DNR Wednesday, April 16, 2014 It’s called a DNR, a legal document we encourage every Hospice patient to sign. DNR is an acronym for “Do Not Resuscitate.” The document declares a person’s wishes that, should they medically crash, they do not want any effort made to revive them. They want life to be allowed to take its own course toward its natural end. You might think that every Hospice patient would want to sign one. After all, in order to be accepted for Hospice care, two doctors have to attest that a person is facing death within six months. Simply signing the Hospice documents is an admission in itself that one agrees with the doctors. You’d think every Hospice patient would want to sign a DNR. You’d be wrong. It’s amazing how many refuse to sign one. In the event of a medical crash, they want every heroic effort made to revive them. This despite the statistical fact that, once a person has been declared terminally ill, if attempts are made to revive them upon crashing, only one percent survive. A DNR is hard for some to sign because it is the most personal admission a person can make that they are going to die and no one, not even the best medical practitioners, can do one thing to stop it. When you think about it, signing a DNR is no different than signing a last will and testament. A will is a person’s not so subtle acknowledgement of their own mortality. So is purchasing life insurance. We all know, somewhere in the recesses of our mind, that we’re going to die. Bringing that admission to the fore and putting it in writing is a step some just can’t take. Celebrating our Lord’s resurrection is also an admission that we are mortal, that we are facing certain death and we want Jesus to do something about it. It doesn’t make sense to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection as the harbinger of our own until and unless we have first acknowledged our own certain appointment with our physical demise. The only problem with the resurrection is that it, by its very nature, demands a death. No death, no resurrection. I’m certain that’s part of what was giving Jesus so much trouble in the Garden the night of his arrest. His willingness to surrender instead of fight was his surrender as well to his own mortality and, of course, the particularly brutal and spiritually devastating way in which he’d experience it. I know how hard it is to carry the burden of one sin. Jesus was going to bleed out the grief of the sin of all humankind. I can’t fathom the pain of even anticipating that, much less experiencing it. Here’s the bigger problem with the resurrection. Jesus said that, if wanted to experience the power of the resurrection, we had to surrender to the death to our very selves – now. We’re going to physically die whether we want to or not. Whether we die to our own self-centeredness is a moral choice we have to make. We can’t live in the power of the resurrected Jesus unless we accept our own, very personal, encounter with death to self. Jesus said as much. “‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’” (Matthew 16:24). Jesus had his cross, his own DNR, if you will, to carry. He wanted out of it. Who wouldn’t? It wasn’t until he accepted it by force of spiritual will that he was then able to experience his own personal resurrection to new life. The only thing standing between us and the power of the new life we’ve been promised is our unwillingness to pick up our own cross, pull out a pocket knife, carve our name into it and then haul it down the road. I was talking to a woman in mid-life yesterday who was telling me that she got “saved” when she was nine. Then, like most of us, she proceeded to live the next few decades any way she wanted. It wasn’t until ten years ago, she said, that she realized she’d never actually followed Jesus past her ninth birthday. With an intensity in her eyes that was almost spooky, she looked straight at me and said, “That’s when I was converted, when I decided to genuinely follow Jesus, no matter what.” She didn’t go into any gory details about what that turnabout meant in her life. The details weren’t the point anyway. It was her choice to pick up her own cross, her moral surrender to self-death, that was the point. No one can tell us what it means to “take up our own cross,” to sign our own spiritual DNR. That’s a discovery more personal than any other we’ll ever make. It’s a discovery we must make. Otherwise, we may remain forever “saved” but never “converted.” This very day, I will see dying people. Some have signed a DNR. Some have not. The real question facing me today is whether or not I’ve signed my own spiritual DNR, whether I’ve truly decided to live for Jesus instead of myself or I’m just good at talking about it but not living and dying it.
Posted on: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 11:16:09 +0000
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