Life is like one of those high-top tables at the coffee shop: you can sit enjoying yourself for a while but God makes it slightly uncomfortable so that you won’t hang around all day hogging the WiFi. At some point in life, your latte’s been drunk and you’re sitting there stalling while the heavenly baristas glare at you in a not-so-subtle hint to leave.

Obviously, most people don’t want to leave the coffee shop. We’d rather today not be our day to die. Would it be possible to just continue being in the prime of life for all eternity? An arrangement where time continues to pass, but our bodies remain stuck at twenty-five? We think that sounds ideal, but would you really want to live in a world like that?

Think about it, if no one ever died there’d be like a hundred billion people on the planet. Every nook and cranny of earth filled to the brim with humans. If no one ever died, there’d be a lot more bunk beds. We’d have to stack sleeping people four or five beds high, our bedrooms would look like the inside of those sleeper trains in China.

And imagine the things we’d hear said out loud if no one ever died. If you get nervous at family get togethers, on pins and needles about what cringy thing your grandpa might say, imagine also seated at the table were his father. And his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father. On and on down the line, going back to Cain and Abel themselves. Imagine what that table talk would sound like, with your ancestors from 500 B.C. weighing in on the events of the day.

There’d be endless wars as tiresome old farts like Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan still fought to expand their precious kingdoms. Their monstrous hubris even further inflated by the unshakeable knowledge that they shall never die. The ambition of war-like men would have all the time in the world to gain power by any means necessary.

In some ways this world where no one ever dies would be highly uncompetitive. The rules would be all set before you were even born, your place and rank preemptively assigned to you at conception. In other ways this world would be more competitive than anything we could ever imagine. You’d be fighting with anyone who ever lived for your place in this world. You’d never be up for a promotion because the guy currently doing the role started during the Tang Dynasty and “isn’t quite ready to retire yet”. If you’d been born recently, it would take incredible talent to become even a low-level manager. If you think the people in government now are too old, just remember, in a world where nobody dies, they’d never even have a shot to be president of the student council!

The world would be unequal and unjust. Like people who show up early to a party and ransack the buffet, those ancient old timers from the cradles of civilization would have plucked all the choicest parts of the world long before we were a glimmer in our parents’ eyes. They’d have built truly generational wealth, then set up oppressive structures to protect it all costs. The old timers wouldn’t consider our talents and dreams, they’d consider our utility towards their comfort and enjoyment. They’d invent new vocations for the youth, jobs they’d never want for themselves – foot rubber, grape feeder, dishwasher, diaper changer.

Everyday would be groundhog day, a mindless sprint on the hamster wheel to nowhere, knowing that those at the top never die. Our only solace would be to scratch out a little parcel of life and work it for all it’s worth. This tiny dream would be as good as it gets, and even that might be taken from us if it interfered in any way with the old timers.

Rather than a dark, dystopian future, it’d be a stunted, conservative present that never ends. A maintaining of the status quo, just because it’s comfortable.

This is the world where no one ever dies, where Barista God allows us to freely slurp from the fountain of everlasting youth. In this world he looks up at us from across his coffee covered counter-top, smiles lovingly at our empty latte cups and pats us on the head.

“Don’t you worry about the WiFi son, just stay here as long as you want…”

We can logically concede that people passing away has some upside, but few would admit it’s good. Personally, it is very hard to leave the coffee shop, to admit to ourselves it’s time to move on. It is very hard to die in life and it is very hard to embrace the inevitable decline.

It’s especially hard when you have so much to lose – abilities, identity, power, respectability. The ego, like a cancer, expects endless growth and expansion, not realizing this will be the ultimate death of us. It cannot imagine or accept a world without us. It must hang around a little longer, it will not go willingly into the ground.

Ego leads us to act like we’re living in the World Where No One Ever Dies. Where “50 is the new 30” and online visual evidence of our lives has proliferated. We don’t want to give up our spot or make room for others, because that would be conceding defeat.

And yet we cannot but sense the passing of time. Like the high-top tables at the coffee shop, we feel the slight discomfort of our position but insist on slurping that one last imaginary drop out of the latte. We’re hogging the WiFi and won’t move aside for others. We live for the comfort and aggrandizement of ourselves rather than embrace a downward trajectory that will create space for the next person who will one day sit at the cosmic coffee shop.

It’s logical to hold on tight and refuse to go quietly out the door. Why would anyone willingly make peace with the slow rolling approach of death? There’s simply no sense in it.

Yet paradoxically, the world around us seems to hint that there is life in death.

Everything in nature withers and fades. It crumbles and falls, returns to the earth. It dies.

It becomes mere dung and ashes, a fertilizer towards new growth. But by falling in death, it joins the flow of life. It becomes a piece of the whole, a part of the New Growth. When the New Growth sprouts, this dead thing has become alive again. It is reborn in an unrecognizable form, fresh and full of potential. In a world where no one ever dies, power is hoarded, spaces are overcrowded, and growth is stifled. This mysterious cycle of life is broken. But in world where people choose to let go and release, all things are constantly being made new again.

The Christian faith seems to attest that life is found in a willing acceptance of our own decline and demise. Our churches are filled with crucifixes and other visual reminders of dying. These religious articles point towards our primary vocation – to model dying to a world obsessed with living forever. We are invited to have the ego crucified, to “die unto ourselves”, both physically and spiritually.

For what good does it do to gain the whole world and yet lose your very soul? Or as J.C. said it best

“If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.”*

*Bible, Book of Matthew 16:25

If No One Ever Died