Sickness

Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur, who is on a mission to extend his life as long as possible. He is not alone in this quest. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.”

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life…. Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act.

Here lies the crux of the error of those that see human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”

Bad days. We’ve all had them, and for many of us, it doesn’t take much to send a day spiraling into chaos before breakfast is even over.

According to a new survey, the average American knows their day is going to be bad by 8:36 a.m. Additionally, it’s not just a rare occurrence—four times a month, people expect the worst, adding up to an average of 48 bad days every year.

Mornings, it seems, are critical in setting the tone for the day. The survey highlights that common morning mishaps—such as waking up feeling sick (35%), suffering from poor sleep (31%), or starting the day with a headache (29%)—are among the top indicators of a bad day. Even seemingly minor inconveniences, like misplacing keys (26%) or leaving a phone at home (25%), can derail the entire day.

The impact of these morning disruptions is significant. Nearly half of those surveyed (48%) reported canceling plans or calling in sick after a challenging start to the day, opting to return to bed in hopes of salvaging what remains.

Possible Preaching Angle:
We have all been there, but a Christian doesn’t have to let pessimism or emotions rule their day. Beginning this new year, resolve instead, by faith, to put your day into God’s hands – “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psa. 118:24)

Music legend, Elton John, made an emotional revelation on BBC's The Graham Norton Show, where he appeared with collaborator Brandi Carlile to promote their upcoming track Who Believes In Angels?. Elton confessed that he "lost it" and needed comforting for 45 minutes when the new song made him confront his own mortality.

"Bernie Taupin (Elton's lyricist) gave me a lyric for a song called, 'When This Whole World Is Done With Me', and I'm writing the verse (music) quite quickly, and I think this is a really lovely verse," Elton recalled. "And then I get to the chorus, and I find that it's about my death, my demise. And as a 76 year old man, which I was at that time, and having children and having a husband, mortality, and you think about, 'How long have I got? How long? I hope I've got, much longer than maybe I've got.

Paul Auster, a prolific novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter was described as a “literary superstar” and “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” But his life was haunted by tragedy and death. In 1961, a 14-year-old Paul Auster watched a friend die after being struck by lightning. Later, he lost one grandmother to a heart attack and another to A.L.S., a disease which Auster said left victims with “no hope, no remedy, nothing in front of you but a prolonged march towards disintegration.” Later there were the deaths of his mother and father; the passing of his 10-month-old granddaughter Ruby, and his son, Daniel, who overdosed in 2022.

Auster wrote that “the world was capricious and unstable, that the future can be stolen from us at any moment, that the sky is full of lightning bolts that can crash down and kill the young as well as the old, and always, always, the lightning strikes when we are least expecting it.”

Sadness permeated Auster’s work. After his death at the age of 77, his wife wrote, “Paul was extremely interested in the idea of the hero who is cast into a new world by grief. He used that device a lot: the stripped person. The person who has lost their most profound connections to the world.”

In the year 1909, seven-year-old Walt Disney was playing by himself in the backyard of his family's farmhouse. He decided to sneak up on a big brown owl, but when he grabbed it the owl panicked, Disney threw it to the ground and stomped it to the death. According to his biographers, that owl haunted him for years, and produced a morbid fear of death.

Disney’s first big hit as a young animator came when he was 26 years old, in a cartoon featuring Mickey Mouse. But he immediately followed up that success with a short feature titled “The Skeleton Dance,” which opens with a terrified owl perched in a tree followed by skeletons rising from their graves. Disney’s distributor complained, saying, “We don’t want this gruesome crap… More mice… More mice!”

This was a small sample of what was to come. One scholar said, “If Disney was a mouthpiece for an American way of life, the force of his voice depended on a curious obsession with death.” Virtually every one of his famous films focused on the subject, from Snow White to Pinocchio.

His personal life was focused on decline and demise as well. Disney’s daughter Diane said that Disney hired a fortuneteller when he was in his early 30s to predict when he would die. The fortuneteller predicted the age of 35. Disney distracted himself by workaholism and success. If he stayed busy, maybe he could distract both himself and the Reaper. He survived 35, but never forgot the prediction. Shortly before his 55th birthday, he knew that maybe he had misheard, and the fortuneteller had said 55, not 35.

