A friend convinced Phil to go deep-sea fishing, something he had never done before. Now that he was in the middle of the ocean, he felt sure this was the dumbest thing he had ever done. Who would have believed that seasickness could be so awful? With every pitch and roll, Phil wondered if he could survive the remaining two hours of the trip. One of the deckhands said to Phil, “Don’t worry, young fella. Nobody ever died of seasickness.”
Phil responded: “Great! You just took away my last hope for relief.”
We may feel there is little worse than death; that is certainly one reason people refuse to discuss the topic until it is too late. And when we do talk about death, we may imagine (like Phil on the fishing boat) that death could only be good if life is really terrible. Yet the Bible has this strange verse in Philippians: “To die is gain.” English Philosopher Francis Bacon said that people naturally fear death as children fear the dark. How, then, can death be a gain?