As I indicated in the last Bulletin, the ninth smart way to think about God, that is GOD IS FOREVER, is so important that I thought I would continue to comment on it in this Bulletin.
God says we are immortal, because we are created from His Immortal Spirit. That is our true nature. And although we may not be aware of it, we have always been immortal.
Eternal life will not be “added” by God to our lives. Eternal life is our gift of life, though we may still be a little too stupid to appreciate it. Although we are making a passageway between two realities, and it can seem dark, God tells us we will not at all cease to be. We will not fade to black like the end of a movie.
On the contrary, God says our consciousness lives on. It will retain its integrity through the passage of death and we will continue our purpose in life. We will continue to grow spiritual toward greater perfection and love.
There are various and different ideas about our eternal life, none of which have been proven to be true or false. Some believe this requires a cleansing period, a self-critical honesty that burns in our consciousness. Others believe it involves other bodies, other physically real opportunities to continue our spiritual growth. And still others speak of resurrection into a new and different kind of body, a spiritual body, which enters some alternate reality of pure Goodness that we call heaven. We don’t know which is true and we can debate the afterlife experience all we want and never really know what happens. Reincarnation, resurrection or all the heavens, purgatories and hells of our own imagination are but personal images that affirm one essential truth: God is Forever.
Death is not at all final. If we think it is, that is just incomplete knowledge on our part, just like any doubt. The real issue is not death at all, nor past lives, nor future lives, but how we live this life. It is truly only our worldly accomplishments that really die. Acts of kindness, charity and love live on within us and in the lives we’ve touched, long after we pass on.
There need be no deathbed or moral remorse or missed opportunity to a person who has lived life in a personal relationship with God, expanding and growing in love of Him, love of neighbor, love of self. To one for whom God has become real, the passage through death need not be terrifying or empty. It can simply feel like a continuation. Just one more step in becoming smarter, in experiencing the wholeness of Divine Love. To this person, any victory death has is at best temporary, dwarfed by the overpowering promise of Eternal Life. What more beautiful way for a life to draw to a close.
What do you believe?