Actress and former Seinfeld star (as Elaine) Julia Louis-Dreyfus has had moments when tragedy and comedy get put in a blender. Monday, September 18, 2017, was one of them. Louis-Dreyfus and the hit TV show Veep had triumphed at the Emmys the night before. By morning, her doctor was on the phone telling her she had cancer. The first thing she did after hanging up was double over with laughter.

She said, “I mean, it felt like it was written. It felt like it was a horrible black comedy. And then it sort of morphed into crying hysterically.” [But she was also] terrified. “You just simply don’t consider it for yourself, you know, that’s sort of the arrogance of human beings. But of course, at some point, we’re all going to bite it.”

Pastor John Yates III once worked for the British scholar and Bible teacher John Stott. Yates reflected on the time when Stott’s aging and disability started to slow Stott down. Yates says:

Stott spent the last 15 years of his life going completely blind. It began with a small stroke that knocked out the peripheral vision in his left eye, forcing him to surrender his driver’s license. And over the years that followed, this man who wrote more books during his lifetime than most of us will read in an average decade became unable to see the pages in front of him. But that wasn't all. His body grew increasingly weak. He needed more sleep. He was eventually confined to his bedroom.

I spent three years working closely with John when he was in his early 70s. I was in my mid-20s. It was absolutely exhausting. I've never been around another person with a capacity for work as fast as his. He was the most disciplined and efficient man I've ever known. But there he was, years later, now in his 80s and into his early 90s, with his mind as sharp as ever. But then he was unable to do much of anything, except to sleep, eat, and listen out his bedroom window for the call of a familiar bird.

Now I found this personally incredibly difficult to understand. Why would God allow a man like John to suffer the loss of precisely those faculties that made his life so meaningful and has worked so successful, if it just seemed cruel? It would have been better, I thought, for him to die or to suffer from Alzheimer's, because at least then he wouldn't have known what he was missing.

But then I finally begin to understand why John never seemed to complain. That's because God was giving him the gift of absolute dependence. God was showing him that he delighted to offer Stott a dependence on him.

Medical clinics are popping up across the country promising to help clients live longer and better—so long as they can pay. Longevity clinics aim to do everything from preventing chronic disease to healing tennis elbow, all with the goal of optimizing patients’ health for more years. Clients pay as much as $100,000 a year for sometimes-unproven treatments, including biological-age testing, early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies, and hair rejuvenation.

The centers capitalize on Americans’ obsession with living longer. Many doctors caution that some clinics’ treatments lack robust scientific evidence or introduce health risks. One researcher said, “Anybody who is treating your toenails can say they’re contributing to longevity.”

People who visit these clinics are often wealthy people in their 40s to 60s who are seeing signs of aging. Several providers say they have noticed clientele trending as young as 20-somethings in recent years.

His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic. In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.

During an interview in late 2012 he said, “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear. In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.

When asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr. Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar.” This is a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. Dr. Narita said, “Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer. So, if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”

At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. He said in one interview, “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future … will come up in discussion.” Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context,” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics—to make room for younger generations. Nevertheless, with his comments on euthanasia and social security, which appear clear enough, he has pushed the hottest button in Japan.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This is not a pleasant or positive illustration, but it does highlight the dangers of losing the biblical doctrine of the Imago Dei and the sanctity of every human life.

Conservatives are not alone in opposing the slippery slope that is the growing trend toward advocating for euthanasia. The liberal periodical The Nation, as well as liberal disability advocates, are raising the alarm as well. The reality is that the lives of Americans with disabilities are being devalued:

Disability is something people are taught to hate and fear. And people with disabilities are frequently not given the resources they need to live or the assistance they need to participate fully in society. The poverty rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. Further, the unemployment rate for disabled people is more than double that of nondisabled people. The responsibility for care that is shirked by the state frequently falls on families, who are overwhelmed. Instead of being given the resources they need to thrive, many, if not most, people with disabilities are treated like expensive burdens.

Diane Coleman, the president of Not Dead Yet, has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair and a respirator. She says, “It is not the disabilities that ruin lives. It is the system and society that fails to support disabled people. It’s not religious, nor is it pro-life. It’s about going up against a ‘better dead than disabled mindset.’”

Coleman says medical professionals have devalued her life and others with disabilities. One member of her staff was told by his father that it would have been better if he’d died in the accident that made him a quadriplegic. Coleman said, “Those experiences are so well-known in the community.”

