Gospel Prism

Have you ever heard this children’s prayer:

Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.

This was entitled, “A Child’s Bedtime Prayer� from the New England Primer in 1784. If you read the words, they’re quite morbid. Why would children be reciting this prayer before they sleep? Because infant and children’s mortality was so commonplace in this time period, it was never known if a child would wake up the next day. Diseases such as TB and smallpox were devastating much of the landscape so such prayers were often said with deep earnestness.

For Americans of yesteryear and for much of the world today, death was and is always in plain view. Children were taught at an early age that death was a part of life. Animals were butchered, had their necks wrung, had their skin filleted as a part of life. Children were never squeamish at such sights, and of course, men AND women also played a role in the process of animal food preparation. But today, we are sterilized from not just these acts of death, but also from any thought about death.

For example, I never really considered bringing my children to Brian’s funeral, despite my oldest daughter’s continual questions about his death. She would say, “How did Uncle Brian die?� She was constantly listening and probing, listening to our every conversation on the phone like a nosy reporter waiting to make a scoop on a story. And each time, Shua and I brushed her aside. We didn’t want her to deal with death thinking that such things were beyond her comprehension.

“You’re too young to understand,� we would say.

“Was Uncle Brian stabbed?� she would ask quite matter-of-factly.

“That’s for adults to know,� again we would add.

Perhaps as difficult a conversation it is to talk about sexuality with your child, perhaps equally if not even more difficult to talk about is the topic of death. But like sexuality, death is a critical discussion to have with your children. And it is a discussion that I must have with my children very soon. It is a mistake to think that children should not think about death when our Lord conquered death (1 Corinthians 15). And to think about death is truly the right road to think about life. The New England Puritans put this prayer into their children’s bedtime process because they wanted their children to dwell, not on the morbidity of death, but rather to make the most of every ounce of life there is to live. So one of Jonathan Edwards’ resolutions was, “Resolved to live with all my might while I live.� Of course, this was later followed by, “Resolved to think about death every day.� To think about death was to think about life. And to think about death in view of life, is to think about life eternal with Christ (Romans 6:23).

As I was thinking about this prayer, I typed the words, “Now I lay me down to sleep� into google. The first hit was a website called, “nowilaymedowntosleep.org.� You will want to visit this site, but be forewarned, it might make you well up, as it did me. These are parents who have lost their infants for differing reasons and the photos are taken (quite beautifully and tastefully I might add, like this one) with the parents and their deceased children set to music. This is not a Christian organization to my knowledge, but I was struck by these parents who are obviously grieving over their loss. Death is very real to such parents, but I would say that they are missing the foundational truth that God is in ultimate control and has brought these children back to Him. And it is the incredible hope that we have in Christ, that ultimately gives us peace even as we face death.

Death must be a part of our lives, meditated upon, examined, and wrestled with in order to know what life is. No matter how hard we try to remove ourselves from death, death will force its way back into our lives. Our loved ones will one day die. We will die. But thank God that in Christ, we can echo Paul’s words, that death is not the end of life:

“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
55″O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”

56The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:54-57)