The Silence

By Phil Lynch

I have been rubbing shoulders with death lately. My father-in-law passed away a month shy of his 99th birthday. My wife and I had been staying with him and my brother-in-law for the last five months. The main reason we were there is because we wanted to be around him before he passed on. Our job commitments had meant we weren’t previously living in close proximity, so we were grateful that the Lord had, through recent changes, created the opportunity for us to come back. He was a grand old man who wanted to live to 100, but his body just didn’t last the distance.

Then today my sister wrote that my cousin had also passed away. I wasn’t close to him—actually, I'd had no contact with him for about 40 years—but still, it was cause for me to reflect on the fact that someone that I had known well for a time was no longer around on earth. It is an odd and unfamiliar feeling. But that in itself is strange, because death is integral to life. Physical life has a beginning and an end. We rejoice at birth and grieve at death.

I am presently still in the moment. I know that death for us is a moment of release into the spirit world. I know that God has promised us that we can barely even imagine the good things that He has in store for those of us that love Him.1 I know we are supposed to take hold of those promises and let them encourage us.

From the Bible, we know a number of things about the afterlife from the time of the Rapture onwards. We know that then we receive a new super body, still corporeal in some aspects but super-corporeal in others. We will be able to eat, we can walk and talk, and our new bodies will be flesh and bone, but apparently not have blood.2 More than this, we will also be able to appear and disappear. We know this because Jesus did these things after His resurrection and John tells us that “we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him.”3We will be able to fly and survive in rarefied atmospheric conditions, because it says we are going to meet the Lord in the clouds when He comes at His second coming.4 Jesus, of course, rose into the clouds at His ascension.5

But what happens before that time to those who pass on isn’t talked about a lot in scriptures. There is (or at least there was) a place called Paradise that Jesus went to at His death on the cross.6 We also know that Jesus went to visit the spirits in prison,7 but that doesn’t necessarily mean Paradise and that “prison” are the same place. He could have visited both. Paul said he knew of a man—many think he was alluding to himself—who visited Paradise, which he also called the third heaven, in some event so profound that he wasn’t sure if he physically visited it or it was only a spiritual experience.8 Jesus told us of a certain poor man, Lazarus, who died and was carried to Abraham’s bosom.9 Some suggest that is the name of an actual heavenly place, but many versions of the Bible translate bosomas side, so my guess is that it meant Lazarus was next to Abraham.

Nevertheless, Jesus told us that when we believe in Him, we have eternal life. So if life is forever, then we must go from life to life at the moment of death. That means our spirits live on. Many who have had near-death experiences describe that life in glowing terms, but if we are going strictly by what the Bible says, there is not much to go on. But knowing the nature of our God and that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and gentleness are the essence of His Spirit, I think we can be sure that life after death in His presence will be a wonderful experience.10

But for now there is a silence in my soul. I was going to describe it as an emptiness, but that is not the right word, at least not for me. My thoughts are far from empty. I am thinking of what these people had been and done on earth and of my interactions with them. I remember the one time I played golf with my cousin. I even remember the box-thorn bush I hit my ball into and his commiseration as to the scratched and bloody arm I got from retrieving it. It's funny what memories stick with you. There were probably lots more that could have but didn't.

But I don’t hear him. I don’t hear my father-in-law either. The silence isn’t a bad thing. It is not a scary thing. Still, a couple of voices have been lost to the world, distinctive voices that probably don’t have a match anywhere. Life is different now. The world, or at least my world, is not the same.

I know this is probably a transitory phase I am going through. And I am confident I will come out of it and it will be a life-affirming experience. But I don’t want it to pass without me capturing the essence of it, without it adding some depth to my character. It is not a morbid or fearful grieving, but these days have an ineffableness to them. I have wandered into a part of life that I haven’t been into for quite a while. And this time it is different than before. Perhaps I am more philosophical this time, or more conscious of mortality, or more human and less doctrinaire in my theology, or… But it feels like this time is life-enriching, because it goes right to the core of my being. I have come up to the wall at the end of earth life. I have placed my hand on its surface. It is a strange feeling.


[1] 1 Corinthians 2:9.

[2] Luke 24:39.

[3] 1 John 3:2.

[4] 1 Thessalonians 4:17.

[5] Acts 1:9–11.

[6] Luke 23:43.

[7] 1 Peter 3:19.

[8] 2 Corinthians 12:2–4.

[9] Luke 16:20–22.

[10] Galatians 5:22–23.