Rise and Fall...

And there, at the end of that ellipses, is where science ends and faith begins.

I sat with a very dear loved one as they died today. I’ve never experienced that before. My dad died before I could make it to the hospital. My Grandma died in her sleep one night. Chris’s dad died a few days after we had left town. Same as his granddad.

I have grieved and I have lost, but I’ve never sat so close with death before. His breathing was labored for hours.

Rise and fall,

rise and fall,

rise and fall,

and then it became calmer. Less difficult, it seemed. But it also because shallower.

I counted in the silence between breaths.

Seven seconds.

Then nine seconds.

And then the pattern disappeared.

I called the name of the family member sitting next to me and we held our breaths as he took a breath in. And he never let it out.

It was so quiet. Deathly quiet, I thought.

There is such a thin veil between life and death, isn’t there? I remember thinking that when my dad passed away. One minute they are living and the next, they are not. It took months for this concept to settle into my heart when Dad died. I remember waking up in the middle of the night for months and whispering out loud in the dark, “He’s just… not here anymore? How is that possible?”

I felt that again today sitting next to the hospital bed. But seeing the rise and fall of his breath made me even more aware of our fragility.

The rise and fall,

the rise and fall,

the rise and fall,

the rise…

And there, at the end of that ellipses, is where science ends and faith begins.

It’s where our world here ends, and heaven opens its arms.

One minute he was sick in that bed and in the very next breath of a heartbeat, he was whole in heaven.

Throughout my life, there have been times when I have doubted the religious semantics of my faith. And I’m sure to anyone who is nonreligious, this must found absurdly childish.

But sitting there in that hospital room, watching that holy breath

rise and fall,

rise and fall,

rise and fall,

rise…

the glorious complexity of faith became startlingly clear to me.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son,

that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but will have life everlasting.

And so, we rise and fall,

rise and fall,

rise and fall,

And then we rise… Rise… RISE.