The Ground Is Not Indifferent
A church can keep quiet and call the quiet peace. We will not.
This is not a word about a party. It is not a forecast with a year written on it. It is a warning. Canada has made a way to end a life on purpose, with a form, a second signature, and a needle, and has called that ending care. Jaxson Harlan Ministry will not be counted among the people who take blood that way. We will not be counted among the people who look at the ground and say it does not matter.
God sees. The ground is not indifferent. Judgment is real. That is the sentence we are willing to sign.
Four hours
Donna Duncan was sixty-one. She lived in Abbotsford, British Columbia. She had spent her working life as a psychiatric nurse. In February 2020 a car accident left her with a concussion. Anxiety followed. So did paranoia, a turning away from food, and a wasting the people who loved her could see. Her daughters, Alicia and Christie, have said the plain thing. Their mother was not dying. She was in crisis.
Her physician of twenty years would not support a request for medical assistance in dying. He said her mind needed treatment. Other assessors approved her. They placed her on the track for a death called reasonably foreseeable, and they did it on the strength of weight loss and frailty. The daughters went to a judge. A warrant was issued under the Mental Health Act. Donna attempted suicide. She was held. She was found capable of choosing. On 29 October 2021 she was released. Her family says she received the injection at home about four hours later.
Police opened a file. It was the first known police investigation of a death like this in Canada. They closed it. No criminal offence, they said. The assessment records were not given to the family. Alicia has written the story down. A member of Parliament raised the case in the House. None of that brought her back.
Hold the facts where they are. This is a family’s account, set beside a closed police file. It is not a murder verdict. It does not need to become one before a church can speak. A woman in a documented crisis walked out of a psychiatric unit and into a death approved on the strength of her own wasting. If that can be done in order, under the law, with two signatures, then the law is not the last word. God is.
He asked me to
Scripture has already heard the defence we are hearing now. The person asked. The person was already suffering. The hand that finished it was only helping.
An Amalekite came to David with a crown and an armlet, and a story. Saul was wounded on the field. The king asked to be finished, so no one else would have the killing. The man said he did what was asked.
“So I stood beside him and killed him, because I was sure that he could not live after he had fallen. And I took the crown that was on his head and the armlet that was on his arm, and I have brought them here to my lord.” – 2 Samuel 1:10
Consent is in the story. Suffering is in the story. A man already down is in the story. David does not treat the request as a cleansing. He has the man killed for the killing.
“Your blood be on your head, for your own mouth has testified against you, saying, “I have killed the Lord’s anointed.”” – 2 Samuel 1:16
Asked for is not absolved. A second witness does not wash the ground. The closest thing the Bible has to a signed ending of a dying man’s life is judged as bloodguilt, not as mercy.
The same shape sits in a smaller room. Abimelech, his skull crushed, tells his armour-bearer to run him through, so no one will say a woman killed him. The book records it. It does not praise it (Judges 9:54). Job begs for the day of his birth to be blotted out, and begs for a death that will not come (Job 3). God does not answer him with a procedure. He answers him with Himself. When Scripture tells of a self-taken life — Saul, Ahithophel, Zimri, Judas — it tells a collapse. It never tells a faithful exit.
The image, and the reckoning
The reason is older than Israel’s law code. After the flood, before Sinai, God speaks to Noah about blood.
And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” – Genesis 9:5–6
The image is the reason. Not usefulness. Not a forecast of how many months are left. Not a form that says the suffering has become intolerable. A human life is not ours to close because the person who bears it is tired of bearing it, or because a clinician has agreed that closing it would be kind.
“See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.” – Deuteronomy 32:39
That is not a threat shouted at a sickbed. It is a border. Life and death are not a service a people can add to a health system and keep the name of mercy. You are not your own (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:7–8).
The ground
Blood is not a private matter in the Bible. Abel’s blood cried from the ground, and God heard it (Genesis 4:10). When a body was found and no killer could be named, Israel did not shrug. The elders washed their hands over a heifer and asked that innocent blood not be left on the people (Deuteronomy 21:1–9). The rite looks strange to us. The point of it does not. Unanswered blood was not allowed to sit in the land as if the land were neutral.
“You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell, for I the Lord dwell in the midst of the people of Israel.” – Numbers 35:33–34
Read the sentence without rushing it. Blood pollutes the land. The land is not a filing cabinet. It is the place where God has said He dwells among a people. Manasseh filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the next generation still met that blood in the bill when the city fell (2 Kings 21:16; 24:3–4). The psalmist says they poured out innocent blood, and the land was polluted (Psalm 106:38). Hosea says there is no faithfulness, and there is swearing, lying, murder, and stealing, and for that the land mourns (Hosea 4:1–3).
A people that makes the killing of the image-bearer ordinary, including the image-bearer who asks for it, does not stand in a neutral zone. God sees. The ground is not indifferent. Judgment is real.
This is not a claim that every Canadian is personally guilty of what happened in an Abbotsford living room. Ezekiel 18 will not let a son die for his father’s sin as if guilt were only inherited. A man who never signed a form is not Donna’s killer. A people can still share in a thing they defend, pay for, and refuse to repent of. Achan’s taken silver troubled the whole camp. Silence, once you know, is a kind of signature.
