Two Tragedies and one Cryogenically Preserved Girl

A sad item made the news this week. A terminally-ill 14-year-old won a historic legal fight to have her body cryogenically preserved. She told the High Court Judge that she ‘wanted to live longer’ and ‘not be buried underground’. Our hearts are surely moved by this girl’s words; illness cut her life short, which is a real tragedy. She died last month and her body was duly flown out to the USA where it has been preserved.

Her letter to the court expresses a hope that her illness will be cured at some point in the future, perhaps in several hundred years’ time, at which point she would be woken up. This process has cost her 37k.

There’s therefore a second tragedy here. The girl mistakenly thought that she and her body were one and the same. She was not her body. Her body was a shell, a tent, which she was occupying. The real her, the spirit, soul, personality, mind- call it what you will- was merely inhabiting it.

In one sense, however, this tragic girl was quite correct. We shall one day be reunited with our bodies; those who are dead shall awaken:

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.