This page shows how many people in the world die of different things for different lengths of time. Kinda morbid, but it showed me some interesting comparisons. Take war, for instance: 460 so far today. Now, I am usually pretty much against people getting killed because they can’t get along, but maybe I should be more focused on helping my neighbors not feel the urge to take their own lives, since the suicide count is at 2,348. Or malaria, at 2,451. Or maybe I should drive more carefully—traffic accidents clock in at over 3K. But, the big killer is still cardiovascular, which just crossed the 45,000 mark. That’s forty-five thousand people dead. How can I help reduce that? Encourage people to go get some exercise, by building a park, or inviting someone to come out and fly a kite with me? I don’t see “old age” on there, so maybe that is mixed into the other numbers. Maybe the “heart stopped when he was 110″ skews the cardiovascular number some. But still, there are a good many people dying.
But is death all that bad? Everyone dies eventually, and I’m not dead-set on living to be 110. And it seems that how you live is more important than how long you live. Of the 150+ thousand people who died thus far today—how many of them were really alive? Living life for something more important than their next meal. Having a goal deeper than, having a good time during their [short] life? It would seem that helping people not die, may be dwarfed by the task of helping those remaining people to actually live. There are 6,612,897,237 of us who would benefit from hearing an encouraging word, being shown Christ’s love, and being guided into better relationships with God and people.
The good news is that those two goals are not in competition with each other. We don’t have to help people live, at the cost of people dying, but as Jesus brings health and joy to our current existances, His plans for us can reduce our death rate, as well as ultimately make death not really even worthy of the name. And we can share this with others, until we all join in one song of “Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.“
