By Michael Brooks
Brooks is a pastor of the Siluria Baptist Church and adjunct instructor at Jefferson State Community College.

The medieval church would often bid one another farewell with the phrase, “Memento mori,” which means “Remember death.” The point was that the thought of approaching death can be a great motivator for holy living.

For most of us death is unwelcomed. I’ve known some people over the years who saluted death.

These people suffered and they or their families saw death as welcomed, or as Christians are wont to say, death is our final healing. But these folk are in the minority. For most of us death comes too soon.

This was true for King Hezekiah in the Old Testament. He pleaded for more time and God gave him 15 more years to live.

I can imagine the king’s life was forever different in those years of God’s grace.

The late Steve Jobs said, “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.”

Visitors to The Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga., see Elizabeth Shoumatoff’s unfinished portrait of President Franklin Roosevelt in the cabin’s living room area. FDR sat for this portrait on April 12, 1945.

That day he told his aids, “I have a terrific headache,” and then slumped in his chair. He was taken to the modest presidential bedroom and pronounced dead.

When we think of a significant life, here it was. Roosevelt had the full weight of the world on his shoulders as he charted the course of World War II.

He had a terrible burden perhaps only understood by his compatriot, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain.

In fact, FDR was working on a top secret project to end the war. With the aid of captured German scientists the Americans authorized production of the atomic bomb.

This project was so secret that Vice President Harry Truman knew nothing about it when he assumed office that day.

FDR didn’t live to see German’s surrender the next month, nor Japan’s surrender that summer after the atomic bomb was used.

Death claimed our president at age 63. And death will claim us, too, at the appointed time on God’s eternal calendar known only to him. Death may come calling in the midst of some great project.

But when death comes to our door, we cannot hide. We have a heavenly appointment with the God who gave us the gift of life. The apostle Paul said, “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5: 10).

“Memento mori” may seem a macabre greeting, but it’s a sobering word that should motivate us to holy living.