We walk the road of life. We must travel the road of life. We weren’t given a choice, or maybe we were given the choice, but we’ve forgotten that we said yes. Here we are, everyday, walking, sometimes running down this inevitable road. There’s no way to stop it.

Well, there is one way to end the journey, but we don’t like to think about death, and when we’re forced to, we have a mild panic attack, because there’s too much unknown for our minds to digest. Death is too foreign, too illusive, and it’s too dark on the other side to embrace our arrival to its doorway.

Fear grips our hearts, because no matter what we do, no matter how hard we try to slow down time, we all move forward at a steady pace. We let Fear dictate our existence. He becomes the master of this journey. He calls out, You don’t want to die, but listen to the marching beat. Every step you take, every breath you breathe is one step closer to your doom. 

We paint the picture of heaven, of the afterlife, to try and quiet the voice of Fear. We do our best to catch the vapor, but it’s still too foreign, it’s still too illusive, and Fear is there chuckling at our grasping, so we panic. What if it’s not like we think on the other side? What if we have it all wrong?

So, we wrap ourselves into a cocoon — a cocoon of busyness, addiction, fear, depression, anxiety, and people pleasing. We live this life waiting for the other shoe to drop. We refuse to open up and live with wild abandonment, because it’s probably going to end in a disaster anyway.

Except, what if we changed the way we looked at death. What if

Death is the reward of life.

But how can death be a reward? Let me explain my deductive reasoning on how I came to this conclusion.

I was pregnant with one of my four children, and I began to think of the process of birth. Here’s this tiny fetus living the life. He has all of his needs met. He’s floating in a warm fluid that sustains his environment. He’s fed freely through his belly button, and the constant motion and muffled noises makes him content.

Now, what if somehow we could get inside the mother’s womb, and what if somehow we could communicate on that tiny fetus’s level, and we told that baby,

“Just wait, little guy, you ain’t seen nothing yet. You’re about to travel through a portal to a new land. This land is full of ice cream, swings, cuddly puppies, and thrills beyond your wildest comprehension. You will love other humans, sing with your voice, and laugh until you cry. Little baby, you’re about to enter earth, and your existence is about to get so much better.”

What could the baby possibly say? That baby has no frame of reference to understand the awesomeness that he’s about to enter into. All he knows is the beauty of the dark warmth he’s floating in. If he could tell us how his inevitable birth made him feel, I’m sure he would say, “No thank you! I want nothing to do with birth. It’s too foreign, it’s too illusive, and it’s too dark on the other side to embrace birth.”

But we’ve been on the other side. We’ve experienced life on earth firsthand. We know it’s beauty, thrill and complexity. Sure, there’s evil too, but we were made to overcome and thrive in spite of the pain. We understand how exponentially better things are outside our mother’s womb.

With that thought, and using deductive reasoning, in this journey of life,

in each phase, things get better.

So, I’ve embraced that very thought. I don’t understand the other side, but if I calculate the rate of improvement from womb to earth, then death to afterlife is going to blow my mind. Just like life is the reward of pregnancy, death is the reward of life.

Don’t get me wrong, the death canal is going to be stressful, and I’ll probably come out on the other side screaming my head off, but there will be a group of people to welcome me, and gather around me to ‘ohhh’ and ‘ahhh’ and make sure I find a cozy place to adjust to my new leg of the journey.

Until then, I’m going to quiet the voice of Fear, and delight in this moment. I’m going to enjoy this life and make the best of my journey here, and when it’s my time, I’ll accept death as my reward of life.