“Madeline Arakawa Gins, Visionary Architect, is Dead at 72”.  That was the headlines of a January 12, 2014 NY Times article. 

Madeline was a “poet-turned-painter-turned-architect who publicly forswore mortality—whose buildings, by her own account, were designed to pre-empt death for those living in them—died on Jan. 8 in Manhattan…The cause was cancer.” 

She & her husband who preceded her in death, “sought not merely better living—but, ideally, eternal living —through design.” The chief tenet of their philosophy was captured in an exhibition called, “Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided Not To Die.”

The irony, of course, is that both she and her husband couldn’t reverse destiny. They both died. And despite their desire to outwit death, their destiny caught up to them, as it will for all of us. But whatever you might think of their attempts to outwit death, something about what they wanted rings true: They wanted to not die. And in this desire, they are tapping into a key teaching of Christianity: namely, that death is our enemy.

In this study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, we’re going to look at an episode in which a man found himself in his worst nightmare: his 12 year old daughter was dying, and while she was at death’s door, he left her in an act of desperation to find Jesus and beg him to come to her daughter. And we’re going to see Jesus hurrying off with this father only to be interrupted by another person who was desperate to encounter Jesus. 

Two very different people from two very different social positions in life who are nevertheless joined by their very similar need of the Master’s touch. And we meet them in this account when their deep moment of desperation in which something within them said, I will arise and go to Jesus.