I run a few miles in the morning and think about death. You never know what can happen out on those shadowed streets. 

The sun stretches and yawns on the horizon, and someone late for work makes a fast turn, or the wheel drifts as that guy checks a text, or the breakfast burrito threatens to do some reverse tortilla origami on those white pants. Swerve. 

Once, while I was running, an armadillo sprang up out of the weeds as if it had been waiting for just that moment to race. For a few paces, it galloped along beside me before giving up and skittering back into the brush. You never know.

As I set out on my run, I breathe a little prayer. “Lord, protect me.” But then, kind of like the three young men in Daniel, I add: “But if not, and today is my last day of life, forgive my sins and receive me into your presence.” 

My aerobic workout doubles as an exercise in memento mori: Remember that you will die. Possibly by tripping over an armadillo.

Reflecting on our death is a good practice for followers of Jesus. Memento mori precedes the gospel: Socrates described philosophy as preparation for death. In that sense, it means discovering what matters most in life and driving at it with gusto. 

When our culture thinks about death and doesn’t recoil, that’s where it typically goes. We say: “You only live once!” before parachuting out of a plane.

But when the scriptures remind us of our swift mortality, it’s less carpe diem and more “you are dust and to dust you shall return.” That’s what old Moses said: “You turn us back to dust” and human beings are “like a dream” (Psalm 90:3, 5). 

Asks James: “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and vanishes” (4:14). 

And Paul: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” ­(Colossians 3:2-3).

Because we are awake to the truth that we will die, we live as those who know they must render an account before the judgment seat of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:10; Romans 14:10). 

That’s been the church’s wisdom down through the ages. 

In the fourth century, Anthony the Great instructed those who sought God to “live each day as if dying.” 

Benedict of Nursia wrote in his Rule: “Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.” 

The early Mennonite treasury of prayers and spiritual counsel, Prayer Book for Earnest Christians, recommends that one “awake in the morning with your thoughts turned to God. Think, this might be your last day of life.” 

Meditating on death in this sense is a call to humility and repentance. It lends our lives urgency and calls us to ask: Am I living each day for Christ?

And yet, it’s not only that we should keep the sheer and inevitable cliff of our future death before our thoughts. It’s that in Christ, we have already died. 

The apostle’s words point to the paradox at the heart of Christian reflection on death: “We are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died” (2 Corinthians 5:14).  

“Consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:11). 

“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:19-20). 

In Christ, we have died to sin and self. The animating force of our life now comes from God and is oriented toward God. 

Meditating on death in this way reminds us that our lives are not our own. That gives us hope, because it means our deaths are not ours alone either. Our life and our death have been united to Christ’s.

Which leads to a question: What am I afraid of? That’s a question that must be wrestled with, Israel style. We can’t glibly wave it away. 

If, in Christ, I truly am a dead man or woman walking (or running!), then what am I afraid of? 

Failure? Rejection? Poverty? Our children’s choices? 

These are fearful things. Life may only be “smoke” and a “mirage” (Psalm 62:9, Message). But it’s our smoke and our mirage.

Yet, if we’re a people who have died and our lives are hidden with Christ in God, maybe we truly have nothing to fear. The world is wide, and God made us to run in it. 

Memento mori in Christo Iesu.