Light of Your Love! - song
Friday, May 24, 2013
Endtime Insights: The Surveillance Society
By Joseph Candel
SHORTLY before his death, in 1949, George Orwell wrote his final work, the classic 1984. It painted a picture of a chilling future in which the world had fallen under the rule of three great totalitarian governments. The government that controlled what had been Britain, and the United States was called Oceania and was ruled by Big Brother. In Oceania, the state was all important and to be served with unthinking loyalty. To achieve that end, its citizens had been divested of all privacy. Without privacy, there was no freedom.
News, books, plays, movies—everything was censored. History was rewritten to suit current propaganda needs. “Thought police” monitored behavior patterns to detect possibly deviant attitudes. Invasive listening devices tuned in to the most intimate conversations.
Perhaps the most effective means of control was the two-way television that looked into every room at offices, factories, and homes. The individual was never free from the surveillance of Oceania’s security forces.
Prophetic as 1984 was, George Orwell could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would become. His novel is now being actualized. Poor Orwell! If he were to walk into the world today and see what it’s like, he would probably die of fright. In his day it was all science fiction. Now it’s reality—and one that’s not going to go away.
In fact, one of the most alarming signs of the times is that people are no longer alarmed by the fact that their every move can be monitored and recorded. Someone can read every unencrypted e-mail we send. Monitoring agencies, using geostationary satellites and other means, can tune in to every phone call we make. Every purchase we make with a credit or debit card is stored in a database someplace under our name, which is linked to our address. These networked databases know exactly where we are and, to some extent, what we are doing. By studying spending patterns, others can learn about our tastes and habits.
Computer chip implants are being used to monitor children, prisoners, pets, Alzheimer’s patients, and others. The surveillance cameras that line our streets and monitor stores, parking lots, and private homes are becoming a routine part of daily life the world over. On the Internet our activities can be recorded down to the last mouse click. Big Brother is here.
Big Brother has not only arrived, but he is already tightening his grip on the world. From Australia to India, Canada, South America, the U.S., and even Afghanistan, the infrastructure for a One World Government that keeps an eye on people “for their own good and the good of society” is being put in place. Today’s surveillance tools are paving the way for the most monitored society imaginable.
It’s all about control. The Bible predicts that a One WorLd Government is coming, led by a Devil-possessed dictator known in the Bible as the Antichrist or the Beast (Daniel 11:21, 23-24; 8:23-25; Revelation 13:7). To rule the world, the Antichrist must first be able to control the people, and how can he control the people unless he knows what they’re doing?
As incredible as all of these technological advances are and as thought provoking as they may be to those who have read about Big Brother, we really shouldn’t be surprised. The Bible predicted just such a system more than 2,000 years ago.
“And he [the Antichrist’s chief aide, referred to in the Bible as the “false prophet” who “deceives the world”] causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on [in] their right hand or on [in] their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast [the Antichrist], or the number of his name. … His number is 666” (Revelation 13:16-18).
Under this 666 system, no one on earth will be allowed to buy or sell anything unless he or she receives a mark in the forehead or right hand. Technology is rapidly reaching the point where the coming Mark of the Beast 666 electronic credit system can take over.
Other changes are also taking place in the world that will facilitate the Antichrist’s rise to power. Jesus said that during the period of the Antichrist’s rise to power and seven-year rule, “lawlessness will abound, [and] the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). The Bible also tells us that in those days “evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse” (2 Timothy 3:13). Who will “save” the world from the economic collapse, horrible wars, terrorism, etc.?—The Antichrist, of course.
With all this technology in the hands of increasingly ungodly men, the world is playing directly into the hands of the Antichrist and his authoritarian One World Government that promises “technology and security for all”—but surveillance and control as well, including oppression by brute force of those who step out of line and all-out war against those who refuse to bow down and worship him as God (Revelation 13:5-7,14-18; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).
The immediate future is not very bright, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed and ready to resist the Antichrist and his mark. And the not-too-distant future will be brighter than ever when Jesus returns (Matthew 24:29-31). Then we will enjoy the dawn of a wonderful new world, where the lion will lie down with the lamb and the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:6-9).
Everything is falling into place for the New World Order to take off, and it’s happening fast.
SHORTLY before his death, in 1949, George Orwell wrote his final work, the classic 1984. It painted a picture of a chilling future in which the world had fallen under the rule of three great totalitarian governments. The government that controlled what had been Britain, and the United States was called Oceania and was ruled by Big Brother. In Oceania, the state was all important and to be served with unthinking loyalty. To achieve that end, its citizens had been divested of all privacy. Without privacy, there was no freedom.
