Life, Death and Life Again?

My wife, Debbie and I have been going to the VA Hospital the past few days visiting a man who has terminal cancer. It is an odd feeling talking and praying to and for a man whom you don’t know and you don’t know if he can understand or comprehend one thing that you are saying. Debbie is a nurse as well as a minister so she helps me out in things medical. For instance the last thing that goes is your hearing. Seriously, when you are dying you can hear someone talking if everything else has shutdown. It has been proven by people who have drowned and were resuscitated. I’m getting off my point, so I digress.

Anyway, the man’s name is Tommy. He was saved several years ago and was a good Christian man. In fact he was the youth leader of his church. Very commendable. He later took up with liquor and shall we say strayed from the narrow way. I didn’t realize this the first night I prayed for him. I told the family that we probably differed in theology on this point because I knew that if Tommy had been saved before, he was going to go to heaven. I told them he probably wouldn’t be in the first row, but I was sure that he would be there. That gave them some comfort.

Can you imagine trying to pray through with a morphine drip and your eyes glazed over like a man who had just been decked by Mike Tyson. Dying is hard work, man. The waters don’t need to be muddied up by trying to find your way to heaven. I would imagine the light would be very dim at best through all the pharmaceutical haze and what not.

Did you ever wonder why some people died instantly via a car wreck and some lingered for years with a dreadful disease? Which way do you prefer? Dying in your sleep? Come on chicken, you can do better than that. Show some creativity. Did you ever watch “Ghost Whisperer” on television? It is a cool show, albeit maybe not correct in the biblical since. But according to that show some people are dead and do not even realize it. They can talk to Melinda because she is some type of Medium or something. But nobody else can hear them or see them. Kind of like in the move, “The Others”. The kids were dead and yet thought they were talking to and seeing ghosts. How creepy is that?

The bible doesn’t say much in the way of coming back in another form. Sort of like, one shot and that’s it. Make the most of it. Look what it says about dying:

"The poor man died, and angels took him to the place of honor next to Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. He went to hell and was suffering terribly. When he looked up and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side," (Luke 16:22-23 Contemporary English Version)

So when you read that it would make you think that nothing transpired between dying and going to hell. Am I right? The bible (actually Jesus) says he went to hell and suffered terribly. BTW, this is not a parable but a true story. At least that is what all of the theologians and commentaries have to say about it. They note that Jesus used a man’s name (Lazarus) instead of saying “a certain man” or words like that.

Now look what the Apostle Paul tells the Christians in Corinth:

We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord. (2Co 5:8 KJVR)

So it would seem that when you leave this “tabernacle of flesh” you are present with God. Not hard to understand is it?

I gotta be honest with you though. Hard to say, me being a minister and everything, but there seems to be quite a bit of evidence of people living a past life. Mozart playing the piano at such an early age, stuff life that. When our daughter was about three or four years old she told us that she had been on the Titanic. We had just watched the movie so we didn’t pay much attention to it. Then she said that she lived through it and so did her friend. What was your friend’s name Holly? We figured it would be Jennifer or Samantha, something she would be familiar with. She looked at us with a straight face and said “Her name was Khalil”. Wow what an imagination, we thought. Until we got on the Internet and looked up the manifest for the Titanic. You guessed it! There was a survivor on board the Titanic whose name was Khalil. Hair stood up on my arm.

Wait, that’s not the end of that story. Several years later we were talking with her and asking her about it. She said yes she remembered telling us. So, we asked her what her name was at that time. Figuring Mary or Ann or something like that, she blew us away again with an uncommon name like Selena. Want me to tell you the rest? We looked it up and a lady named Selena survived the catastrophe and coincidentally enough stayed on the same deck as Khalil. Anyway that is an honest to God true story and I just wanted to share that with you. Does that lend any credence to reincarnation? Again I am not a theologian but things like that are hard to explain away.