People ask me questions about why is it important
to think about you know, when you die?
Especially when we're 20 and 30 and
40, 50, 60, we, most of the time, we don't like to
think about that. We just know it's something that's out there.
But I,
I've been around a lot of death.
I've been in lines at airports in which the person
in front of me is dropped and I've given him
mouth-to-mouth to resuscitate him. I've gotten off buses and
there've been cars that have smashed in to everybody on the bus with bodies
everywhere. I've been on subways
that I'm walking up the stairs and people drop in front of me and I'm
trying to bring them back. And of course what you had in the
you know, when we were in the combat situation in Vietnam.
So I have experienced a lot
of different scenarios as it relates to this,
this question that what most of us don't really like to talk about but
we know that it's really out there.
I can make an observation,
I think especially with those that I was dialoguing
with before they came
to a point of breathing their last breath.
Just about every one of those
that I can remember - there were questions
probably in the last 60 seconds of our conversation or there were
screams or there was uncontrollable
pain in which young men
and other people, women, were calling out, "oh,
God, don't let me die.
God, don't let me die. Somebody help me. Somebody help me."
And so if we do believe in an infinite personal God, and
we do believe that he has a plan, then I don't think we're creatures
of chance - that there is destiny and that
we have a time on planet Earth, but there's also
an eternity that
we will experience. And so I,
I think everybody knows this at a deeper
level.
I found very few people that
don't believe that there's life after death - matter of fact, on
one of the big surveys that was taken both in England or America,
you know, they were asking all these different types of questions and
one of the questions - if you could ask God
any one question, what would it be? And of course there were a lot of answers that
were all over the place but the two most
were: number one, why am I here?
And the second one: what happens when I die? So we all think about it
and it's the subject that I think
really needs to be addressed in a loving, tender and
rational way. And as I look at the religions of the world,
Christianity really has the answer
that the person Jesus Christ and the context of the Resurrection -
that's life after death. It has been promised.
But I think we need to be more open just to have genuine dialogue as it
relates to this question.
What'd Jesus say? What'd Jesus claim?
Is it true? What's the evidence related to it?
Because I think it's something that all of us
at different times in our life really struggle with.