Are You Ready When A Loved One Leaves?

It is a strange reality to witness the death of someone and realize in some form or manner everyone will die. For me, I witness the death of a staff member from the YWAM base here in South Africa. It was very tragic to walk out from the office to see a young Brazilian man on ground with his face lying in a pool of blood. He had fallen from the rooftop of the YWAM Building next door, to the pavement of driveway of house where the voice for the voiceless office is.

In the moment, I calmly tried to help, but there wasn't much I could do. I was left to pray and ask God to grant this man mercy by sparing his life. The next thirty minutes I watched as each different emergency agency from South Africa came to aid in trying to revive back to life this staff member. In the last moments of the CPR, I watched to see if the medical team was getting a pulse. It was when they call out the time of death; a sigh of sadness overtook me. It was going back upstairs into the office to give Jennifer the horrible news that the tears began to well up in my eyes. “He didn’t make it,” was my reply to Jennifer. Honestly this was the first time to see someone die before my eyes. In retrospect, I wished I’d stayed home with Caleb and hadn’t gone out to witness the tragic event, but in the moment I was doing what I thought was needed.

Needless to say, what I had planned to do that day didn’t get done. All I wanted to do was drown my brain by watching movies, just so I could forget what happened. It took me a day or two after the event to reconcile what I witness, but it left a deeper sense of the future reality for everyone. Death has a date with all of us, none us know when, but inevitably it’s going to take place.

The question that needs to be asked is, Are you ready for it and are you ready for your loved ones to be gone when death comes knocking? I know for myself, when I die, Heaven will be welcoming me in because I’ve called upon the resurrected Lord and Savior of humanity. The harder question is being ready to let go of the ones I love when it’s there time to go. Witnessing this death was hard, but not as hard, if I had received the call saying that my love one had fallen to their death. The relationships you and I have with family are such a huge part of our lives and when they leave and never come back, it will leave a spot of emptiness and loneliness that can never be replaced.

The pain of losing someone will be experience by every human living and I pray for all those who are experiencing such grief that they will have peace from God and rest in knowing that if their love one knew the savior, they are experiencing life in the fullness and they are in a place of pure paradise.

I rest in knowing that the gentleman that died is in a much better place, but for those who called him son, brother, grandchild, nephew, uncle; I pray that they are comforted with relief. Life is short, it is but vapor that it is here one day and gone the next. May we all place our fate and lives in the mighty hand of God who is able to keep us, both in this life and the next one to come!