Things That Die

“I don’t do flowers,” a woman told me recently. “They die.”

I can’t remember who it was or what the context was… so she may have had additional reasoning that I missed. So I don’t criticize her statement and in fact, she was right. 

Flowers die.

Should we love things that die?

Sunlight dies at the end of the day, when the darkness and the light trade places. I remember sobbing over the death of a pet calf.  Trees eventually fall or get chopped down.

People die. 

We look forward to heaven, where there is no decay… where the perfection of an opening rose is normal, not a brief beauty… where tragedies don’t happen… where all of our imperfections and weaknesses and brokenness and handicaps are no longer present… 

But in the meantime… should we love? Should we love what we know is a prisoner of time? Should we love what we will have to watch wilt? Should we love when we know that we too are mortal and could vanish in the blink of an eye? 

Already, my roses are showing wear. Perhaps flowers capture the cycle of life more quickly than most living creatures. A week or two at most, and then they’re gone. 

Should we love things that die?

In the middle of thinking about this, I ran to Martin’s to pick up chips and salsa for our meal after church tomorrow. I ran down my wooden porch steps and at the bottom I saw the silk flower that had appeared on the wind. Someone made it wanting it to last forever, wanting it to defy the odds of a real white rose.

It IS kind of lasting forever because somehow it blew onto my property, possibly months or years after it was first purchased.

But, even though it isn’t dying, I don’t love it more than the roses in my vase. I don’t love it as much as my roses!

Should we love things that die? 

Perhaps taking that risk is what makes us fully human, made in the image of our Creator, who by the way, loves things that die. In fact, God loves us, even though we as a human race CHOSE to die. He loved us so much that He joined us– and chose to die too, not as a consequence of sin, but as a decision to banish sin. 

And in the end, because of this love for things that die, death was forever banished! And in that paradise beyond death, there will be no fear in love, no risk, no chance of loss… 

Only perfection!