Is There Life After death? or Is It All a Myth?

Death Experiences by Dennis Edwards 

Some of you have told me that life is all there is and when you’re dead you’re dead. You’ve said that it doesn’t really matter if there is life after death. You’re just going to live for the here and now and be good for goodness sake. I want to share something with you, some evidence to the contrary. I don’t know if you’re really interested in evidence. Your mind might already be made up and you don’t want to be bother with “more evidence.” After all you’ve come to your conclusions and this God stuff has only gotten us war after war. Look at the Middle East with the Muslims, Jews, and Christians. And, how can you know the truth? Look at all the different Christian denominations and sects there are. It’s just too much even to bother. 

Besides, Dennis, you Christians are really homophobic. I read one of your articles about same-sex relations. You need to bring your ranching up to date. Pope Francisco is more in tune with the 21st century than you are. You’ve been reading that Bible too much. You actually think it’s true. Come on, Dennis, take your blinders off. Relax, people have been warning about the “end of the world” for I don’t know how long, and we’re still hear. We’ve muddle through this far and we’ll keep muddling through. Calm down, take a vacation, watch some television and put that old book made for monks in the monastery away and enjoy the last years of your life. If there’s life after death we’ll find out when we die. Stop worrying about it now. Just be good for goodness sake, like us. That’s all you need. That’s all the religion any of us need. So don’t try to convince us otherwise. 

I am sorry you feel like that and have had such a bad experience with religion some place in your life. However, to be truthful with you, I had a pretty similar experience with religion which left me an atheist. But when I saw the arbitrariness of my atheistic faith, when I saw I couldn’t be a consistent atheist, I abandomed atheism for ignosticism. But the fact that love existed, and nature proclaimed the existence of something more, plus the perfect harmony of the stars and planets pushed me further along into Deism. It just seemed more logical that some kind of force or power or energy was in some way in control of the universe. Maybe it just got things started, but life and living things, and sunsets, and mountains, and beautiful people just seemed to cry out that there was some sort of creator or alien race out there somewhere that made us. 

I just wanted to share with you some experiences I have had or have been told to me by others, experiences that give us some glimpses into the “other side,” or other dimension. I know you’re not ready for it and don’t want to hear it. But for those of you that do, here goes. 

The first experiences comes from close friend of mine who I work with regularly. She’s a woman of great faith and worked in Brazil with a Christian organization that helped the poor people in the favelas to improve their living conditions. However, her greatest pleasue was not just transforming the favela physically, but helping to transform the lives of those who lived within the favela with the love of God and the truth of His word. She not only helped transform their lives, but also the lives of those who became partners with her in her humanitarian work: business owners, teachers, pyschologists, lawyers and other volunteers. Here’s one of her stories which just took place recently in Portugal. 

Maria, my friend, was asked by a young woman she had met and talked to about Jesus, if she would go and visit her Aunti who was dying of cancer in a local hospital. My friend agreed to go with her one day soon for a visit. The day came and they arrived at the hospital, but only two people were allowed in the room with the patient at a time. Finally, it was their turn to go in and visit the dying woman. The friend who had invited Maria, chose to stay in the hallway and asked Maria to go in alone. Maria entered and went to the side of the woman’s bed. Maria could actually see how the cancer was destroying the woman’s insides as the nurses were doing some changing and the sheet was up. 

Maria asked the woman if she believed in God. The woman responed that she did. Maria asked her if she was sure she was going to heaven when she died? The woman said she thought she was but she wasn't sure. Maria explained to the woman about asking Jesus into her heart to forgive her of her sins and to give her the free gift of eternal life, if she believed. The woman said that she indeed believed and wanted to say the prayer with Maria to receive Jesus. After they prayed, Maria asked the woman if she was at peace. The woman responded that she was, that she was at peace. She asked Maria to help her husband as it would be difficult for him to lose her as he was very dependent on her spiritually. 