Not the same as letting go
Say this clearly, so the word does not become cruel.
Letting a death come is not the same act as aiming at a death. A family may refuse a machine that is only stretching out a body already finished. A nurse may give medicine whose aim is comfort, even if the last hours grow shorter. The aim is the line. A dose given so a dying person is not left in agony is not a dose given so the person will be dead. Medical assistance in dying names death as the treatment. That is a different work.
And the sufferer is not the enemy of this word. Donna was in crisis. Her daughters were trying to have her held so she would live. If you are in that kind of night, this message is not a push and it is not a sneer. In Canada you can call or text 9-8-8. Ask a person to sit with you. The church’s answer to a dark room is presence, truth, and the Cross. It is not a faster door out of the room.
Most of the deaths under this law are people already near the end, many of them with cancer. That fact explains why a neighbour signed. It does not change what the needle is. In 2024, 16,499 people died this way. That was about one death in twenty in the country. The smaller track, for people whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, is the thinner share and the steeper slope. A death approved because a mind is ill, and only the mind, is still paused. Donna was not approved on that ground. She was approved because wasting was allowed to count as a foreseeable death. That is the scandal in her file. It does not need a party name to be told.
A warning, not a date
Some will want this word to name the fall of the country and put a season on it. We will not.
The curses of Deuteronomy 28 were spoken to the nation that stood at Sinai. Rain, exile, the sanctions of that treaty — those belonged to the people God had taken as His own by covenant. Canada did not stand there. We are not given a timetable. We are not given a crop failure with Ottawa written on it. Jesus refused the crowd’s reading when a tower fell and when Pilate mixed blood with sacrifices. He would not let them rank the dead. He said repent, or you will perish likewise (Luke 13:1–5).
There is a harder form of the same warning, and it needs no extra lightning. Paul says God gives a people over to what they have already chosen (Romans 1:24–32). The judgment is often the thing itself. A country that has made a clinician’s ending one ordinary way to die is already living inside the fruit. You do not have to promise a separate disaster to say the act stands under judgment.
So hear it as a warning. Not as a date. Not as a private prophecy. God is not mocked. Blood does not become clean because a statute has a short name. The ground does not take a neutral position because a committee has.
The blood that speaks
Numbers says no atonement can be made for the land for the blood shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. That is the old sentence. The Gospel does not cancel the sentence. It answers it with a better blood.
“You have come … to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” – Hebrews 12:22–24
Abel’s blood cried against the killer. The blood of Jesus cries for the guilty who will come. If you have asked for this death, or signed the form, or defended it as love because you could not watch another month of pain, the door is not a better argument. The door is repentance. Agree with God about the blood. Do not keep a second court in your own house and try the case again every night. There is no condemnation for the one who is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1). There is also no baptism of the needle.
If you are watching a mother waste and you do not know what love is allowed to do, love is allowed to stay. Love is allowed to tell the truth. Love is allowed to refuse a signature. Love is not allowed to call an aimed death a gift from God.
We will not sign it
Jaxson Harlan Ministry is a small work. We do not sit in the office of prophet. We do not have a date for a nation. We do have a commandment, and a ground, and a Cross.
We will not be counted among a country, or a church, that takes blood this way and names it care. We will not be counted among the quiet. The image of God is not a lease. A request is not an absolution. A second signature does not clean what the first one opened.
God sees. The ground is not indifferent. Judgment is real. The blood that speaks a better word than Abel’s is still speaking. Come to that blood while it speaks mercy, and not only witness.
The Music “The Ground Is Not Indifferent” – The Lyrics
Artist: Jaxson R. Harlan
Verse 1
He came in with a crown and a story to tell,
Said the king was already gone.
Said he asked me, so I finished what the sword had begun,
And I brought you the gold he had on.
David heard the ask. David heard the wound.
David did not call it clean.
Chorus
Asked for ain’t absolved.
A signature don’t clean the ground.
You can name it mercy. You can sign it twice.
The ground is not indifferent.
God sees.
Verse 2
They wrote it on a form in a quiet room,
Called a wasting a road to the end.
Four hours out of a held night,
And the needle was a friend’s.
She was not a case to the ones who knew her name.
She was a woman in a night that had not cleared.
Chorus
Asked for ain’t absolved.
A signature don’t clean the ground.
You can name it mercy. You can sign it twice.
The ground is not indifferent.
God sees.
Verse 3
I ain’t got a year to hang on Ottawa.
I ain’t been handed thunder on a date.
I been handed blood, and a book, and a Cross,
And a people who were told to wait.
We can wash our hands in a committee’s ink.
The ground don’t take the ink for rain.
Chorus
Asked for ain’t absolved.
A signature don’t clean the ground.
You can call the quiet peace.
The ground is not indifferent.
God sees.
Bridge
Abel’s blood still cries.
The better blood still speaks.
One against the killer.
One for the guilty who will come.
No atonement for a land
But the blood that is not ours.
Come off the form.
Come to the word that outlives the needle.
Last chorus
Asked for ain’t absolved.
A signature don’t clean the ground.
We will not be counted in the taking of this blood.
The ground is not indifferent.
God sees.
God sees.
Tag
Not a date.
A warning.
The ground is not indifferent.