News, books, plays, movies—everything was censored. History was rewritten to suit current propaganda needs. “Thought police” monitored behavior patterns to detect possibly deviant attitudes. Invasive listening devices tuned in to the most intimate conversations.
Perhaps the most effective means of control was the two-way television that looked into every room at offices, factories, and homes. The individual was never free from the surveillance of Oceania’s security forces.
Prophetic as 1984 was, George Orwell could not have imagined how advanced surveillance technology would become. His novel is now being actualized. Poor Orwell! If he were to walk into the world today and see what it’s like, he would probably die of fright. In his day it was all science fiction. Now it’s reality—and one that’s not going to go away.
In fact, one of the most alarming signs of the times is that people are no longer alarmed by the fact that their every move can be monitored and recorded. Someone can read every unencrypted e-mail we send. Monitoring agencies, using geostationary satellites and other means, can tune in to every phone call we make. Every purchase we make with a credit or debit card is stored in a database someplace under our name, which is linked to our address. These networked databases know exactly where we are and, to some extent, what we are doing. By studying spending patterns, others can learn about our tastes and habits.
Computer chip implants are being used to monitor children, prisoners, pets, Alzheimer’s patients, and others. The surveillance cameras that line our streets and monitor stores, parking lots, and private homes are becoming a routine part of daily life the world over. On the Internet our activities can be recorded down to the last mouse click. Big Brother is here.
Big Brother has not only arrived, but he is already tightening his grip on the world. From Australia to India, Canada, South America, the U.S., and even Afghanistan, the infrastructure for a One World Government that keeps an eye on people “for their own good and the good of society” is being put in place. Today’s surveillance tools are paving the way for the most monitored society imaginable.
It’s all about control. The Bible predicts that a One WorLd Government is coming, led by a Devil-possessed dictator known in the Bible as the Antichrist or the Beast (Daniel 11:21, 23-24; 8:23-25; Revelation 13:7). To rule the world, the Antichrist must first be able to control the people, and how can he control the people unless he knows what they’re doing?
As incredible as all of these technological advances are and as thought provoking as they may be to those who have read about Big Brother, we really shouldn’t be surprised. The Bible predicted just such a system more than 2,000 years ago.
“And he [the Antichrist’s chief aide, referred to in the Bible as the “false prophet” who “deceives the world”] causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on [in] their right hand or on [in] their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast [the Antichrist], or the number of his name. … His number is 666” (Revelation 13:16-18).
Under this 666 system, no one on earth will be allowed to buy or sell anything unless he or she receives a mark in the forehead or right hand. Technology is rapidly reaching the point where the coming Mark of the Beast 666 electronic credit system can take over.
Other changes are also taking place in the world that will facilitate the Antichrist’s rise to power. Jesus said that during the period of the Antichrist’s rise to power and seven-year rule, “lawlessness will abound, [and] the love of many will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). The Bible also tells us that in those days “evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse” (2 Timothy 3:13). Who will “save” the world from the economic collapse, horrible wars, terrorism, etc.?—The Antichrist, of course.
With all this technology in the hands of increasingly ungodly men, the world is playing directly into the hands of the Antichrist and his authoritarian One World Government that promises “technology and security for all”—but surveillance and control as well, including oppression by brute force of those who step out of line and all-out war against those who refuse to bow down and worship him as God (Revelation 13:5-7,14-18; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4).
The immediate future is not very bright, but to be forewarned is to be forearmed and ready to resist the Antichrist and his mark. And the not-too-distant future will be brighter than ever when Jesus returns (Matthew 24:29-31). Then we will enjoy the dawn of a wonderful new world, where the lion will lie down with the lamb and the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:6-9).
Everything is falling into place for the New World Order to take off, and it’s happening fast.
Activated Mag: Why Does God Allow Suffering? Part 2
It happened to me: My Best Friend
By Randy Medina
Four years ago I was rushed by ambulance to an emergency room. Four years ago I began a second life.
Hospital tests showed that I had late-stage cirrhosis of the liver. I had contracted Hepatitis C about 30 years earlier, when I was a teenager, and it had taken that long to have any noticeable effect on my liver. Now the effect was as severe as it was sudden. I was told that unless I received a liver transplant I would die.
