Undeniable Truths

In the light of eternity, it doesn’t really matter whether you die sooner or later.

It doesn’t matter if you die at nine or ninety.

Sooner or later everyone dies.

Sooner or later everyone who loves them morns.

Sooner or later every saved soul is united in heaven with the saved souls that are there waiting for them.

Heaven is better than earth; a whole lot better.

Five minutes in heaven is better than five years on earth with great health and financial prosperity.
It’s perfect up there. Perfect is much, much better than good.

The Vocabulary Of Death #3

Say what you believe, and only what you believe. There is great comfort in the hope of heaven.

A Christian you loved has just passed away. Perhaps this was a member of your family. You may have to be the one who tells everyone else in the family that this person has passed on, If it happened as the result of an unexpected accident it will come as a shock to everyone. What words will you use? What comfort will your words give to your own soul and the souls of others?
“Children, your father died this afternoon in a car accident.” No! We can do better than that. We must do better than that! Let the first words out of our mouths be words of faith and hope. “Children, your father was in a car accident this afternoon. His body died and he has gone on to wait for us in heaven. This will be very hard for us to adjust to, but we must always remember that your father is in heaven right now and that someday we will all be together again as a family in that perfect place.”

The Vocabulary Of Death #2

You strengthen your faith and comfort your soul by keeping your words in harmony with what you believe.

“She looks so natural.” This means that the undertaker did a great job and the body looks almost as if the person was still alive. “She looks so natural.” No, she doesn’t. We don’t know exactly how she looks right now because we can perfectly visualize a disembodied soul, but I can promise you this: “she” doesn’t look like that dead body in the coffin.
Let’s say what we believe. “Yes, the undertaker did a good job with the body, but I wonder what she looks like right now, all shining with the light of God’s glory?”

The Vocabulary Of Death

Let’s go back to the great optical illusion. My grandma had died. Every single time I had ever looked at that face I was looking at my grandma, but that was no longer true. As a fourth grader I couldn’t put it into words but I was able to figure it out later. Without a disciplined mental process, our emotions will peer through our eyes and respond appropriately. They will see that the loved one looks dead. They will then watch as the loved one is either buried in the ground or burned up in a fire. They will respond with sorrow, and only with sorrow, because that is all we are giving them to work with.

One way we can help ourselves is by being very careful, and very Christian about the words we use about death.

We do not buried anybody. And you better not start now. It’s against the law; it’s a monstrous act. The only way to bury a person is to bury them alive; and even then they won’t stay buried because their bodies will die and their souls will depart from that grave.
We did not, will not, bury a loved one at the Shady Rest Cemetery. We laid their body to rest at the Shady Rest Cemetery. Just saying it the right way will make you think about the hope. And the comfort is in the hope.

I Couldn't Resist

My daughter’s little dog just jumped into my lap to give me my morning greeting. Since I am typing this with the keyboard in my lap while sitting in a recliner, I had to move the keyboard to keep from getting some canine input via the keyboard. Playfully I asked the little dog if she should like to share some thoughts on dog heaven with my readers. The thought that came into my mind was of a vast, green field filled with very slow rabbits. In the center of the field there looms a giant fire hydrant . .

The Pre-Rapture Rapture

Come fly with me into orbit above the country where you live. We will be making this flight during the night, on the side of the earth that is turned away from the sun. This would work on the daylight side of the planet just as well, but we might get a better visual on the night side. We will hang in orbit in our space ship looking down at the earth below. It will be utterly quiet (there is no sound in space). We can see the lights of the great cities below us.

Suddenly God touches us. He opens our eyes to see into the spirit realm. He opens our ears to hear in that realm. Our view of the earth is suddenly transformed. What are these bright and shinning lights rising up from the earth and flashing past us into the depths of space? What are these glad cries of triumph, of exultation, of unspeakable joy that fill our ears?

