“Pray to avoid dying before your time,” I heard the pastor of a neighbourhood church tell his members one Sunday. As Nigerian preachers are wont to do, he told a scary story about a young woman who had died in a car accident. According to him, her blood soaked the white aso-ebi she was wearing and filled the streets. When he was done with the story, his fearful members began to scream at the top of their lungs begging God not to let them die young.
I haven’t been to church in months due to the pandemic and a sudden relocation. However, while I miss certain aspects of worshipping in a community, there are some things I’m glad to do away with. That prayer to avoid dying before your time is one of them. It’s a prayer rooted in fear and not faith and it makes people panic which is not what prayer is supposed to do.
Also, how do you even know that a person died before their time? Who told you when their time would be? How do we determine a time that we never set in the first place? This all comes down to the human illusion of being in control. You’d think after 2020, we’d have realized that nobody knows anything for sure. Our best theories are nothing more than intelligent guesswork.
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I don’t pray that prayer anymore; the one that begs God to keep me from dying before my time. Instead, I pray that he helps me make the most of my opportunities. I pray that he helps me do the best I can with the time I have left. I pray that I live a life of impact and achieve everything he meant for me to do. We’re afraid of death because we think it’s the worst thing that can happen to us. It’s not.
The worst thing is for a person to come to this earth and leave without making a mark. It doesn’t really matter if they depart at 40 or 90. We all have a purpose to fulfill. Nobody is here by accident. So instead of fearing death or being scared about dying before your time, do your best to live life to the uttermost. Because the ones who truly live never really die.
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