From that day, the hospital became my second home. There I lived through some life-changing experiences—times of tears, times of acute loneliness and despair, times of soul-searching, times in dry and desolate places, and times in oases of joy. Best of all were my personal visits from Jesus, of which I had two.
The first question that came to me when I heard I was dying was, “Why me?” The second was “What have I done wrong to deserve this?” I didn’t ask those questions in an angry or self-righteous way, but because I wanted to know if there was anything in my life I needed to change. I wanted to become a new person.
Whatever it was, I told the Lord, I was sorry. I knew Jesus had forgiven me and lifted the burden of guilt when I received Him as my Savior, but I had made a lot of mistakes since and was truly sorry. I replayed every situation I had been in since Jesus had found and rescued me over 30 years earlier. I thought about every person I had hurt and every unloving thing I had said or done. I knew that when I arrived in Heaven the Lord was going to review my life, and I wanted to make that process as painless as possible by coming clean now.
I was put on a waiting list for a liver transplant—a wait that lasted 20 months. During that time, the illness began to affect my brain. I became confused and started losing my memory. At times when I was out of the hospital and needed to get home, I would get lost in my own neighborhood. It was frightening!
Then one night, after some serious soul-searching, a man appeared in my room. He turned to me and said that He loved me. I thought at first that I was hallucinating, but I wasn’t—it was real! I knew immediately that the man was Jesus. The room lit up—His love and warmth were that strong—and He kept telling me over and over that He loved me and would always be there. “No matter what you have done, I will always be there. I want to be your best friend.”
As He walked across the room, I thought He was going to bump into a chair, so I said, “Watch out for that chair!” He just chuckled. Who was I to tell Jesus, who with His Father created the universe, to watch out for a chair? What a joke! He had just finished telling me that He wanted to be my best friend, and that’s how it was—like a good laugh between best friends. He didn’t talk to me about my faults. He didn’t mention anything about my past. He didn’t say anything about my illness or whether I would be healed. He only said, “I want to love you, I want to be your friend, and I’ll always be there for you.”
I fell asleep, and when I awoke in the morning I prayed. “I don’t know what happened last night,” I told Jesus, “but if I wasn’t hallucinating, You are going to have to prove it to me.” And that evening it happened again. Jesus appeared in my room and said the same things. The message He was trying to drive home was that anytime I needed Him, He would be there. Since that experience, I can talk to Jesus just like I would talk to anyone else.
A month and a half after my transplant, I developed problems with my new liver and landed back in the hospital, in intensive care. The doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, and eventually sent me home. I was dying again.
After about a month and a half of intense suffering, I couldn’t stand the pain any longer and told Jesus that I wanted to go home to Heaven. “If You’re not going to heal me,” I told Him, “then take me home.” He chose not to do that, but He was with me when I needed Him most, just like He had promised, and He helped the worst to pass. I’m still here.
I don’t know what else Jesus has in store for me, but I know I’m not the man I was before. He’s also given me the best job in the world—telling people about Jesus and what He’s done for me. I may not be completely healed, but I’m happy to be alive and have a purpose, and I’m going to continue to love and trust Him.
My life is still on the line. I face death every day. All I have left is Jesus, but Jesus is all that matters. I wake up each morning and say, “Lord, keep me through one more day.” And when I get up and open the shades on my window and see the sun shining out there, I shout for joy. I want to get up and dance! Life with my best friend is precious!
Jesus really, really loves you too. He wants to be your best friend, your buddy. And He will always be there for you.
(Randy Medina is a full-time volunteer with The Family in the U.S.)
All I have left is Jesus, but Jesus is all that matters.
Heaven’s healing balm
By Maria Fontaine
From a letter to the parents of five teenagers who were killed in a traffic accident
Dear ones,
My heart breaks for you whose hearts are broken. My eyes weep for you who weep. I feel your agony and loss. All I’ve been thinking about since I heard the news is you who are suffering so unspeakably.
You had such great plans for your children. They were growing up so beautifully, so radiantly, and now they’re gone—instantly! Perhaps all you can say is, “Why, Lord? How could You punish us so severely?” My heart breaks for you as you endure such torment of spirit, and I pray that even in your sorrow you can know His peace.
I recently lost the one who was dearest on earth to me, so I know what it’s like. I know what it feels like to suddenly realize that things are never going to be the same again. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye either. I didn’t get a chance to ask his forgiveness for all the ways I’d failed him. I didn’t get a chance to put my arms around him and love him one last time or assure him of how much he meant to me. I know what it’s like to battle condemnation, but I also know what it’s like to receive the Lord’s abundant supply of grace in time of need, His peace that passes all understanding, His strength to go on another day, His answers to my many questions.
