Woody Allen said something like, “I don’t mind death it’s dieing I’m afraid of.” Dieing does sound scary. No wonder the rapture theory sounds so appealing; you can skip the dieing part.
Sometimes my brushes with death were frightening; other times it happened too fast to be scared. Once I was electrocuted when a live current went through a gate and I grabbled onto the gate handle; if no one rescued me, it would have been a terrible way to go. When I was in intensive care after my first baby was born; I suppose I could have died but it felt a lot better than being electrocuted. A robber tried to steal something belonging to my husband, and I chased him through the desert by myself on foot; I didn’t stop to think it might be dangerous, but later learned he shot a police officer through the kneecap. In Jakarta, our car was surrounded and rocked from side to side during a huge riot; people were dying around us. Then in Yellowstone, a mother grizzly reared up on her hind legs when my daughter and I accidentally came upon her with a cub- we did everything wrong; screamed and ran. Worst of all was when my kids all got cerebral malaria, the variety of malaria that is 100% fatal without treatment. The anopheles mosquito bit my kids while we camping on a remote beach; it skipped over me, but I could have lost all of my children at once because they were sick for a whole month before the doctors figured out what was the matter with them…
We can’t control how we end up dieing, only how we live. I guess that’s why the bible doesn’t say much about death; it is not our concern for the moment. I watched the 300, and when the Spartans wanted to curse someone they said, “May you live forever.” Christians consider death as an enemy, and yet Christians should have at least the same fearlessness about death as the Spartans- not because we want glory on the battlefield, but because Jesus is waiting for us on the other side.