Blessing Family and Honoring God at the End of Your Life

If you or your family don’t have personalized advance directives, this free new tool is for you.

Bob had been deteriorating for a while and was recently admitted to the hospital. Mary was in a car accident and arrived in the hospital the same day as Bob. Both were in bad shape and needed major medical treatments to even have a chance to survive. The problem was that these treatments might make the dying process worse for them both by adding more burden and suffering than benefit.
Bob’s and Mary’s families were distraught—and not just because of their family member’s medical condition. They didn’t know what their loved one would have wanted in such a situation. Their loved one had never made an advance directive.

Every adult should have one. Now it’s easy to make one—privately and free!
“What exactly is an advance directive?” you may ask. It’s a document that identifies who you want to make healthcare decisions for you when you become unable to make them. It also gives some basic guidelines to that person to ensure that your priorities are respected.

Most people never get around to making one. Sitting around contemplating one’s medical decline and death is usually not anyone’s idea of a good time! But those who are wise will recognize why it’s so important to make the time. You don’t do it just for yourself—you do it especially for your loved ones.

It’s common for people unexpectedly to be in accidents—or else gradually to lose their mental ability—without having made an advance directive. So, loved ones agonize over when to stop treatments that may be of little benefit. Unless they’ve been blessed with the opportunity to attend a bioethics conference or earn a bioethics degree at a place like Trinity, they are understandably inclined to overtreat. For example, they may leave their family member on a breathing machine–or unconscious with a feeding tube–for a long time before they die. They don’t want to let their loved one down by stopping too soon. But their loved one may have wanted them to stop; they just never gave the word in an advance directive.

You can easily avoid causing that anguish by creating an advance directive now. And you can save your family much grief by helping all the adults in it to create advance directives. Believe it or not, getting together as a family to discuss the values and beliefs each person must clarify to make an advance directive is one of the richest discussions ever.

When my family had this conversation, we naturally explored issues of life, faith, death, and eternity that had never before been so easy to discuss. Each person doubly benefitted as we created our own advance directives and became equipped to understand and carry out one another’s. In hindsight, it stands out as the richest several hours we ever spent together as a family.

New Online Resource

Those hours now can even be a little fun! In light of this deep need we all have to engage in this important process, I’ve developed a new online resource based on over 25 years of teaching at TEDS and 45 years in the bioethics field. It’s located at MedicalDecisions.info and enables you to take a walk through a series of natural scenes, which prompt you to make choices along the way.

Supporting Graphic. Screen shot of tool.

After landing at the homepage, select the “Advance Directive” button in the lower-right part of the screen. You’ll then be transported to a pathway through a number of natural scenes. When you click on a scene’s “Select Here” signpost, you’ll see what each branch in the path stands for.

When you choose one of the path branches, you’ll visually move down that pathway and into another natural scene. What’s happening during this “walk” is that you’re identifying the beliefs and values you want to guide health care decisions for you.

Three Short Videos

There are three places in your walk where you’ll be offered the opportunity to get more information to inform your decisions by watching a short four-minute video.

One video is offered if you choose the pathway, indicating that you want every technology to offer the slightest benefit no matter how much suffering it causes. The problem with choosing this pathway is that people often don’t realize that some technologies in some situations can make the situation worse. It can be an idolatry of technology to use them—just because they’re there. They may only be adding burden and suffering to a death that can’t be avoided.

The result may be a later—and less peaceful—death. The value of avoiding over-treatment is explained in the video, and you’re given the choice to take another pathway if you prefer.

A different video is offered if you choose the pathway indicating you might want to resort to medically assisted suicide in certain situations. Why professional groups of physicians and disability rights groups consistently oppose this practice is explained, along with other dangers it poses. After these shortcomings are unpacked, you’re given the choice to take another pathway if you prefer.

The third video is one you’ll be offered no matter what set of pathways you take. A message will appear explaining that which pathway you take will likely influence whether you die a little sooner or a little later. So—what is it like to be dead—so that you can include that in your calculus of pros and cons? There are many ideas about that out there. You’re simply offered here one view that can prod and help clarify your thinking. It’s just a few minutes long and contains a presentation of the gospel as well.

The gospel presentation notes that what your experience will be like after dying depends not on whether you’re good but on whether you’re forgiven. Regardless of your particular views about death and dying, the video portrays the biggest issue of your life as your relationship with God, who created you. Everyone has a natural inclination to go their own way—to reject God. For rejecting God, they deserve severe punishment. God is just so that penalty has to be paid. But being thoroughly loving as well, God paid the penalty!

That’s what’s so good about Good Friday—Jesus Christ on the cross is God paying the penalty for our self-centeredness. On that basis, God offers us forgiveness if we are willing to receive it and follow the way of Christ. Those who are willing can look forward to a glorious eternal life that begins even now with the assurance of God’s love and guidance in the face of life’s worst challenges.

That’s the third video. No one has to view any of the three videos—they’re simply offered. But you can see how going through this resource with an unbelieving family member or friend—for example, to help them create their own advance directive—can be a great way to share the gospel with them. It opens the door naturally for you to ask them if they have any questions about the “What Death Is Like” video. You can add anything you wish to what they’ve seen there.

Personalized Advance Directive

When you finish your walk down the pathways, you will see your own advance directive displayed on the screen, ready to be printed or downloaded to your computer. If you download it, you can type in your name, the names of the people who will be making decisions for you, and so on. It will be a legally valid advance directive tailored to your priorities.

  • You don’t have to pay anything;
  • there are no ads to distract you;
  • and you don’t have to provide any personal information.

The whole process of using this online resource is private.

If you need clarity regarding what values to plug in as a Christian—for your own advance directive or someone else’s—you can find those explained on a website called Faithful Medical Decisions.

If you go there, you’ll have a choice between end-of-life issues and beginning-of-life issues (meaning how to have a baby if you’re infertile). If you click on end-of-life issues, you’ll have several options, the third bullet point being “Christian Perspective.”

If you click on that, you’ll find the biblically based information you need, organized into seven relevant topics followed by a list of additional helpful resources. There, you can gain individual access to the three videos in the MedicalDecisions.info tool. Bottom line: You now have everything you’ll need to help others create an advance directive after creating or updating your own!

Current Treatment Decisions

Eventually, though, you’ll probably have to make actual end-of-life medical decisions for yourself (if you are still mentally able) or for a loved one. The Medical Decisions tool can also be used to help you bring your values and beliefs to bear on those decisions. When you select “Current Decisions” rather than “Advance Directives” on the site’s home page, you’ll soon be given a document containing six key questions. The doctor will need to answer them before the implications of Christian faith for the treatment options can be identified.

Then, you can start your journey down the pathway where you’ll be making similar but somewhat different choices compared to the advance directive choices. Some pathways will lead you to an opportunity to see one of the first two videos. But every pathway will, at some point, give you the opportunity to see the gospel video. At the end of every pathway, you’ll receive a document. That document will help you explain to your doctor which treatment option you want—and why.

Bob and Mary may have lived their life well in many ways. But they didn’t finish it all that well, due to lack of planning. You now have the online tools to make your end of life a blessing to those you’ll leave behind. You can make advance directives and current medical decisions in a God-glorifying way!