Mourn.

The students pointed me to the common thread that ran through the 5 ancient civilisations: fear of death and the afterlife.

In ancient Egypt, pharaohs made monuments of their own deaths in the shape of the pyramids, in the hope that they will attain immortality in the afterlife. Today, the pyramids appear immortal, enduring some 2800 years later.

Carthage, in the face of impending doom brought on by the advancing Romans, erected temples to pray to Baal and sacrificed their own children to the gods.

The ancient Greek civilisation, for all its academic and intellectual foment - these folks INVENTED the words "eclecticism", "platonic ideals", "equestrian" and "democracy" for crying out loud - had to construct their lives around Greek gods and goddesses who took on human capriciousness and emotions, to explain away the senselessness of how lives begin and how they end.

Even the Roman conqueror, Alexander the Great called himself the incarnation of Hercules, the Roman demigod, in his own bid to acquire some sense of divinity for posterity's sake.

The Chinese buried their maids, servants and wives with them in the hope that such luxuries should not be denied after death and that they would not be lonely.

Today, I read about one man's grief and the loss of one life... a woman he did not even really know. And I am completely and utterly undone. I grief with him. I mourn.

3000 years of human history in 2 days and there is some sense that we unite in the act of mourning over our complete and utter helplessness over life and death. But the consolation the Christian takes comfort in, is that while the single human life looks pathetically insignificant against the immense expanse of the stars in the sky and the planets above us, God knows and cares for each life. Each and everyone of us can take comfort in knowing that although we cannot triumph over death by our own strength, Jesus has.


"When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [3]
and crowned him with glory and honor." - Psalm 8:3 - 5


O death, where is thy sting?