Whose afraid of death?

Everybody fears death ---because we have reason to fear and because we are made in the image of God ( which means we know we are guilty)  -  Some of the evidence is guilt itself ,  the excuses we make for our own behavior;  the shallow substance of anything good in us ;  The wonder of something good that is beyond us..........add more

One of Helen Garner's helpful comments of her life and experience ( featuring the man who murdered his three sons at Winchelsea on ABC Book club last night )  was her revelation that we sometimes don't know what we are rebelling against.  we neither tell ourselves or heed the few  who are honest about the nature of this fear . 

We are often  mistaken about who the enemy is: we  maybe individually our own worst enemy; and not much help to others . 
  We are even a hindrance to men and women in great need because we haven't faced our our real needs -Ourselves being mirrored back to us by face of others  --"Takes one to know one" as we say here 

We  need to confront these things -

1. Knowledge of our own great potential for evil 
2. The pathetic nature of our care for others
3. The way we carry around a burden of guilt and fear and project the nature of that burden onto others 

We have reason to fear our own  death and the true judgement of our lives .


Without , I hope,  being too smart , let me offer you my own reflections  on the way into and beyond this very dark place.

• That, however good we or our friends are or have been,  we have failed to live up to the potential we have been given . We have done wrong. we think wrong, and still do

• That ours is an unweeded garden just as any other

• We deserve nothing but our Creators rejection
•  The fear of that rejection  maybe stopping us from doing the one needful thing - the moving on from here - facing the reality of our own deep sinfulness.

So , our only hope is to cling to Him who offers the only real place of rest and renewal  from these realities .   ( Its all in the prayer book )