Dying as a martyr for the true God is good and noble.
Regretfully, however, this means to risk making a mistake in doing something that Jehovah doesn't require you to do, that costs you your life.
20 years ago I was struck by a car on my bicycle and was rendered unconcious. At the hospital I was given a waiver to sign before I passed into a coma. I was an minor teen and the same age as the girl in this article, and my mother opposed my Jehovah's Witness faith. However, she respected my conscience and allowed me to choose death over life in what I believed at the time was an act of ultimate faith in God.
Based on what I knew then, I would sign that waiver again.
Based on what I know now, ............................................. I sit here for several minutes after typing those last words and find it difficult to continue that I would NOT sign that waiver. What does this mean? I feel my Christian trained concience freed in the knowledge that God does NOT require such a sacrifice, anymore than God would NEVER require I jump from the upper-deck of a skyscraper to prove my love for Him! Then I cannot help but wonder why I paused? Perhaps, because I don't know for sure whether God would approve of a blood transfusion? Perhaps, because of my conditioning over the years and difficulty in shedding the massive guilt trip the Society and Governing Body have succeeded to lay squarely upon my shoulders over what amounts to a misinterpretation of Scripture?
It is really unsettling to realize there is no noticeable difference between cults like the Branch Davidians or Jones and the "true faith"! What is even more troubling is that one day you could be convinced you are dying to remain faithful to God in a matter that the next day, after your death, turns out to be a total misunderstanding of Scripture!
What to do? Refuse to die for any cause even if it is clearly good, out of fear that one of these days a more enlightened society will look back upon your sacrifice as misinformed folly?
Should you die for issues like refusing blood because there's a possibility it might get later proven the Society was right all along? Should you live through a blood transfusion because there's a possibility it might get later proven beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt the Society was wrong in their blood interpretations?
That is why I have come to believe that God accepts the sacrifice of anyone who dies for Him, even if God never wanted this sacrifice. If one truly believe that God created the universe and invented its laws, then one knows that God can make it right. Perhaps it will happen in the form of a short story I once read from a brother about a boy who died from refusing a blood transfusion awakening in his bed as if it were a bad dream. Disturbed by a future of dying young that he thought was just a dream although it seemed absolutely real, he considered it as God trying to tell him something. But what was God trying to tell him? Digging deeper into his Bible than ever before, he suddenly arrived at a startling conclusion. God didn't require this future sacrifice of him! He realized that blood was a symbol of life, and should be given freely to make it possible for others to live. A few years later, the boy was in the same accident that he dreamed about a few years earlier, as if it had already happened. But this time around, the boy's clean conscience before God allowed him to accept a transfusion, and live to glorify God through a life devoted to helping others.
I have thought of this story time and again, and wonder if the girl who died for her beliefs will awaken in her bed, and her "bad dream" will trigger her to examine the Bible and reconsider how God views blood, and why the emphasis on blood as a symbol of life? I think back to when I signed that form, believing I would die and having full faith in the resurrection, and sometimes an eerie thought enters my mind. Suppose I never did regain consciousness? Suppose this is all a dream? I wonder if anyone reading this can relate to the feeling?
Derrick
