RICHARD MAFFEO
From life… to life

In 1974, Dr. Daniel V. Taub learned the secret of an abundant life. It was an important lesson then. It took on even greater meaning for him in the fall of 1996, when he was lying in a hospital room. Six weeks earlier, his doctors had diagnosed colon cancer. On further examination, they had found another tumour in his left lung. Then a CT scan had uncovered suspicious spots on his liver. We both knew he was dying.

I walked into his hospital room and tried to ignore his laboured breathing and his yellowed, swollen skin.

“Hi Dan,” I choked back tears. “How are you feeling?”

He opened his dark, sunken eyes, turned his head and tried to smile. “Tired,” he whispered. “Good to see you.”

It had been nearly five years since Dan and I had last been together. My job change and move across country had ended our weekly chats. When he and I had spoken on the phone during the past Christmas, neither of us had known it would be his last earthly celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth.

As I watched him lying there, struggling to breathe, my mind drifted to the time when he had shared with me the story of his discovery of Jesus. Because he had been raised as an agnostic, had been educated in the most prestigious schools and had been trained as a clinical psychologist, he could have easily dismissed the emptiness gnawing at his heart as irrational foolishness. The idea that sin could be the root of his emptiness was completely foreign to his world view.

But when God revealed to him the truth about sin and forgiveness, Dan suddenly knew he had to make a choice between God’s truth and his human philosophies. He chose God, and from that moment he devoted his life to the cornerstone of God’s truth: Jesus Christ.

Now, 22 years later, although his body was weakened by cancer, his faith remained powerful. As he had done for the last two decades of his life, he asked everyone who would listen, “Do you know Jesus?”

Once, during the few days we spent together in his hospital room, I asked, “Dan, how does it feel to know you are dying?”

I learned long ago that a hospital room is where everything we hold dear washes out: money, popularity, passions, careers. Like charred timbers after a house fire, a deathbed places so many things into clear perspective.

My question was deeply personal for me. I needed to know his thoughts. Perhaps his answer might help me cope during that future time when I lie in some hospital bed, staring into eternity.

He raised his hand to the bed rail and touched mine. “From life . . . to life,” he smiled. “I leave this one to enter the next with Jesus.”

I placed my other hand atop his and let his words seep into my spirit. We buried Dan a few days later. Yet, Dan’s last words remained in my memory.