In 1909 Pierre Curie, a man who along with his wife discovered radium, was run over by a wagon and killed instantly. The loss of her husband was a devastating experience to Madam Curie emotionally. Thereafter for months, she wrote personal notes to him daily in her diary. In one of those notes, she described the funeral service and how they gathered by the graveside and how she kissed his cheek and said good-bye. They tried to usher the family away, but they didn’t want to leave until they had covered the grave with dirt and the dirt with flowers. She wrote of that experience, “Pierre is sleeping his last sleep beneath the earth; it is the end of everything, everything, everything.”
There are people who come to the final hour of life and they say it is the end of everything. The hymn writer William Cushing expressed something of the despair when he wrote, “Oh, to have no Christ, no Savior. How lonely life must be, like a sailor lost and driven on a wide and shoreless sea. Oh to have no Christ, no Savior, no hand to clasp thine own! Through the dark, dark vale of shadows, thou must press thy way alone.” In contrast to that despair, the apostle Paul could say, “Why, to live, that is wonderful. To suffer, that is okay. But to depart and be with him, that’s better. That’s a step up. That’s an advantage.” Paul stood on the brink of death unafraid, for he had found meaning in life.
Dag Hammarskjöld, who was for many years the Secretary General of the United Nations before he died in a plane crash, was a dedicated Christian. But in the years before he became a Christian, he described the despair, the meaninglessness, and the futility of his life. In his diary entitled Markings, he makes an interesting statement about his life and the meaning he had found. He said, “Before Christ there is nothing. After Christ, there is nothing, but in Christ there is everything.” He had found in Christ a commitment that made him want to live, content to suffer, and unafraid to die. You can find those same things in Jesus and in total commitment to him.