What we are seeing and hearing is the pre-rapture rapture. It is the rapture that you experience without your physical body. This is the other side of death. It is filled with glory and wonder. For thousands of years human have mourned and known great sorrow at the physical death of their loved ones. It is not wrong for a Christian to grieve. But our grief should be balanced with hope and in the comfort of hope we should eventually come to the place of joy because our loved ones are now living the life of perfect joy.
The next time you look up into the sky think about it: the pre-rapture rapture. It’s been going on for thousands of years. The departed souls of the Christians you knew and loved have taken that flight. If the Lord tarries, someday soon, you and I will join them.

We Play Until We Win

For a Christian, the game is never over until the Christian wins. There may be thousands of defeats along the way, but in the end the Christian wins.

Make a list of everything your departed loved one didn’t like about himself or his life. Everything. Let me help you. I don’t like having to struggle with my weight. I hate having to fight reoccurring depression due to Seasonal Affective Disorder. I don’t like having to wear bifocals. I wish my body still felt the way it did when I was 25. I am weary of struggling with sin. My neighbor’s dog woke us up last night at 3:00 a.m. They leave him out all night and every once in awhile he wakes us up. I love the wilderness but I don’t like mosquitoes. As a manager sometimes I have to have confrontations with people at work that upset me.

For your departed loved one, all of that is suddenly gone. Forever. Every single battle is over.
Maybe you want to start another list. What are some of the things in your life that you wouldn’t mind leaving behind when your body dies?

Act 3

The third act in your mental movie is the arrival in heaven. Vividly picture your departed loved one meeting friends and family that are waiting for them. How long has it been since your grandparents have seen you? Do you really think they are going to greet you with a handshake? How long has it been since you’ve seen your mom? How hard do you think she’s going to hug you?

Keep in mind that everyone in heaven will be family. Everyone in heaven will love the way we should already be loving on earth, with perfect love. Everyone in heaven is a big deal to the other people who live there because everyone in heaven sees you as God sees you and values you as God values you. Everyone you knew on earth will greet you in heaven like a long lost brother.
You have this vivid, visual picture of the dead body of your departed loved one in your mind. That thing in the coffin is not your loved one, it’s just his body. Picture your loved one where they are at right now. Do this frequently. Play your mental movies over and over again. Don’t just read this and then forget it. Discipline yourself to create the mental movies. You already know how to daydream. This is the kind of thing you should have been daydreaming about all along.

Act Two

Okay, you’ve taken the time to visualize the reaction of your loved one at finding himself physically dead. That’s act one in your mental move. What happens next, in act two, is truly amazing.

Jesus told a story of a man named Lazarus who “died and was carried by the angels to be with Abraham.” (Luke 16:22 NLT) In those days, before the resurrection, saved souls went to paradise, which is not exactly the same place as heaven. Since the resurrection, saved souls ascend into heaven. And they are carried there by angels.

Visualize the person, still in the room with their own dead body, suddenly becoming aware of the presence of an angel. You should picture the angel as a human form, clothed in white, with an angelic expression on his face. Wings are optional. In the Bible we encounter some angels who don’t have wings. They’ll be able to fly without them. Trust me. You should definitely visualize the angel as having the same color skin as the person who has just died.

The angel is probably going to say something along the lines of “it’s time to go.” Visualize the person who has just passed into the next life as understanding what this means and accepting everything that is about to happen without the slightest trace of fear (even if they were afraid of heights in this life).

Picture your loved one being picked up by the angel and beginning their upward flight by passing through the ceiling. Imagine the look of wonder on their face as they pass through the ceiling and as they rise higher and higher in the sky. I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to fly up in a rocket and see the earth from orbit. I will eventually get my wish but I won’t need a rocket to get up there.

Imagine the look on the face of your loved one as they rise higher and higher. Visualize them looking down on the earth. See them moving out into the vastness of space. Picture them looking back as the earth grows smaller and smaller. I don’t know about you, but I plan to ask the angel for a flyby of Saturn on my way out. Saturn is probably the most beautiful object in the solar system.

