Jimmy Carter, on Death

“I found I was absolutely, completely at ease about death.” “I’m going to live again.” Jimmy Carter, on Death Jimmy Carter brought up death — specifically, his own — at what turned out to be the last Sunday school class he would teach at Maranatha Baptist Church. “By the time I was 12 or 13 years old, my anxiety about this became so intense that at the end of every prayer, until after I was an adult, before Amen I added the words ‘And, God, please help me believe in the resurrection.’” Mr. Carter recalled the worries he had as a young person, stirred by learning in church about Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection and by the pastor’s sermons about how “all believers,” as he put it, “would someday enjoy a similar resurrection.” “As I grew older,” Mr. Carter wrote, “I began to wonder whether this could be true.” He was concerned as a boy that even an iota of doubt could lead him to a different fate, relegating him to an eternity separated from his family, particularly his parents. “These two people were the core of my existence,” he wrote, “and I couldn’t bear the idea that I would not be with them forever.” Mr. Carter prayed before teaching a Sunday school in Plains, Ga. “I realize that my physical strength and endurance are steadily declining, and I am having to learn how to conserve them, but I have found with relief and gratitude — even when facing the prospect of an early death from cancer in my liver and brain — that my faith as a Christian is still unwavering and sustaining.” As he matured, Mr. Carter’s faith firmed and came to define his approach to life — and death. In a 2012 interview with an influential evangelical theologian, Mr. Carter said his aim had been to “pattern my life and my own fallible human ways after Jesus’s life.” “Faith in something,” he has written in several books, “is an inducement not to dormancy but to action.” Mr. Carter spoke to a Sunday school class at Maranatha Baptist Church.