His soft brown eyes widened in an eagerness to explain, he swiveled around to face me in his high-backed, plush chair, corners of his mouth tightened as he remembered gravity of truth. With broad sweeping gestures, hands danced and hovered in the air, giving life to his words.
"...they say the first beat of a fetal heart sends blood rushing through the vessels, forcing them wide open-causing micro-fissures that permit plaque to begin building in the arterial wall-beginning the lifelong process of atherosclerosis that ultimately leads to vessel deterioration and termination."
I slowly raised my eyes from clasped hands lying softly in my lap, processing, calculating.
"So then...the moment life begins...death...begins as well?"
Sympathy only born of mutual understanding crossed his kind face; his voice steeled and cautious in appeal to my slow dawning of comprehension that he had already experienced-made his peace with-long ago.
"Of course. We are all born dying. Death is a fact."
So, as any girl who spent four years trying to fit into a sterile engineering world run on pragmatic calculation would do, I spent the rest of my day trying to learn from the kind cardiologist and chase him around the hospital from rounds to new patients to trans-esophageal echo-cardiograms and numerous CT scans as he flitted from floor to floor, moving uncommonly quick and deftly and snapping orders and decisions as if he were born to live on the knife-edge of life and death. But I had this juxtaposition of life and death who are so closely linked-dependent on each other in a way-in the back of my mind.
I thought about that forming fetal heart that sends its first batch of fresh blood
surging
tumbling
roaring
through vessels and to a forming embryo that is no bigger than 1/4 in. No bigger than a raisin. Blood that nourishes, and sustains, brings growth and life to limbs and organs, red essence spreading, permeating, the little embryo-raisin as sentience and viability took flight.
And I thought about those fresh, soft little vessels being violated as they received life, the ripping, tearing and trauma, the first in a line of many future woundings that ultimately lead to disease and death.
It seems that our earthen vessels are just not fit to handle life. Not because life is too repulsive, but because we are too weak. Life surges forward, embracing all it contacts, pulsating with energy and motion, a cataclysm of vibrating dynamism. Ancient, raw, terrifying, not because it is evil, but because it is far beyond frail humanity and eludes comprehension. It rushes and pours, a mighty river, traveling where it pleases, and in its face, any attempts to do anything more than simply accept what comes are as valiant and effective as a moth's attempts to stop a semi the moment before it becomes a permanent addition to the windshield.
This life necessitates death. Doesn't all life necessitate some kind of death? Or is it the other way around--that death necessitates life? After all...Adam saw to it that we are all born into death-demanding a propitiation be made on our behalf. Nothing is free-not even life itself.
Quod me nutrit me destruit. What nourishes me also destroys me.
The old order-this is the world we are born into. One in which we are imperfect, diseased. One in which the very life that sustains us is the weapon that ends us. One in which we cannot experience the life we were intended to because of the inadequacy of our current state. Death is inevitable, because we just cannot stand against the onslaught of life. But it won't always be this way. The promise is coming, the sanctification is set into motion, the Lord is not negligent.
"...They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God. 'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." Revelation 21:3b-4
"So then...the moment life begins...death...begins as well?"
The moment blood enters the heart, the body begins its sojourn to death. And the moment we recognize Jesus is our only hope and are born again, our self begins the long journey towards a new order. Answering the call of a living sacrifice, nailing itself to the cross as our heart vows to sing no other name but the name of Jesus. The outward man is perishing. Lose your life to find it. Crucify the flesh and its passions. The new order is coming.
Of course. We are all born dying. Death is a fact. At once an inevitable hurricane and a beautiful fact for some, who can remember the promise, who stand fast in the hope.
Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow. Oh, praise the one who paid my debt and raised this life up from the dead.
Christ is risen from the dead, trampling over death by death, come awake! Come awake! Come and rise up from the grave. Oh death, where is your sting? Oh hell, where is your victory?
Salvation is here.
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