At that point, the woman told the nurse who was standing near by, she said, “I won’t be needing this mask anymore.” (She had been using a mask for breathing) "My angels are coming for me. I can see them. They are coming for me." Maria said that though the cancer was eating up the woman’s internal organs it hadn’t affected her mind and she was very lucid in her thinking, and even happy and bubbling, though she was dying. At that point, Maria gave the woman a kiss and said goodbye. Her husband was then able to return to the room and the woman and her husband had a few more minutes together and then she died. Maria was standing out in the hall with her friend when it happened. The woman had indeed seen her angels. Watch this scene from the movie Ghost giving us a glimpse at this event.

How can we explain that? Illusion? Imagination? Maybe the food or medicine she was taking caused her to see things? If there is no spiritual dimension and death is the end to everything why did she see her angels? Was it wishful thinking so that she would accept death peacefully. Had evolution developed the mind so well that it could conjure up visions to placate the soul in times of distress? I don’t think so. I’m more inclined to believe that the woman did see her angels coming for her. The whole event reminds me of the old song, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” song by the colored people during their times of affliction. Here it is sung by Johnny Cash.

Here’s a similar account from my own history. I had been visiting a friend of ours called Mimi. She owned a restaurante in town and came down with cancer. I think it was stomach cancer. During her time of treatment I would go and visit her at her home and sing Christian songs and read the Bible with her. She was a dear old woman of faith, generous, and loving. She had five children. Funny enough her husband was about twenty years older than me, but we had the same day of year for our birthday. While she was about twenty years older than my wife and their days of birth were just two days apart. She was born on March 9th, and my wife on March 11th. So we had this close bound with her and her husband, a sweet couple who came from Angola in 1975 when the revolution took place there. 

Anyway, as things turned out, Mimi took a turn for the worse and her organs started to fail. The doctors told the children who were about ten to fifteen years my younger. Mimi went home from the hospital for a weekend and was going to go back to the hospital on Monday morning. Her oldest son called us to let us know to come and visit her on Sunday, as she was dying and it would be our last chance to see her. But he asked me to please not tell their Mom she was dying. That’s what they thought was best to do. That really annoyed me as I felt that if I was dying I would want to know about it and not be told a lie. With regrets even now when writing this, I conformed to their wishes, though now I wish I had done otherwise. But peer pressure is a powerful tool to silence us from speaking the truth to one another. 

So, my wife an I got ready and drove over to Mimi’s new apartment they had recently bought. We rang the bell and waited for someone to open the door. Lo and behold, it was Mimi herself. She smiled, with that sweet loving smile of hers. Then she said, “Do you know what? I can see your angels. You have two shining angels standing right beside you.” She went on, “It’s funny, some of the others that have entered have angels also.” See this short clip on seeing angels.

We knew God himself was preparing Mimi for her soon departure by giving her a glimpse of the spiritual dimension. Even though our lips were sealed, God would not be mocked and He Himself was revealing the spiritual realities to His beloved daughter. She died the next day in the hospital. I was able to be with the family almost to the time of her death. But the nurses came in and saw so many people, Mimi’s five children and myself and a young portuguese adult who spoke English whom I brought with me to help in communicating to the family and she monitored me and my friend out. Family only, she commanded.

It’s really a shame that we are so afraid of death that we hardly want to talk about it. It used to be a natural thing that people did at home with there loved ones standing there besides them. The famous Christian Evangelist Dwight L. Moody died with his family all around him. He had been going in and out of consciousness throughout the day. The doctors had told the family that Moody was coming to his end, so they were all respectfully there at his side. But something unusal happened just before he died. There he had been almost the whole day sleeping or unconsciousness, yet just before death he awoke and said excitedly to his family, “I’ve been there. I’ve been inside the gates. It’s beautiful. More than you can image.” His oldest son replied, "Dad, you’ve been dreaming." Moody responed, “Son, it was more real than any dream.” With that he fell back into unconsciousness and died shortly afterwards. 

My own father told me that he didn’t want to be recusitated when he died. He had been there to see the proceedure used on my grandfather whom the doctors brought back to life. My grandfather did not gain consciousness afterwards and laid for two more weeks in bed sleeping. My father was there when he died. Suddenly grandfather, who hadn’t shown any signs of life during that two week period, sat up with his eyes wide open as if he saw something entering the room. Just as quickly as he sat up, he laid back down and died. My father said he was sure that grandfather had seen the angels coming into the room for him. 

