I had just taken some boxes of books to be mailed and was listening to NPR on the car radio. The program was a discussion about assisted suicide or death with dignity or “control over how I will die.” It is all the same thing. We just come up with new ways to describe it, new ways to say it is okay to commit suicide when you think, “my life is done” or “my life is to painful” or “my life is without purpose” or “I don’t want my family to watch me suffer.” The piece was complete with melancholic music and the retelling of the last days of a New York couple who moved to Oregon temporarily so as to accommodate the wishes of a husband dying of cancer.
I don’t like the idea of assisted suicide and see all kinds of hidden problems and ethical issues with the practice.
But honestly, I can’t be completely unsympathetic.
For years I have told my wife and children, that if I begin to develop dementia of Alzheimer’s, that before I lose my mind completely, to buy me a one way ticket to a muslim country, let me go off, preach the gospel and die a martyr. That way, muslim peoples hear the gospel, the family has no burden to bear, no body to bury, and the family gets a great story to tell to the grandkids.
My kids just smile, look at their mother with a knowing nod, and then someone says, “We’ll just wait till his mind is completely gone and tell him he’s in _____________” and he’ll be fine.
I’ll buy my own ticket.
But seriously, as I listened to the NPR puff piece for assisted suicide, I was saddened that the 62 year old man with cancer, felt his life was without purpose. That, to me, is more tragic than the cancer. And for me, as a Christian, I count elderly people (anyone older than me) as some of the most faithful and significant people in my life. They pray for me. They call me. They encourage me. They counsel me. And let me repeat, they pray for me, many of them daily. I covet that ministry and find myself spending more and more of each day in. prayer for my family, friends and neighbors. I don’t think I ever pray enough, but the older I get, the more time I want to spend in prayer for the world around me. Which leads me to what caused me to sit down and write this post. Today, I ran across a wonderful paragraph from a January 2021 article on John Stott.
John was an anglican priest, pastor, theologian and for a two decade period, the chaplain to the Queen of England. He was also a gifted expositor of the word of God and the author of one of the first books I included in the preaching classes I taught at the International School of Theology in California (Between Two Worlds: The Challenge of Preaching Today). But it was an answer to a question about what would he do differently if he could live his life over, that caught my attention.
SERIOUS ABOUT PRAYER
“In the last decade of his life, he was asked what, if anything, he would change if he were to live his life again. He paused thoughtfully and answered: “I would pray more.” This was the response of someone who, while at university, set his alarm clock to 6am to pray. In later life, this changed to 5am. Stott kept a notebook of situations and people to pray about. He began and ended each day in prayer, and he prayed throughout the day. His life was infused by prayer. “Prayer is not a convenient device for imposing our will upon God, or bending his will to ours,” he wrote, “but the prescribed way of subordinating our will to his.””
Paul Woolley
“John Stott: What every Christian should know about this unlikely radical”
Christianity Today, January 31, 2021
Even if our years are “reduced” to “mostly or merely” praying, our winter years may be the most effective years of our lives. Let’s go through the gray years with joy and joyfully embrace prayer as a major component of a life that glorifies God.
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