Step #38-We Need to Be Ready

“Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.” John 8:51

Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent (April 2, 2009)

What did Jesus mean when He said “whoever keeps my word will never see death.” Of course, He was not referring to our physical death, He was talking about our spiritual death. If we don’t obey His word, if we don’t keep Him in our hearts, we will die spiritually.

He is also referring to dying to life as we know it, here on earth, but resurrecting to a new life, a life on heaven when we will never die. Jesus came to give us hope that there is more. Life does not end here on earth. Life begins when it ends. He came to die for our sins, to suffer a physical death in order to resurrect to a new life, an everlasting life. That is our hope and the heart of our faith. When we truly believe this in our hearts, we will stop being afraid of death.

One person from our time that taught us a lot about death was our previous pope, John Paul II. I always admired him during his life, but he gained my respect during his death. Today is the fourth anniversary of his death. That year and the previous one were especially hard. I lost a dear friend to cancer, we lost a father and three children at Belen in a tragic accident… it just seemed like every other week I was in a funeral. I remember I began to have a lot of doubts: What was the point of praying for someone that was sick if they were going to die anyway? Why had the father and three kids died in the accident, yet the mother had survived? Did they forget to pray before they went on their vacation? I was going nuts trying to make sense of it all. It took the Emmaus group, various meetings with a priest and a lot of prayer to begin to see a small ray of light in the horizon. The following year, 2006, I lost another dear friend in a tragic accident, and it was during her funeral mass that my eyes were completely opened. Her husband talked about her life, which she had dedicated to serve the Lord as a wife, mother, CCD teacher and director, plus many other ministries that she served through the years. He had such an amazing faith that God had called her because she was ready to be with Him, that I began to understand the meaning of life and death.

Jesus came to teach us that in dying we are born again. He suffered tremendously, yet He showed us that if we place our hope in the resurrection, we will be able to endure our cross. We have a lot of saints that we can read about who truly believed this and that is why they were able to withstand horrific deaths. More recent, we have John Paul II who taught us how to die with dignity, how to suffer in silence and how to release ourselves completely to God.

Nobody knows when God will call us to join Him in His kingdom. We all need to be ready. We need to be spiritually alive. We need to follow Him, obey Him, ask Him to forgive our sins and attempt to live a life of grace.

Our Mother can help us achieve this. Let’s sit under the tree with her and share our fears and our doubts.