23-year-old Jules Good, assistant director of Not Dead Yet, said of her experience, shared by many others: “When I was 18, I got a pretty rough diagnosis. I was super depressed and attempted suicide. And when I went to my first counseling appointment with a new therapist, I explained my whole deal. And she looked me in the eye and said, ‘Yeah, I’d probably kill myself if I were you.’”

The dramatic increase in life expectancy confuses people. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the average life span was about 45 years. Now people are expected to live up to 78.5 years. That has spurred an unwarranted optimism, when in truth, the overwhelming majority of the increase is the result of a decrease in infant mortality.

At the turn of the twentieth century, about 10 to 15 percent of all children died before their first birthdays, mostly from infectious diseases. But because of medical advances, today less than one percent of children die before their first birthdays. Thus, Olshansky and Carnes point out in their book The Quest for Immortality, “The rise in the life expectancy has slowed to a crawl.”

Another thing that confuses people is thinking that if we could cure cancer, most of us would live many more years. Not true. In fact, Harvard demographer Nathan Keyfitz calculated that if researchers cured all forms of cancer, people would live only a measly 2.2 years longer before they died of something else! Unless science cures the majority of all diseases, as author Stephen Cave writes, “Then the result is not a utopia of strong-bodied demigods but a plethora of care homes and hospitals filled with the depressed, the diseased and the incontinent old.” In that case “it is not about living longer but dying slower.”

An article in Bloomberg Businessweek described the quest of multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson, a 45-year-old software entrepreneur, to turn back the clock. This year, he’s on track to spend at least $2 million on his body. He wants to have the brain, heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, and hair of an 18-year-old.

The effort has been named Project Blueprint, and Johnson’s doing it with the assistance of 30 doctors. They try the most intriguing new treatments on Johnson and obsessively track the results using everything from whole-body MRIs to blood draws. It's all on top of a rigorous framework of a 1,977-calorie vegan diet, and an extremely specific brushing and flossing routine. If you think he's crazy, “This is expected and fine,” he says. The crazy part is, it's working.

According to the article, "Johnson’s body is, as they measure it, getting medically younger," citing the biological age of his heart (37), skin (28), lung capacity (18), and gum inflammation (17). Each morning starting at 5 a.m., Johnson takes two dozen supplements and medicines. There’s a supplement for artery and skin health, another to prevent bowel polyps, others to reduce inflammation, and also his vegan diet. He follows a daily hourlong workout, consisting of 25 different exercises. Then there are weekly acid peels to counteract sun damage and sound therapy to better his hearing.

Kristin Dittmar, a cancer specialist, says, “I think what he’s doing is impressive, and he has personally challenged me to be better. What he does is also essentially a full-time job.” She also stresses that cancer has genetic components that no cutting-edge science, let alone juices or creams, can yet beat.

It’s also easy to imagine how a group of Johnson wannabes experimenting with ever-riskier procedures could go horribly wrong.

Two Harvard health professors (one an epidemiologist) note that declining church attendance is a public health crisis.

Of course, the point of the gospel is not to lower your blood pressure, but to know and love God. ... But there are many public health benefits of church attendance. Consider how it appears to affect health care professionals. Some of my (Tyler’s) research examined their behaviors over the course of more than a decade and a half using data from the Nurses’ Health Study, which followed more than 70,000 participants.

Medical workers who said they attended religious services frequently (given America’s religious composition, these were largely in Christian churches) were 29 percent less likely to become depressed, about 50 percent less likely to divorce, and five times less likely to commit suicide than those who never attended.

And, in perhaps the most striking finding of all, health care professionals who attended services weekly were 33 percent less likely to die during a 16-year follow-up period than people who never attended. These effects are of a big enough magnitude to make a practical difference and not just a statistical difference.

Our findings aren’t unique. A number of large, well-designed research studies have found that religious service attendance is associated with greater longevity, less depression, less suicide, less smoking, less substance abuse, better cancer and cardiovascular- disease survival, less divorce, greater social support, greater meaning in life, greater life satisfaction, more volunteering, and greater civic engagement.

The findings are extensive and growing.

A teen was a little mystified when he learned about the “Ding Dong Dash” student group activity at his church. With the after-hours stealth, catching homeowners unaware, and the anonymous nature of it all, Clifton Punter said he wasn't so sure about the ministry's concept.