At a time like this, the only thing we can do is turn to Jesus and His Word for comfort. I can speak from experience. I know that in spite of the loss, in spite of the tears, in spite of the heartache, in spite of the questions, you can have peace knowing that Jesus loves you. The most important thing for you to remember right now is that the Lord loves you. In spite of the battles, in spite of the loss, in spite of the confusion, in spite of the heartbreak, you must hold on to the knowledge that He loves you.
The Lord’s love is unending, unfailing, and unchanging. No matter what happens, no matter how dark it looks, no matter how difficult the battle, no matter how dark the tunnel, no matter how long the suffering, Jesus loves you—and He doesn’t give His love stingily. He doesn’t mete it out a little bit here or a little bit there as you earn it, and then get angry with you and withdraw His love if you are not good enough or make mistakes. That’s not the way the Lord does it! He never stops pouring forth His love freely and abundantly. He never turns His back. He never closes His eyes or His ears to your needs or your cries for help and comfort.
When you feel the most desperate and the situation is darkest, when you feel the most confused and hardly even know how to pray, then the Lord will pour forth His love even more abundantly—not less! He knows you need it even more to wash away the pain and wipe away the tears and comfort your broken hearts.
Some of you probably feel great condemnation. Some of you may even be angry with the Lord for not preventing this. Some of you may be feeling bitter. Most of you will be feeling bewildered and shocked and greatly, greatly saddened.
The only thing that can wash away these pains is your faith in the Lord’s love, that “He does all things well” (Mark 7:37) and that all things truly work together for good to those who love Him (Romans 8:28). No matter how strange and hard it is to understand, even this will eventually work together for good. You must be assured that Jesus loves you very much and that He hasn’t abandoned you now. You must cling to the promises He has given you in His Word. Even when you can’t feel His love or see His love, you can know His love through faith. Your faith in His love is the only thing that is strong enough to quench these fires of sorrow.
Right now you feel that this whole thing is a sign of His lack of love or His anger or His displeasure. You look back and have so many regrets. You’re filled with so much remorse. But the Lord’s message to you is to let these feelings go—and you can let them go! You must let them go! Let them be washed away under the flood of the Lord’s love.
We don’t have to do penance for our failures. We don’t have to suffer. We don’t have to weep. We don’t have to endure condemnation. We can find the peace of the Lord in His forgiveness and love. “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54).
During my time of sorrow, when I was experiencing feelings of guilt and condemnation, I just couldn’t think about the past—not even the good memories of sweet times. I had to leave the past and think about the present. When I looked back at the past, I was overwhelmed with sorrow, but when I refused to dwell on the past but instead focused my attention on the present and the bright future to come, I could feel the assurance of Jesus’ love and see the wisdom in His plan. You must not concentrate on the past. It’s over with; it’s done! In time you’ll be able to pull out the happy memories and enjoy them without feeling sadness at every turn, but for now it’s probably better to not think about the past at all.
If we only realized how real and how close the spirit world and Heaven are! There is only a veil—only a very thin, almost transparent veil—that separates us from it. Don’t feel that you’ve lost your loved ones, because you haven’t! They knew and loved the Lord in this life, and now they’re with Him. They’ve gone ahead of you to the other side of the veil, where you will one day be reunited in the Lord’s infinite eternal love.
They’re gone, but they’re still with you; they’re still close—even closer than they were before. If you listen and have faith, you will hear their whispers comforting and encouraging and instructing you. Even if you had differences when together in this life, as everyone does at one time or another, even if you didn’t always see eye to eye, even if you had misunderstandings, things will be different now. Now you’ll understand and be more united and closer than ever before. All this is possible if you will only have faith.
This separation will not be for long. As the Bible says, it’s only for a “moment.” Then you will all be together forever in Heaven, nevermore to be separated, nevermore to feel such pain and loss. In spite of the pain you feel right now, you can be blessed with the hope and knowledge of Heaven and the Lord.
Your loss is great and your pain seems overwhelming, but it is small compared to the loss of those who do not have faith, who do not know Jesus, who don’t know what happens to their loved ones when they go on. They have no consolation, no comfort, nowhere to turn. They have no hope of seeing their loved ones again or being reunited. But you who are blessed with the truth of the Bible know that your loved ones are with Jesus and are happy, overjoyed, healthy, strong, and beautiful. This separation is only for a time, and then your pain and tears will be forgotten. Have faith!
