"Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom" (Psalm 90:12). Most of us spend a great deal of energy trying not to think about death. Yet the Bible keeps bringing it up, not to frighten us, but because facing our own mortality is one of the fastest ways to find out what we really value.
This story about death comes from an unlikely preacher: the co-founder of Apple, speaking to a crowd of graduating students the year after he was told he had only months to live. We retell it in our own words, with a short quotation from the speech itself, and close with a takeaway for preaching or personal reflection. If you want to go further, the reflections on Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Atul Gawande's Being Mortal on Sopranu make good companion reading.
Story in this post:
Steve Jobs on Death: "The Most Important Tool"
The original illustration places the speech at "Stamford" University. It was Stanford University in California.
In June 2005 Steve Jobs stood up to give the commencement address at Stanford University. A commencement speech has a simple purpose. The speaker, usually someone who has done something remarkable with their life, passes on a little hard-won wisdom to help the graduating students as they begin the next stage of theirs.
Jobs told the students he would share just three stories. The first was about connecting the dots in life, the second was about love and loss, and the third, surprisingly for a graduation day, was about death.
He described a doctor's appointment in 2004. A scan had shown a tumour on his pancreas. The doctors told him it was almost certainly a type of cancer that could not be cured, and that he should expect to live no longer than three to six months. His doctor advised him to go home and get his affairs in order, which, as Jobs explained to the students, is doctor's code for preparing to die. It meant trying to tell your children in a few months everything you had planned to tell them over the next ten years. It meant saying your goodbyes. The news was devastating.
Later that same day he had a biopsy. Doctors put an endoscope down his throat, through his stomach and into his intestines, and took a few cells from the tumour. His wife was there, and she told him afterwards that when the doctors looked at the cells under a microscope, they began to cry. It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that could be treated with surgery.
Jobs had the operation. He went on to live for several more years, years in which Apple released some of its most famous products, before the cancer returned and he died in October 2011.
Standing in front of those students in 2005, he said that this was the closest he had come to facing death, and he hoped it would be the closest for a few more decades. Having lived through it, he could say something with more certainty than when death was only a useful idea.
He told them that remembering he would be dead soon was the most important tool he had ever come across to help him make the big choices in life. Almost everything, he explained, the expectations other people place on us, our pride, our fear of embarrassment or failure, simply falls away in the face of death. What is left is only what is truly important.
Then he put it in words that have been quoted countless times since: "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."
Takeaway: Jobs discovered what Scripture has been saying for thousands of years: an honest look at death clarifies life. The psalmist prays to "number our days" so that we gain wisdom (Psalm 90:12), and the Preacher says it is better to go to a house of mourning than a house of feasting, because death is the destiny of everyone and the living should take it to heart (Ecclesiastes 7:2). For Christians, death is not only a sharp tool for setting priorities. It is also an enemy that Christ has already defeated (1 Corinthians 15:54 to 57), which means we can face it without terror. If you knew your time was short, which of your fears would suddenly look small, and what would you finally have the courage to do?
Source: Steve Jobs, commencement address at Stanford University, 12 June 2005 (transcript).
Final thoughts
A man who built one of the biggest companies in the world told a crowd of young graduates that the most useful thing he knew was that he was going to die. That is a striking story about death, and a hopeful one, because it shows that mortality does not have to paralyse us. It can free us from the fear of what other people think and turn our attention to what lasts.
Christians can go one step further than Jobs did. We remember death not only to sharpen our choices, but because we believe death does not have the last word. What would change in your week if you lived it as someone who is both mortal and deeply loved by the God who raises the dead?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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