Then Punter participated in Ding Dong Prayer Dash at St. Matthew's United Methodist Church, and he understood everything. Ding Dong Prayer Dash is a twist on "Ding Dong Ditch," a familiar children's prank involving ringing someone's doorbell and running away before it's answered.

Thus, on a recent Wednesday night, Punter and other members of the church's student group formed a circle on the lawn of a homebound church member. A nearby porchlight provided a warm glow as he led them in a prayer for the church member then hung a special door sign featuring a hopeful message on the member's front door.

Riinnnggg! Punter rang the doorbell and he and others in the student group quickly walked back to two waiting vans. And on they drove to another house to offer up another prayer for fellow church members who are generally homebound.

Punter said of the prayer activity, "When I first heard about it, it seemed a little weird. You're ringing someone's doorbell and then running away but then I realized it makes people smile because we leave them a gift basket or we leave them a note. It lets them know somebody's thinking about them.”

Jayna Sims was a recent recipient of the group's Ding Dong Prayer Dash. She was on the student's list because of the death of her father. She said the student group visited her dad earlier in the year and brought him some goodies. Sims says,

It means a lot to me—I've had a rough year. I took care of my dad this last year and along with COVID, my immune system is bad so I've been trapped at home for two years. Having them stop by every once in a while, that means a lot, it really means a lot. … my church family is still my church family, even though I can't go every week.

Muscular dystrophy, spinal injury, and other medical issues can cause progressive weakness and loss of muscle mass in a patient’s arms. Over time, muscle weakness decreases mobility, making everyday tasks difficult. But, a pioneering set of “wearable muscles” with a profile like a shoulder sling, could increase mobility and strength in the arms of people who have lost it. As algorithmic intelligence advances, engineers are attempting to design prosthetics to replace lost mobility, but many are large, bulky, or extremely expensive.

Michael Hagmann has a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Bethlem myopathy, but his muscular output was increased 61% thanks to a kind of exo-tendon called “Myoshirt.” Smart algorithms detect the user’s movements and the assistance remains always in tune with them. The mechanical movements can be tailored to their individual preferences, and the user is always in control and can override the device at any time.

The Myoshirt is a soft, wearable exo-muscle for the arms and shoulders. It is a kind of vest with cuffs for the upper arms accompanied by a small box containing all the computer technology. At the moment, the box containing the motor and computer parts weighs close to 9 pounds. So, the team’s first priority is to develop a full prototype with an even more discreet profile to allow people to use it in day-to-day life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the spiritual realm, believers have a disabling weakness due to the “disease” of sin and often do not have the strength they need to do the will of God. However, God’s strength can provide all the spiritual power we need to obey and serve him. “He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak … but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength …” (Isa. 40:29-31).

In his book Hinge Moments, college president D. Michael Lindsay shares about the birth of his oldest daughter, Elizabeth. They quickly knew something wasn’t quite right with her developmentally. When she was four months old, their pediatrician said, “Well, I don’t know what to say, but something is definitely wrong with your little girl.” Lindsay says, “I found it difficult to breathe. Grief overtook us and made it hard to get out even basic words. We prayed hard that our worst fears wouldn’t live themselves out, but we dreaded they would.”

After three years of tests and specialists, Elizabeth was diagnosed with an extremely rare genetic disorder. She is only one of 500 people or so known cases in the world. There is no cure. It involves profound cognitive disability, legal blindness, and many challenges with internal organs.

Lindsay says that parenting Elisabeth has been what he calls a “heavy joy”—filled with profound challenges but also lots of happy moments. It has also taught him and his wife key lessons about being transformed by Christ. Lindsay writes:

Elizabeth is not drawn to fame or self-advancement. She reflects a more authentic way of Christian living, one that is less interested in appearances or achievement. She takes pleasure in simple things—the taste of vanilla ice cream, the thrill of reaching heights in the backyard swing, the delight of listening to songs with a good beat and familiar melody. And Elizabeth is genuinely happy when she pleases her father, clapping for herself when she hears my affirmations.

Having Elizabeth in our family has helped us see the importance of vulnerability and simple obedience to Christ. More importantly, she has demonstrated that “walking in a manner worthy of the Lord” (Col. 1:10) doesn’t rely on superior [knowledge or performance]. Instead, it is a way of being that opens us up to fully pleasing the Lord in our respective callings.