He never stops pouring forth His love freely and abundantly. He never turns His back. He never closes His eyes or His ears to your needs or your cries for help and comfort.
You will all be together forever in Heaven, nevermore to be separated, nevermore to feel such pain and loss.
The power of love is stronger
By Michael Dooley
I had just returned from a very exhausting humanitarian aid mission to a country that had recently suffered a debilitating war. I felt depleted emotionally. Songwriting was the furthest thing from my mind as I tried to deal with the images that still haunted me. Perhaps the most difficult were the images from the hospitals we had visited: the sunken eyes of emaciated children looking blankly into mine; the wistful, sometimes tear-laced smiles of their mothers. The hardness of heart that had caused this suffering rankled within me.
How would Jesus have been with those children, I wondered. How would He have held them, blessed them, healed them? An impression began to form in my mind. There was melody, too, in that silence—one that I could sense rather than hear. I sat down at my keyboard and began to play the music I felt welling up inside. The words began to flow, and I sensed a broken, loving heart that had been healed by the tender touch of the Master’s hands nearly 2,000 years earlier.
In about 20 minutes the song was there, almost in its entirety. Tears rolled down my face. Contained in the song was the healing my spirit had been longing for. The pain of those broken lives was still with me, but there was new hope that they could be changed and redeemed by the power of a love that was stronger than all the hatred anyone could contrive and bring against another.
The Light of Your Love
(Song of Mary Magdalene)
By Michael Dooley
I saw how You stooped to lift a child,
Watched how You gently, kindly smiled.
That’s when I knew how much I wanted
To be part of You.
I saw how You mended broken lives,
Felt how You cared and sympathized,
Saw how their heartaches made You cry,
And I loved the heart of You.
And all of my hopes, my dreams, my fears,
Seem to dissolve within Your tears,
And I longed to hold You near
And tell You I loved You.
And all of life’s cruel and stinging trials
Vanished before Your gentle smile.
That’s when I knew my heart’s desire
Was to spend my life walking in the light of Your love.
And when You held my upturned face,
Tenderly dried my tears away,
All of my past Your love erased,
And I was born anew.
Then I saw what it cost You to be free;
I wept as I watched You die for me.
That’s when I knew that I would be
Forever in love with You.
And when You rose again and came to me,
I knew Your love was for all eternity,
And You would come one day and take me
To be with You.
And in that land of no more tears,
And in that time beyond all years,
You would embrace me, hold me near,
And tell me You loved me.
Where all of life’s cruel and stinging trials
Vanish beneath Your radiant smile,
And You fulfill my heart’s desire,
And I’ll be there forever living in the light of Your love.
(Michael Dooley is a full-time volunteer with The Family in the Middle East.)
If you haven’t met the friend who will love you through thick and thin, the One who holds the keys to overcoming and happiness and joy and eternal life, you can right now by sincerely praying a prayer like the following:
Dear Jesus, thank You for dying for me so that all my mistakes and wrongs can be forgiven. I now open the door of my heart and I ask You to please come into my life, give me Your free gift of eternal life, and be my nearest, dearest friend. Amen.
Feeding Reading: Suffering as God sees it
Some of the world’s suffering is the Devil’s doing.
Job 1:12-19; 2:6-7
Acts 10:38
2 Timothy 2:26
Some of the world’s suffering is self-inflicted, often due to greed.
Proverbs 15:27
1 Timothy 6:9-10
James 4:1-2
James 5:1-3
We often bring on suffering by sin and disobedience.
Genesis 42:21
Job 4:8 reap the same
Psalm 107:17
Jeremiah 30:15
Suffering is sometimes God’s loving chastisement.
Proverbs 3:11-12
Hebrews 12:5-12
1 Corinthians 11:32
Revelation 3:19
God has a good and loving reason when He allows suffering.
Genesis 45:4-8; 50:20
Psalm 119:71
Romans 8:28
God comforts and strengthens us when we suffer.
Matthew 5:4
John 14:18
1 Peter 5:10
Suffering can draw us closer to the Lord and teaches us His ways.
Job 23:10
Psalm 94:12
Psalm 119:71
Isaiah 48:10
John 15:2
Hebrews 12:9-11
Other good fruits of suffering:
Deuteronomy 8:2,16 (humility)
Romans 5:3b (patience)
Ecclesiastes 7:2-3 (wisdom)
2 Corinthians 1:4 (compassion)
Keep the faith.
