2 min read

I’ve been having very difficult conversations lately with elderly Christians who need serious health care. What I’m witnessing troubles me deeply.

They are always offered the euphemism MAiD—Medical Assistance in Dying. Clearly, it is physician-architected murder, or at the very least, physician-supported suicide. As Douglas Farrow said in 2016, these are “The Terminators.” The MAiD euphemism is designed to obscure the reality. “Assistance in dying” sounds gentle, compassionate, even merciful. But strip away the clinical language, and we’re talking about doctors ending lives that God has not yet called home.

What breaks my heart even more is this: even the Christians—our brothers and sisters who know the sanctity of life, who have spent decades proclaiming that we are fearfully and wonderfully made—feel pressured by guilt to take fewer medical interventions and stop “taking up space.” The message from our medical system, bloated, bureaucratic, and broken, is this: You are a burden. Your life is no longer valuable. The dignified thing to do is to step aside.

This is a lie from the father of lies.

Of course, the elderly Christians I speak with are clear about rejecting MAiD itself. Their convictions on that front remain firm. But what they need—what we all need to give them—is encouragement not only to reject MAiD, but also to actively seek to steward the life that God has still entrusted to them.

Think about what we lose when we rush the elderly toward death. The prayers from those with Parkinson’s. Their trembling hands folded steadily for a moment before God. The smiles from those with Alzheimer’s, when simple joy pierces the fog. There is so much life in them. So much witness. So much beauty that reflects the image of God even in frailty; perhaps especially in frailty.

But the medical community has developed a structural default for chemical execution: hydromorphoning people to death for the sake of comfort. Pain management becomes a pathway to death. What is stated as compassionate care becomes an accelerator to the grave.

All of this calls for clarity and wisdom. We need to surround our elderly saints with the truth that their lives matter until God calls them home. That their weakness is not worthlessness. That their dependence is not indignity. That the Church—the body of Christ—does not measure value by productivity or convenience.

Every prayer matters. Every smile matters. Every breath taken in faith glorifies the One who breathed life into us in the first place.

Let us guard our elderly. Let us advocate for them. And let us remind them, again and again, that they are precious in God’s sight—and in ours.