While working in India, Doctor Paul Brand, who pioneered the modern treatment of leprosy, once laid his hand on a patient's shoulder. Then, through a translator, Brand informed the man about the treatment that lay ahead. To his surprise, the man began to shake with muffled sobs.

Doctor Brand asked his translator, “Have I done something wrong?” The translator quizzed the patient and reported, “No, doctor. He says he is crying because you put your hand around his shoulder. Until you came here, no one had touched him for many years.”

When people experience the unexpected death of a friend, neighbor, or family member, it’s natural to search for answers. And sometimes the answers aren’t very satisfying.

Such has been the case for friends and neighbors of the Daub family. On January 25th, police responded to their home for a wellness check and discovered the bodies of Morgan Daub, 26, and her parents, 59-year-old Deborah and 62-year-old James, all dead from gunshot wounds.

Evidence at the scene included handwritten notes by all three individuals. These convinced lead detective Timothy Fink that the daughter’s struggles with mental illness led her to take her life, and the parents joined her in a suicide pact because they didn’t want to live without her.

Detective Fink said, “Deborah wrote that she didn’t want her daughter to pass on alone, so she had decided to end her life with her. The letter written by James indicated that they had told him their plan, and he decided that he didn’t want to live without them.”

Members of the surrounding community were shocked by the discovery. One neighbor told reporters that the family had grown isolated over the years, and had withdrawn altogether during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another neighbor across the street, Mike Landis, had pleasant memories of the Daubs, claiming that the couple had been traveling missionaries, and had offered spiritual counseling during a health crisis.

The news was especially shocking for Paula Wolfe, who was a youth coordinator at the local bowling alley where Morgan excelled as a teenager. Wolfe said, “Everybody’s just really sad about it, and just doesn’t know what to make of it. I don’t know that you could ever imagine this. But, yeah, a family that you’d never ever think that anything like this would happen.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Being isolated, in pain, and cut off from community can distort one’s thinking and warp perception. Someone who feels hopeless and isolated is in danger of hurting themselves and others.

Singer songwriter Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969, when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, he raced into the burning house to save two prized possessions, his guitar and a pound of “Colombian grass.” He has emphysema, the consequence of a near-lifetime of chain smoking that began in childhood, when he puffed on cedar bark and grapevines, before turning to cigarettes and then—famously, prodigiously—to marijuana.

In 1981, he was taken to a hospital in Hawaii after his left lung collapsed while he was swimming. He underwent a voluntary stem-cell procedure in 2015, in an effort to repair his damaged lungs. Smoking has endangered his life, but it also, he thinks, saved it: He has often said that he would have died long ago had he not taken up weed and laid off drinking, which made him rowdy and self-destructive.

Now, in his late 80s, he has reached the age where getting out of bed each morning can be construed as a feat of survival. “Last night I had a dream that I died twice yesterday,” he sang in 2017, “But I woke up still not dead again today.”

Anyone who has more money than they know what to do with eventually tries to cure aging. Google founder Larry Page has tried it. Jeff Bezos has tried it. Tech billionaires Larry Ellison and Peter Thiel have tried it.

Now the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which has about as much money as all of them put together, is going to try it. The Saudi royal family has started a not-for-profit organization called the Hevolution Foundation. It plans to spend up to $1 billion per year of its oil wealth supporting basic research on the biology of aging and finding ways to extend the number of years people live in good health.

The sum, if the Saudis spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers attempting to understand the underlying causes of aging—and how it might be slowed down with drugs. Former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist Mehmood Khan says, “Our primary goal is to extend the period of healthy lifespan. There is not a bigger medical problem on the planet than this one.”

Khan says the fund is authorized to spend up to $1 billion per year indefinitely. By comparison, the division of the US National Institute on Aging spends about $325 million a year on the biology of aging.

The Saudi government may be partially motivated by the belief that diseases of aging pose a specific threat to that country’s future. There is evidence that people living in the Gulf states “are aging faster biologically than they are chronologically.”

Basically, the country is being beset by diseases of affluence brought on by rich diets and too little exercise. Even though Saudi Arabia has a relatively young population, with a median age of around 31, it is experiencing increasing rates of obesity and diabetes.