Job 13:15a
Acts 20:23-24
Romans 12:12a
2 Corinthians 7:4b
Philippians 3:8
Hebrews 11:25-27
James 5:10-11
1Peter 4:13,16
Rewards in Heaven for earthly suffering:
Romans 8:18
2 Corinthians 1:7
2 Corinthians 4:17
2 Timothy 2:12a
Revelation 21:4
From Jesus with Love: Making things right
Life is a great cycle of cause and effect. Everyone makes choices every day, and everyone’s choices affect others. The combination of everyone’s choices and the effect those choices have on others makes the world what it is.
Every problem can be traced to some unloving or selfish choice someone made. These sins are the major cause of problems in the world today—selfishness and lack of love. People either don’t see how their wrong choices affect others or they don’t care enough to do things differently.
You may feel that the world is too messed up, that too many wrong choices have been made, that it doesn’t matter much what you do, that it’s hopeless. But that’s not true. Just as every problem can be traced to a wrong decision, every solution begins with a wise and loving decision to do the right thing, the loving and unselfish thing.
A little bit of love can make a lot of difference. One act of kindness or unselfishness can start a whole chain reaction of events that will, in the long run, make life a lot better for a lot of people. So don’t despair because there is so much suffering and grief and wrong in the world. Instead, do what you can to make things right and encourage others to do the same. The world won’t change in a day, but you can make a difference if you try.
For a wide range of books, audio and video productions to feed your soul, lift your spirit, strengthen your family and provide fun learning times for your children, please contact one of our distributors below, or visit our Web site at www.auroraproduction.com.
Activated USA
P.O. Box 4307
Orange, CA 92863-4307
USA
E-mail: activatedUSA@activated.org
Tel: (1-877) 862-3228 (toll-free)
Activated Europe
Bramingham Pk. Business Ctr.
Enterprise Way
Bramingham Park
Luton, Beds. LU3 4BU
ENGLAND
E-mail: activatedEurope@activated.org
Tel: (07801) 442-317
Activated Africa
P.O. Box 2150
Westville 3630
SOUTH AFRICA
E-mail: activatedAfrica@activated.org
Tel: 083 55 68 213
Activated India
P.O. Box 5215
G.P.O.
Bangalore – 1
India
E-mail: activatedIndia@activated.org
Visit our Web site at: www.activated.org
Editor: Keith Phillips
Graphic Design: Giselle LeFavre
Illustrations: Doug Calder
Production: Francisco Lopez
Printed in Thailand
All Rights Reserved
Activated mag: Why Does God Allow Suffering?
Personally speaking
Most people try not to think about it more than they have to, but there’s no denying it: There’s a lot of suffering in the world. Innocents are killed, maimed, and made homeless in cruel and unjust wars. More suffer the same in natural and manmade disasters. Cancer, AIDS, and other diseases claim millions of lives each year, often after months or years of pain. There’s no end to it. Why does life have to be this way? It’s the age-old question: Why does God—if there is a God—allow suffering?
There is no simple, universal answer to that. There is a God and He does allow suffering, but His reasons and purposes are nearly as numerous and varied as the sufferers themselves. One thing is certain, however: How people come through suffering or react to the suffering of others depends largely on their faith. Those who have no faith usually go down in despair, but those who have implicit faith in a just and loving God call out to Him in their time of need, tap into His infinite resources, and find the grace and strength to rise above their pain and loss.
Little is known about the personal suffering of Frank E. Graeff (1860-1919), but he must have been writing from experience when he penned his now famous hymn, “Does Jesus Care?” The pain he expresses is too real to have been mere fabrication, and only one who has been there could express the truth and hope found in the refrain so victoriously. “Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares, His heart is touched with my grief. … I know my Savior cares!”
Suffering is part of life, but that wonderful faith and assurance can be yours too. I hope this issue of Activated will help you connect with God’s love and comfort when you need Him most.
Keith Phillips
For the Activated Family
God Is Love
A deadly coalmine explosion in Northern England left scores of miners trapped underground, beyond help. The large crowd that gathered at the mouth of the mine included many relatives of the dead and dying miners.
