Reminded by Steve

As most of us know by now, Steve Irwin, “the Crocodile Hunter”, is dead. Many are mourning his passing. He was well loved, enthusiastic about wildlife, well known and greatly respected in many places in the world. Irwin died filming a children’s documentary about dangerous animals. He was swimming over a stingray when the creature raised its tail and lanced his heart with its barb. He was dead before they could get him to the hospital.

I’m struck with the surprise of it. Deaths from stingray attacks are almost non-existent. Stingrays generally don’t attack or even defend themselves. They much prefer flight to fight. The stinging of a stingray is generally a mechanical action, where someone steps on it and the barb comes out. Total known deaths of humans from stingrays number less than two dozen.

Steve Irwin, 44, was otherwise a healthy human being, not even engaged in any real dangerous activity beyond snorkeling. Yet an extremely uncommon event with a typically flighty creature that just happened to stab the man in the heart resulted in his “untimely” death. When it’s your time to go, it’s time.

When I was growing up, I tended to be a melancholy teenager. More than once I contemplated suicide. It was this fact – the fact that we don’t decide when we are going to go – that prevented me from ever acting on the notion. I remember once sitting on a bridge high over an arroyo and thinking about the possibility. It was a good 100 yards to the bottom, and the floor was actually a concrete waterway. There was no reason why it shouldn’t succeed in putting an end to my life, yet I knew that when it’s your time to go, it’s time … and when it’s not, it’s not. I never tried it because the notion of being so badly injured and not dying was beyond my comprehension.

We are all aware of our mortality, but few of us are ever really conscious of it. It takes something like this event to shake us awake, if only for a moment. One of the primary problems with human nature, according to the apostle Paul, is a lack of gratitude. In his indictment of human beings, he writes, “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Rom 1:21). Perhaps we ought to be careful about that. Failure to honor God or give thanks, including for such basic things as life and breath, could easily result in futile speculation and foolish hearts. Now we don’t want that, do we? Paul says, “Be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:15-16). Steve Irwin's sudden death reminded me of this.