Life, Death and Our Spirit

In our religious beliefs, we are seeking to know our Creator God and recognize that we humans have some sort of soul or spirit that is part of us.  We can sense that spirit in each other and have faith that it is an eternal life promise. When we think of most friends and family during their lives and after their death, we certainly sense some kind of spirit relating to them. They had a spirit about them in all that they did in this world and we still sense their spirit after their natural death.

We are all tiny physical pieces of our vast universe, God’s Creation, but we see ourselves as spirits whose souls have always existed. While our mortal bodies seem to be separate from our spirit, we are in some sense immortal in our spirit as we leave these short natural lives to be in God’s Eternal Kingdom.

God does not measure time with a clock. Each of us will experience our own death at a worldly time unknown to us. We are, however, on God’s Time. Einstein probably understood that more than anyone with his theory of Relativity, the thought of which brings us closer together with all humanity that has ever been.

St. Paul tells us in a portion of Chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans: “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you …though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness……nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Ben Franklin once wrote to a deceased friend’s family (in part), “Our friend and we were invited abroad on a party of pleasure, which is to last forever.  His chair was ready first, and he goes before us.  We could not all conveniently start together; and why should you and I be grieved at this, since we are soon to follow, and know where to find him? Adieu, Ben Franklin”

My personal certainty of God’s Love, Grace and gift of Eternal Life with Him comes from my revelation experience with Him through His Spirit. During a 10-hour brain tumor surgery and a 30-day recovery at UAB Hospital in Birmingham in 1993, I was forgiven and comforted by Him. My fear of death was removed. He even gave me a glimpse into His Eternal Kingdom. Nothing has changed that understanding I received some 20-years ago.
 
More than one hundred years ago, a man of faith wrote the following piece that has been a help to me and many others over the years. It represents a communication from a deceased family member or friend. It is probably what those we have lost over the years would like to tell us: 

 “Death is nothing at all…I have only slipped away into the next room…I am I and you are you…whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by my old familiar name; speak to me in the easy way which you always used.  Put no difference into your tone; wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.  Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes we enjoyed together.  Play, smile, think of me, pray for me.  Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without effect, without the ghost of a shadow on it. Life means all that it ever meant.  It is the same as it ever was; there is absolutely unbroken continuity.  What is this death but a negligible accident?  Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight?  I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just around the corner…All is well.” (By Henry Scott Holland, 1847-1918, a Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, England.)


We are called, as those before us, to nurture our spirit as we live out our lives in the Lord. Our personal spirit, when enhanced by a close relationship with God, is a gift to us and others in our natural lives in this world and our eternal lives in His Kingdom.