawn leaves in her wake a bunch of really sad people who will be in a painful process of learning to live without her, there’s a substantial hope, tangible in the midst of this. I can feel it, different from the other deaths I’ve experienced in my life. We’re so sad she’s not with us, but we know whom she’s with. Dawn is redeemed from death, and in that, so are we.