AN ENDLESS CYCLE OF LIFE
When I was six, I learned from an older friend that everyone must die someday. This dreadful, universal fact of life so greatly shook me at that tender age that I began to live in fear of the mysterious and unknown ... death.
Many a long troubled night, I lay awake with a strange sadness in my heart, wondering what this life was all about. My inquisitive yet helpless mind would go round and round in an endless circle, unable to reach a satisfactory conclusion.
This awful discovery that I must surely die someday, and so must my loved ones, robbed me of whatever "meaningfulness" of living I had before. My cozy little world, built around my own concept of life and death, seemed to have come to a certain end that day.
Before that, I had my own childish theory of life and death. I had always, in my early childhood, believed that man would live forever in this world unless one was shot down by a Red Indian (as I had so often seen in the movies).
But in the normal process, I thought, man’s life was an endless cycle of growing up, growing old and shrunken, and becoming a little baby to start life all over again. It never did occur to me that we mortals simply have no choice but to die physically; but still, I saw no reason why we should, if we were not being killed by some Red Indians.
Later I began to understand that we, human beings, age in the process of time and are overcome by some physical weakness or sickness. So we just die. It’s only natural. It will happen to everyone someday.
When I first learned of these awful facts of life, my tender heart cried out, "Why must it be natural that a man should age and die? If it is natural, then what’s the meaning and purpose of life? Why should we be living in the first place? And why is this voice deep inside my heart telling me in its own persistent, unique way and language that it is unnatural for man to die? And the same voice is also trying to tell me that something had happened, making the unnatural natural."
What had actually happened?
My young and unspoilt mind could not accept that death was just meant to be, not if there is a God Who is good and perfect. If death for man was in God’s original plan and purpose, then life itself is totally senseless.
The truth of the matter is that God Who is, by His very nature, incapable of evil could not so plan that man should suffer and die. But we misunderstand God in the restriction of our finite understanding, blaming Him for all the evil of the world, especially when we do not know the origin of sin and evil.
Even when I did not know the truth of these vital issues, I somehow understood that death is just not natural. Was God, in His own special way, impressing upon the heart of a little boy that He had never originally intended that His highest creation, man, should die? Something dreadful had happened to make it so, but it was originally not intended to be that way.
The Almighty, in His immense love and infinite wisdom, was preparing my little heart to receive His great Truth someday: – the Truth about Himself – the Truth about the devil – the Truth about man – the Truth about sin – the Truth about life and death – the Truth about eternity and – the glorious Truth about the forgiveness and cleansing of our sins in Jesus Christ, the only hope and salvation for man.