Thursday, December 15, 2011

Dying without Christ

From Christopher Hitchens’s latest article in Vanity Fair, written from a cancer center in Houston where he is undergoing chemo:
I am typing this having just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking.
When our identity and our idolatry become one and the same, the prospect of death can only lead to “unyielding despair.” Let us continue to pray for mercy and grace that would open the eyes of this enormously gifted man to see the Lord and Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

Justin Taylor

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