At the time of death and the funeral your mind will be full of the mental pictures of a dead body. Perhaps you saw the remains of the person at the hospital immediately after they passed away. In most cases you would also see the remains of the person at the funeral home. You need to fight back against the great optical illusions with vivid, faith based mental pictures of what really happened. Visualize the ascent of your loved one toward heaven. This is act two of your mental movie.

Hasta la vista

If you are present at the moment when a loved one passes away, it might be a good idea to speak to them in the moments immediately following physical death. Tell them you love them and that you are excited about the great adventure that is before them. I do not think that it would be inappropriate to ask them to pass on a message to someone. “Tell mom I love her and that I’ll be along soon.” Do not say goodbye. Tell them that you’ll see them later. We will have more to say about this in the upcoming posting on the vocabulary of death.

Act One

The apostle Paul reminds us that “we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Cor. 5:7) The book of Hebrews defines faith as being “certain of what we do not see.” (Heb. 11:1 NIV) At the time of death our physical vision actually makes the process of grieving harder because it is trapped by the great optical illusion. We think we are looking at the person and the person doesn’t look good. The person looks dead. Our emotions respond to what our eyes are seeing and this deepens our grief.

One of the best ways to deal with this is to create a vivid mental picture of what has actually happened, and then to play this little movie over and over again in the theater of your mind as you grieve.

On the basis of thousands and thousands of stories told by people who have had “near death” experiences, I think that it is safe to assume that the person regains consciousness in spirit form while still in the presence of their body. They can see their body and everything in the room around them, but no one else in the room can see them because they are in spirit form. Based on what you know about the person who you are grieving for, reconstruct their probable reaction to being dead.

I’m pretty sure that I will react something like this. “Oh my goodness, that’s my body over there! This must mean I’m dead!” Followed quickly by, “I knew it! I knew it all along! I’m still alive even though my body is dead. It’s all true!”

This is the first act in your little mental movie. Visualize the person trying to interact with others in the room. “Hey, look, it’s me! I’m alright! I’m still alive!” Visualize them as they begin to understand that you can not see or hear them. Don’t visualize them as being afraid. People who relate these experiences say that they had no sense of fear. Visualize this as vividly as you can as often as you need to.

The Great Optical Illusion

If you want to get the full benefit of this new thread of postings, please go back and reread the July 30^th posting about getting hit by a bus.

I once came upon a mountain lion while hiking in the Rockies. We approached him from upwind, that is the breeze was blowing from him to us so he couldn’t smell us as we approached. His reaction upon seeing us was interesting. He ran an almost perfect half circle around us through the woods in order to get downwind from us. With the breeze now blowing from us to him he was able to use his dominant sense, he sense of smell, to “see” what we were. Having taken a good whiff of us, he then bounded off into the woods. The important point to note is that he could see us and he could hear us, but in order to be really sure he had to smell us. His sense of smell was his main way of interacting with the surrounding world.

The sense of smell is the most important sense for most mammals, but not for man. We depend primarily on sight. You might hear the voice of someone coming up behind you, and you might think that you recognize that voice, but if you want to be sure you will turn around and look at the person.

This visual thing works to our great disadvantage when it comes to dealing with death. We go into a funeral home and view the remains of the dear departed. We look at the face and automatically compare the way that face looks now with the way that face looked while the person was still living. And as we do this, unless we are careful, we are fooled by the great optical illusion that is death.

Think of how many thousands of times you have looked upon this face while the person was still living. You could tell so much about the condition of the person by looking at their face. Was he stressed or happy? Did he look tired or sick? Every single time up to that first viewing of the body in the funeral home your eyes were telling you the truth about the condition of the person you were seeing. Your brain does this automatically; you don’t even have to think about it.

