This Week's Scripture Note

Nothing focuses your attention more than watching someone in the room die. I sat with my mother for seven days this summer as she slowly, then actively, died. She starved herself to death. Well, she didn’t. That’s just how her dementia caused her to react to the safety protocols of the COVID crisis. Because of her moment to moment memory loss, she didn’t know that she was weaning herself off of life itself—refusing to eat because she couldn’t remember that she hadn’t eaten in weeks. In the end, her untimely death mercifully spared us from the final years of Alzheimer’s, and for that we’re grateful.

“Only in God is my being quiet, from Him comes my rescue.” (Psalm 62:1, Robert Alter’s translation)

Ashamedly, as I sat by her side day after day and time dilated imperceptibly, I couldn’t find any Scriptures that were comforting to me or her. I wanted to read the Psalms to her, but everything I read sounded absurd over her struggled and halted breathing. (Think of trying to read Scripture in order to comfort a woman in labor. At that point, it’s beside the point.)

The only thing that my mother or I had is that deep stillness in our being that knows when the struggle goes quiet, our rescue comes from Him alone. That confidence is profoundly real in a room full of dying, more real than a hundred kisses. But it’s the kind of thing that easily gets thinned out into a naïve evangelistic quip such as, “if you were to die tonight, do you know where you’d go?” I don’t mean it that way. I’ve understood the finality of death before, both seeing it and believing it was happening to me. But I understood anew, in the deathly quiet that filled the room after my mother passed: “only in God, from Him comes my rescue.” This is not a new insight, just a reminder, a lament, and a hope available only through the empire that Jesus is building.