April 11th, 2020 - Easter Vigil: Death and Eternity

Death. It’s not a pleasant word. I remember when I first began to understand the idea and I would try to imagine it. There I was, 7-year-old Kirby standing there with my eyes closed, imagining what it meant to cease to exist. It was physically disorienting, so much that I would occasionally get vertigo and just fall over. Then my mom taught me about heaven, about eternal life with God, and hell in it’s eternal torment and separation from God. I was just as dizzy and confused thinking about eternity as I was contemplating an end to existence. The idea of death for those without faith involves falling out of existence. For us with faith, we know it is eternal life. Yet both ideas are beyond us, too much to comprehend, and like everything we cannot grasp and measure, it terrifies us.