July 9: Love is Stronger than Death

Sophie Caldecott relishes the bedtime stories her father read to her when she was growing up—stories by authors like Jane Austen and C.S. Lewis—because they taught her not only about right and wrong, but about love.  In 2011, the now twenty-something Caldecott’s understanding of love reached a deeper level after discovering her father had cancer.

Writing in Verily magazine, Caldecott says, “Life seems so fragile back in that hospital waiting room, but I have come to realize that, in fact, it is resilient even in the face of death.  When life is built around love, it can outlast death, because death is not the end.  The cancer is a sick imitation of the real thing, multiplying desperately because it has no real substance or meaning of its own beyond that which it destroys.”

“Perhaps the most precious lesson that a father can teach his daughter—a lesson which helps her to deal with the possibility of losing him, in fact—is that love is stronger than death.  I learned this through the heroes and heroines of the stories that my father shared with me—and, like them, I will never despair or stop believing that the world is good.”

Love never ends.  (1 Corinthians 13:8)

Let Your love heal those who suffer, Lord.