But when it comes to dealing with death, it is imperative that we do think about it. No matter how skillful the art of the mortician, the face that you are looking at doesn’t look good. It is lifeless and unresponsive. It looks like the person is dead. Let me say that again: it looks like the person is dead. So now, for the first time in the thousands, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of times you’ve looked at that person, your eyes are lying to you. It’s an optical illusion. The person is not dead. In fact, you aren’t looking at the person at all. All your looking at is the body they used to live in.

My first encounter with human death was the passing of my grandmother. I remember being very angry and walking away from the group at the graveside service. I remember thinking to myself, people ought not to end up like this. I was fooled by the optical illusion. My mind interpreted the message from my eyes and my emotions responded to it. Grandma didn’t look right. She looked horrible. She looked dead. And so my emotions responded to what my eyes were seeing. Once again, we do this without thinking about it. But it is imperative that we do think about it.

My grandmother did not, in fact, look like she was dead. This is because she wasn’t dead. Grandma was alive. The only problem was that I could no longer see her. All I could see was her body. Her body was dead and so my emotions responded to what my eyes were seeing. I failed to analyze the situation and remind myself that for the first time in my life I couldn’t trust what my eyes were telling me when I looked at Grandma. That wasn’t Grandma any more. Grandma wasn’t there. Grandma was still alive.

Things To Think About If You Are Killed Because You Got Hit By A Bus While You Were Riding Your Bicycle

This is a special, extra post. I will be developing these themes next month, but I thought I should publish this one early. I have a friend who might need to read it now instead of waiting until August.

Imagine for a moment that the universe consisted of you and two other people. As far as the three of you know no one else exists. Then one day the universe goes crazy. It begins to spasm and shake until, suddenly, one of you is gone. You have no idea where the other person went or if you will ever be with them again.

What have I just described? The beginning of the birth of triplets. They are aware of each other while they are in the womb. Then, suddenly, one of them is gone. I suspect that if we could attach the proper electrodes to the heads of the three babies we would find out that the separation as the first baby leaves the womb is traumatic for all three. But from our perspective, understanding the universe in a way the triplets simply can’t, we wouldn’t feel too much empathy for their emotional distress. We know that in a very, very short time the three babies will be back together again lying side by side.

Let’s leave the three babies at the hospital for a moment while we talk about how we experience time. While time doesn’t change, the way we experience it alters dramatically. The younger you are, the slower time seems to go. I can look back on one Christmas in particular, where it seemed like the period of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas lasted about three and a half years.

That same period of time just flies by as an adult. Indeed, many of us might wish that the time would slow down so that we could get everything done in time for the holidays. We have gifts to buy and trees to put up and decorate. The time seems to go so swiftly.

I have reason to believe that this sense of time speeding up never stops as long as we are in this life. I am in my mid-fifties right now, and in the last few years time seems to be going by so quickly that months seem like weeks to me now. I use this to my advantage. I feel like I am never more than 12 weeks away from my vacation. If my vacation is in July, and I am feeling a little tired and in need of a break in April, I remind myself that it will seem like my vacation is only three weeks away. The actual time is three months, but subjectively, it will feel like three weeks to me.

A couple of years ago I asked my then 82 year old father if my sense of time would begin to slow back down when I retired. In retirement we have fewer demands on our time and fewer deadlines. I was surprised when my father told me that time seemed to be flying by even more quickly during his retirement years than it did while he was working.

The older you get, the quicker time seems to go by. Let’s keep that in mind, along with our triplets waiting for us in the hospital, while we think about what it would be like to get hit by a bus.

I was riding my bike about a year ago when I went by a bus depot. All of a sudden this thought popped into my mind: what would happen if I got hit by a bus and was instantly killed? Over the years I have come to recognize that when the Holy Spirit wants to teach me something, He will often begin the lesson by putting a question into my mind.

My first thought was not very profound or spiritual: “If I die right now, who is going to do all those items on my to-do list?” I had just started a new job and my mind was constantly focusing on all the new tasks I needed to learn. But I quickly moved on to thing about more important matters.