“It is very difficult for us to understand why God should let such an awful tragedy happen,” said Handley Moule, a clergyman who was asked to speak to the crowd. “I have at home an old bookmark given me by my mother. It is woven in silk, and when I look at the wrong side of it, I see nothing but a tangled mass of threads. It looks like a big mistake! One would think that whoever made it didn’t know what she was doing. But when I turn it over and look at the right side, I see there, beautifully embroidered, the message, ‘God is love!’ We are looking at this tragedy from the wrong side. Someday we shall view it from another standpoint and we shall understand.”
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? … In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.—The apostle Paul (Romans 8:35,37-39 NKJ)
Does Jesus Care?
By Frank E. Graeff
Does Jesus care when my heart is pained
Too deeply for mirth or song,
As the burdens press, and the cares distress
And the way grows weary and long?
(Refrain)
Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares,
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary, the long nights dreary,
I know my Savior cares.
Does Jesus care when my way is dark
With a nameless dread and fear?
As the daylight fades into deep night shades,
Does He care enough to be near?
Does Jesus care when I’ve said “goodbye”
To the dearest on earth to me,
And my sad heart aches till it nearly breaks,
Is it aught to Him? Does He see?
(Refrain)
Oh yes, He cares, I know He cares,
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary, the long nights dreary,
I know my Savior cares.
Why suffering?: Answers to one of life’s most troubling questions
Q: If God is love and He loves us, as the Bible says, why is there so much suffering in the world?
A: God is not to blame for all the suffering in the world. He’s not some kind of monster that enjoys making people suffer. It’s not God who causes the pain, death, and heartache. The truth is, much of what we suffer is caused by people’s selfishness and destructive attitudes and actions.
Take wars, for example, which have caused untold suffering throughout history. The Bible says, “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?” (James 4:1 KJV). People are to blame for the suffering caused by war, because of their own selfishness, greed, pride, and competitive spirit—the destruction of others for selfish gain.
Q: What about poverty? What about the millions who die of starvation and disease in some of the impoverished nations of the world? Surely they haven’t brought that upon themselves!
A: Believe it or not, man is largely responsible for poverty as well. Global warming is increasing, rainforests are disappearing, deserts are expanding, and seas are dying. These combined ills are having a disastrous effect on food supplies, especially in already impoverished regions, and all are largely the result of the haves relentlessly striving to have more at the expense of the have-nots. For example, indiscriminate logging for fast money in some developing countries is bringing about ecological disasters and population displacement.
In addition, civil conflicts, driven by political greed contribute to famine and poverty in many nations. Can God be blamed for this? Again it’s a case of people bringing suffering on others through selfishness, lack of love, and lack of foresight and concern for future generations.
Q: But the shortage of food is not caused solely by desert expansion, forest depletion, and war. There are often natural forces beyond man’s control that contribute to extreme poverty and starvation. Isn’t God to blame for that?
A: It’s true that some factors are beyond man’s control, but ironically, while millions are undernourished, in other parts of the world there are huge surpluses of food. No one needs to go hungry; God’s earth provides more than enough. But unfortunately, while many rich Western countries spend hundreds of millions of dollars on storing or destroying their surpluses, even paying farmers not to grow certain crops, the poor of the world starve.
Another example of manmade misery and suffering is the pitiful squalor of the poor in the huge cities of some developing countries. God never intended for people to live in crowded, filthy, dehumanizing slums. In most cases those people would have been better off if they had stayed out in the country where the air is clean and there is more food and fewer people—healthful country living as God intended.
In some countries, the poor crowd into the cities to escape civil war, guerrilla activity, or criminal activity in the countryside—more suffering brought on by others’ greed and oppression of their fellow man.
Others, unfortunately, are responsible for their own predicament. They see the material success of the middle class and rich in the cities and think that would make them happy. They are drawn to the cities, but often find their economic state worse than before. Modern cities and the suffering they bring are not God’s fault; they’re a manmade curse.
Also, most of the rich don’t share their wealth or lands as they should, and many don’t pay the poor fair wages for their labor or fair prices for their produce. If they did, there would certainly be enough to go around. The Bible repeatedly advises and even commands the rich to share with the poor (Deuteronomy 15:7-8; Psalm 41:1; Matthew 5:42). God doesn’t want the poor to suffer!
Science has also proven to be a two-edged sword. God has helped man learn more about the world in which we live, which has led to many beneficial discoveries, but much of this knowledge has also been misused, culminating in horrific weapons of war, polluting factories and refineries, cancer-promoting substances, etc. These death-dealing and destructive inventions bring on untold pain and suffering, but they are not God’s fault.
