WeCroak.com is no Joke.com

There’s an App for every occasion, and now there’s one for your final occasion.

WeCroak.com offers an app that reminds you – often – that you are going to die.  It’s based on a Bhutanese folk saying that to truly be happy we must contemplate our mortality five times per day.

With its funky frog logo what’s not to like about wecroak.com?

Five invitations to think about your death.  Random times, as it says, just like death’s random visitation.  So a wise or famous saying about death, is going to be sent to you just to keep your spirits up or down, depending on whether you believe the Bhutanese.

It’s an intriguing thought, and a welcome one in this age of Botox, Crossfit, Photoshop and lying about your age on Tinder.

FWIW, being the melancholic Arts student that I was, I have contemplated my own death for most of my adult life, at least since the days of my obsession with The Cure.

And so it continues both day and night, right through to the time a doctor told me at the age of 43 that I should go home and sort things out because I was going to die within the next six months from pancreatic cancer (turned out to be a misdiagnosis, but I nearly died anyway).

And boy was that confronting.  Never mind a gloomy gothic track from Robert Smith et al alerting me to the end of life, a straight up “put your house in order” did it it one fell swoop.   As a Christian, trusting in the risen Christ who defeated Satan, sin and death, it was still the most confronting experience of my life.

To think that I would, within a very short space of time, be standing before the throne of the Holy Creator of the universe for judgement (Hebrews 9:27), put a perspective on life, and all that I had or had not done.  I’ll never forget that time.

And since then I haven’t needed an App to remind me of my death.  I hit fifty a few years back, watched my own father die, buried him, and have thought about my death every day.  But as I said, and this is where the wecroak.com app does not seem all that helpful, not merely about my death, but what lies beyond my death.

The website states:

We encourage you to take one moment for contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.

Here’s what the thought of my impending death did for me – still does for me.  It reminds me to live a life of repentance.  Daily repentance.

I doubt whether the famous saying by a famous person will extend to these words by that most famous of persons, Jesus:

Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Kinda think that if that one sneaks under the radar someone is gonna be out of a job.  For the Christian, the fact that death is a breath away should keep us in not in

There’s no thought at wecroak.com that death will usher in anything beyond this life that includes the need for something beyond contemplation.  It as, as one would expect of a Western application of an Eastern ritual, devoid of the truly transcendent.

Now this is not to say that all we can do is live in fear and trembling.  The good news for those in Christ is that we have already died – died to sin upon the cross, so that our old life, the one that is infected by death due to sin, is done away with, and we no longer have to live under sin’s deathly reign.

Condemnation is no more.  That final facing of judgement is to hold no fear.  Awe? Yes. Sobriety?  Definitely. But fear? No.  Death has been defeated at the cross and empty tomb.

The best that wecroak.com can do is remind us that we will die.   But the hope that we have in Jesus is so much more.  What does Paul say in Romans 7?

²⁴ Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? ²⁵ Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! 

Note, not from this body, but this body of death.  There’s a day coming when wecroak.com will come untrue, and we will be raised in a body of life eternal.

And, in this day and age when our culture does everything it can to stave off the reminder – and the fear – of death, that’s worth contemplating.  Five times a day at least.