To Die Before You Die

This morning Psalm 49 rose up from the page and looked me in the eye. It was not a psalm to be admired but one to be endured, or rather, entered. “Man cannot buy his own ransom, nor pay a price to God for his life.” The words were stripped of comfort, bare as bone. I could not pass over them quickly. They waited, patient and unyielding, until I stopped resisting and let them speak.

There was no threat in them, only truth. The remembrance of death came as grace, not fear. It quieted the noise inside me, the endless calculations of what must still be done or resolved. Suddenly I saw how fragile it all is, how every effort to secure myself, every attachment, every imagined certainty, is already dust in motion.

“Wise men and fools perish alike,” the psalm says. It sounds harsh until it breaks open the heart. Then you see it is a kind of mercy, because it frees you from the illusion that you can keep anything. Nothing belongs to me. Not the work, not the reputation, not even the body that trembles when I pray. Only love lasts, and love must be purified of every possession before it can be real.

Lately the nearness of death feels like a shadow that walks beside me. It comes in the night when sleep will not stay, in the ache of the body, in the silence of unanswered prayers. Yet it is not cruel. It is strangely familiar, a presence that teaches surrender. To die before you die means to release what was never yours to begin with, to stand before God with empty hands and let Him fill them.

When the psalmist says, “God will redeem my life from the grasp of death,” I no longer hear escape. I hear fulfillment. Death does not have the final word because it has already been invited in, already tasted in the little deaths of pride, control, and fear. Each surrender becomes a small resurrection, a flicker of freedom.

To die before you die is to stop pretending that you have endless time. It is to let every breath become a confession, every act a prayer, every silence an offering. It is to live as though eternity has already begun, because in truth it has.

This morning I asked for the grace to remember this not only when I pray but when I forget, to let the remembrance of death keep my heart awake, stripped of illusion, burning quietly for the One who alone endures.