A lot of us might fall into any one of those categories.

Death is the Enemy, it's going to door to the next life, or even death as birth, where I get to have the new life in Christ. But all three of those fall short. How my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and this is Essentially Presents. There is a great book by my name Dr. Peter Craft called Love is Stronger Than Death. One of the things that when I first read this book that struck me so profoundly was he said, we have to realize that death actually is an evil. Now, I grew up as a Christian, right? So I've always

heard like, no, no, no, death is the door we have to go through to get to heaven. So I had to learn how to look at death as the enemy. In fact, scripture says death is the enemy, but the final enemy to be destroyed is death. I've always been raised with the truth that Jesus has conquered death.

And so now death is not the end.

Death is the doorway to eternity.

Death is the doorway to heaven.

Had to come to the reality that no, he's right.

Scripture is right.

Death is an obscenity.

Why? Because it's the separation of soul and body.

As human beings, we're meant to be soul and body together. Death is the obscenity because it takes something good, a human person,

body and soul, and rips apart these two integral parts of what makes us human beings, which I think

is very fascinating. So he goes through four different ways of looking at death. Now, I'm going to

modify a couple of his because it just

makes more sense to me. The first one is death is the enemy. And that it's the biblical view, that that sense of it's death is the thing we need to avoid, right, at all costs. It's not just the biblical view. I think it's also the view that many of us have. We don't like to think about death. we don't like to face the reality of death.

I remember years ago, there was a Brazilian musician and they were interviewing her about her music. And she said, well, in Brazil, we sing about things that are taboo for you up here in the United States of America. There was a crowd there and they kind of all chuckled. And she said, oh, no, no, you think I mean you guys don't sing about sex. She said, oh, that's all you sing about. All you sing about in America is sex. She said, but in Brazil, our music is not just about love, it's also about death. But you guys never sing about death. We don't meditate on it. Why? Because for a lot of us, death is the enemy, the thing to be avoided at all costs, which is one of the reasons why during the COVID pandemic, there are so many people who were captured by fear

because this thing could be the end of their lives.

If my life is over, then that's the enemy.

Now everything is over.

So one way to look at death is death is the enemy.

The other way to look at death is maybe you get more sober.

Maybe you're like, okay, listen, I'm being realistic.

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