My mother also shared one of her death experiences with us when we were children. I can vaguely remember the event. I was a small child when it happened. My mom’s God-father was sick. He lived out on Long Island while we lived in Central Jersey about an hour and a half apart. On the night of her God-father’s death she dreamed he came and said good-bye to her. The next morning, her auntie, her God-father’s wife, called her informing her that her God-father had died the night before. How do you naturalists explain that? Did they have such a strong emotional connection that her God-father could communicate with her over a hundred miles? 

At the time of my 27 years old son’s death, I , too, had a spiritual experience. I had put down the phone from the call from my son’s roommate in the Bermudas who had informed me that my son had gone missing and that they had found his clothes on the beach side.  I fell to my knees in prayer. “Oh, God, oh God, why?” “Please be with him, help him.” In that moment, suddenly, I saw in my mind's eye a vision of my son entering into the gates of heaven. It was more like he was getting off a boat and going up a ramp into a crowd of people. I could see my father embracing him. A friend who had just recently died of brain cancer, was also there to well-come him. There was a throng of people celebrating my son’s arrival. That was the end of the vision. 

From that point on, I knew he would not be found alive. Five days later his body washed ashore and was found by some German tourists walking along the beach some 21 miles from where his clothes had been found. It was really a miracle for the police told me some other foreigners had also gone missing in the water never to be seen again. I thanked God that I was able to mourn knowing without a shadow of doubt that my son had gone home to his reward. 

But that was not the only spiritual or super-natural event that took place at my son’s death. The next one happened when I was in the Bermudas cleaning up my son’s things. I was getting his clothes ready to give away to the local Red Cross and tying up his loose ends. But grief would overcome me like tidal waves. I was in his room, cleaning up his remaining things, and I couldn’t go on any longer. The pain was just too much to bear. I was crying uncontrollably. I stopped working and went to my lap top to check my mail. Maybe there was something there that would help me. 

And there it was. A former girlfriend of my son had written me an e-mail. She said, “Dennis, I wanted to tell you that this morning I had a dream with your son, Martin. He told me to tell you that everything is alright. Not to worry about him. He said now he understands everything you tried to teach him.” End of message I just broke done and bawled even more, and yet my tears changed from mourning into rejoicing. Martin was home, safe in the arms of Jesus, my beloved Friend and Savior. 

There you go, dear friends. I hope these testimonies have helped you have faith that there is more to life than meets the eye. Jesus said that unless a man be borned again he could not see the kingdom of God. Maybe you are not seeing these things because you haven’t been born again by God’s spirit into the new life. Maybe you haven’t been hungering and thirsting for righteousness and have just accepted the weary meaningless world that we have. But it doesn’t have to be so, my friend. Call out to God in honest desperation and He promises to answer you and reveal Himself to you. 

You could pray a simple prayer like this one, or something similar from your heart. “Dear Jesus or God or whoever you are, reveal yourself to me. I don’t want to be in darkness. I don’t want to be deceived. Like Neo in the Matrix movie, I want the truth. Reveal the truth to me. Is Jesus really the son of God like Dennis claims? Is all this true that he has shared with me? Help me God, or Jesus, if you are there. I’m tired of doing things my way. I’ve done it my way for too long. If You have a better way show me. My head has been bloodied and unbowed, but now I bow my head and ask that You really reveal Yourself to me. Help me. I need your help. I pray this, in Jesus’ name. Amen."

If you pray a prayer like that one, God has promised to reveal Himself to you if you are seeking Him in sincerity. You’ve got to make an effort and not let compromises keep you from the truth. If you need any help, please feel free to write me on messenger or whatsup, or at my google address: dennismedwards@gmail.com I love you and am praying for you that you’ll make the right decision and stand up and be counted for God. Love, Dennis The following video from the Billy Graham ministry might be helpful.