How could heaven be heaven if my wife wasn’t there? How could I be happy to go if I had to leave her behind? How could I rejoice if I knew that she was sorrowing? Interesting questions, are they not? Here are some of the things the Holy Spirit brought to my mind to answer those questions.

First, the sorrow is inevitable. My dream would be for us to die together in our sleep some night when we are both in our eighties, but the odds of that happening aren’t good. I can remember a moment, early in our marriage, when I was thinking about this problem, and my conclusion was that we were in a heap of trouble. I was beginning to understand that the bond in marriage was much, much deeper than I had expected it to be. I had seemed to get by just fine for the first 24 years of my life without a wife, but now, all of a sudden, I needed to be with that woman in almost the same way I needed oxygen. She had become emotionally essential to me, and someday one of us would have to go first, and the other one would be devastated.

But that sorrow is part of the package we signed up for. We committed to “until death do us part.” One of us will some day have to pay a price in sorrow for the joy that we have shared. It is inevitable. And in the moment of death, one of the first realizations that must come upon us is the awareness that, if God were to allow us to come back to our physical life, we would only be postponing the sorrow. Sooner or later, one of us will have to pay. It’s inevitable.

The second thought that I had was that a group of people were going to be disappointed no matter what I did. Let me put it to you this way. If my mom knows I’m coming, she’s going to bake a cake and put up some crepe paper in a room somewhere; or she is going to do whatever is the heavenly equivalent of that. So let’s say that I find myself standing beside my crushed bike and my poor, squashed body someday, coming to terms with the fact that my earthly life is over. If I appeal to God, and He decides to do a miracle and lets me come back, some people in heaven are going to be disappointed. It won’t be a big blow for them to have to wait a little longer, but it will still be a reunion postponed.

The third thought I had was that, even if God didn’t let me come back so that I could have some more time with her, that we would only be parted for a moment or two. Remember, the older you get the faster time seems to go by. It was as if the Holy Spirit was saying to me that in the moment of death, your mind goes through and adjustment that lets you see clearly some things that you should have been seeing all along.

The first thing we will clearly see if that this earthly life was supposed to be a pilgrimage. A pilgrim is someone who is on a journey to someplace else. He never completely settles down where he’s at until he arrives at this final destination. You and I are on a journey to a heavenly country. We were never meant to completely settle down here. We should never allow our hearts to become too attached to this place.

We can keep the right attitude by living for the heavenly reward. If I live for the glory of God today and if I invest a portion of my income in His kingdom, I will arrive in that heavenly country in style. There will be rewards waiting for me. Some will have to do with honor and recognition and some of them will probably be material in nature. As Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” The more we invest in our heavenly future, the more real it will become to us.

The second thing we will clearly see is the true extent of our everlasting life span. I used to tell people that we have a life span that you could only begin to measure in units of billions of years. Let me tell you a profound and exciting truth. At some point, we run out of words to describe numbers. I know about billions and trillions. I suppose there are numbers even larger than that, but at some point the mathematicians had to quit. There would be no point in inventing names for numbers that no one in this life would ever use. I don’t know what the name of the largest number in the English language is, but I do know that someday you will have a birthday where the total number of years of your life will be bigger than that number. Bigger than a thousand, which is 10 hundreds of years. Bigger than a million, which is 1,000 thousands of years. Bigger than a billion, which is 1,000 millions of years. Bigger than a trillion, which is 1,000 billions of years.

In this life, if we haven’t had our hearts and minds renewed by the Holy Spirit through the word, we are like the triplets as they are being born. Something is happening. They don’t understand it and they are upset because one of them is suddenly gone from the only universe they know.

But in that heavenly country, the perspective is much like that of the adults in the birthing room waiting for the other two babies to be born. We just have to wait a few minutes more minutes and the other two babies will be along.

They will meet us in that heavenly country and they will comfort us by saying, “Just be patient. The people you love on the earth will be along soon. It won’t seem to take any time at all.” And as they comfort us, we will see clearly and we will understand. They’ll be coming to join us any minute now. And it won’t seem like a long time at all.