Asleep in Jesus

Asleep in Jesus…
I woke to a misty mountain morning. The after-image of my dream floated on the fog and I saw them, the two brothers, sitting hunkered down on their heels like they always did, by the fence line. Daddy, wearing his Massey Ferguson baseball cap, was peering off into the pasture, checking out his cows. Uncle Harold, wearing overalls, pulled his Prince Albert can of tobacco out and delicately rolled his own cigarette, twisting the end to keep the tobacco from slipping out. He lit up and they sat there in comfortable companionship, the older brother babysitter and his younger baby brother, Uncle Harold and Daddy. I miss those two old Calhoun cusses.
Autumn is my time of remembrance. As the leaves blaze and the air cools, my inner vision clears and it seems the dark glass between this world and the next is thinner, more transparent. Dreams are often of those I love who have gone on before. I find myself thinking more about death, not in a morbid way but a contemplative exercise in my mortality. In my sixties, death has a new reality and unlike my thirties, forties and fifties, I can imagine my own ending.
At my little Southern Baptist church, Jesus’ death came up most frequently during revivals when the visiting preacher painted vivid word pictures of a gruesome crucifixion and a fiery hell. We didn’t observe Lent and our Easter celebration was singing “Up from the Grave He Arose” without much consideration for the grave. Our church art was a painting of the River Jordan, appropriate for dunking Baptists. Catholics had the death scene down pat. The nine Stations of the Cross, stained glass images and statues of saints and Jesus dripping blood as they faced death surrounded them at mass every week. The forty days of Lent ended Good Friday night with stripping the sanctuary bare, a striking symbol for the reality of death.
As so often happens for me, a hymn tune circles around the inside of soul and I find myself singing, “Asleep in Jesus, blessed sleep, from which none ever wakes to weep! A calm and undisturbed repose, unbroken by the last of foes.” What happens after death remains a mystery even unto this day. We have more knowledge about the exact time of death, brain death, and the physiological changes that occur as our body shuts down but we cannot say with scientific certainty exactly what happens to the essential us after death of the body. Images of standing on the banks of the River Jordan waiting to cross over to the other side, being asleep in Jesus, beyond the sunset, the sweet by and by… these words and music are a bridge for my imagination that help me prepare for my final days.
What I can say is absolutely true for me, a faith statement that is inexplicable and indefensible, is I will go to be with God. I suspect my imagination is neither accurate nor wide enough to contain the reality of life after death and for that I am grateful. I do not need a little “g” God when my time to die comes. I need the deep, deep love of Jesus…
O the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast, unmeasured, boundless, free!
Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me!
Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love
Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above!
This old hymn, written in a minor key, says all I know about death and the ever after…God’s love in the person of Jesus will carry me on its ocean waves homeward to a new existence in all its unimaginable fullness. That is more than enough for me.Selah.