Q: Is man, then, solely responsible for all the pain in the world today?
A: No, a lot of it is the work of Satan, also known as the Devil—the powerful spirit being and archenemy of God, whose relentless goal is to make people suffer. In fact, one of the Devil’s main objectives is to turn man away from God by pinning the blame on God for his own dirty deeds!
Q: If God is loving and all-powerful, why doesn’t He stop the Devil and the people responsible from inflicting all this suffering? If God is not directly responsible, why does He allow it to go on?
A: The Bible speaks of a great war in the spirit realm between the forces of good and evil (Ephesians 6:12). God and His angelic forces do often stop the Devil from wreaking even more havoc and destruction, but in some cases God allows the Devil to perform his destructive work as a judgment on those who have rebelled against God or refused to follow His natural and spiritual laws.
But as far as God stopping people from perpetrating suffering and evil, if He were to do that, He would have to put an end to our free will and majesty of choice, whereby we can choose to do good or evil.
Q: Wouldn’t it have been better, then, if He had created us all to be good?
A: If God had wanted robots, yes, He could have made everybody do only what is right and good. But He purposely limited His own power by creating us with a free will so we could choose to both love Him and do what is right—just as parents want their children to love them of their own free will, not because they’re forced to. We were put here to make a choice between good and evil, between doing things God’s way or our own.
This is the main reason there is so much suffering, misery, pain, ill health, wars, economic troubles, and other woes in the world today—because instead of choosing to love and obey God, many people have decided to rebel against His loving rules, which He made for our health and happiness. Most people want to do things their own way and so must suffer the consequences of their own wrong choices. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 14:12, NIV).
Q: But why does God allow bad things to happen to good people? No one is perfect, of course, but why doesn’t He reward those who genuinely try to do good and make right, loving choices by sparing them from suffering?
A: He does, for the most part. We’re all acutely aware when things go wrong, but we often don’t see or appreciate what could have gone wrong but didn’t because of God’s loving intervention on our behalf.
Nevertheless, good people do sometimes go through difficult times. That’s when it’s important to remember—and this can be difficult to grasp—there are benefits from suffering. Difficult times shape our character and teach us important lessons. Often more is learned from failure than from success. Also, suffering often brings out the best in those who choose not to become embittered or hardened, and engenders love, tenderness, goodness, and concern for others. The Bible says, “We comfort others with the comfort that we ourselves are comforted with [by] God” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Often those who turn to God for comfort and strength in their suffering later want to point others to the One who can also ease their sufferings and help them solve their problems—God and His love, personified in Jesus.
And the best news is that one day soon, God’s Word promises, all suffering will come to an end for those who love God. Jesus is going to return to rescue His own from all suffering and whisk them off to Heaven, where God will wipe away every tear from our eyes and there will be no more death, sorrow, crying, or pain, for all these things will be passed away (Revelation 21:4).
(The above answers are based on the writings of David Brandt Berg
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Force for Good: Cultural Adaptation
By Peter Amsterdam
Download Audio (10.9MB)
“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”—1 Corinthians 9:22 NIV
Successfully becoming one with the people we try to reach with the Gospel often has to transcend adopting a certain manner of dress or speech while in public or when with visitors. It means taking it to the next level by having a lifestyle that is in harmony with the local culture and is not perceived as offensive or unappealing to the very people we are trying to reach. The following excerpts highlight the ways in which the life of a missionary needs to harmonize with the local culture as much as possible:
Now, what principles will guide us as we adopt the local way of life? Well, in the first place we will certainly want to become familiar enough with it so that we feel at home in their homes. If we find their way of sitting uncomfortable, and their food unpleasant, they are not going to enjoy having us as guests. …
It is also in their homes that we may become really acquainted with them, and learn to know their needs. When we have become familiar with how they eat, how they sleep, how they work, how they play, what they like, what they dislike, what they hope, what they fear, how they think, how they feel—when we really understand them, then, and only then, will we be able to present the Gospel to them in an adequate way.
In the second place, we will want to live in our own homes on the mission field in such a way as to make our neighbors feel at home when they come to call on us. The fundamental attraction will not be externalities and material things. Even though I live in a little hut that is identical with their own, if in my heart I just do not like to have them around, they will know it, and they will not be attracted to me. But if not only the love and the welcome are there, but also a way of life that corresponds to their own, the approach will be made still easier.
This does not mean, of course, that I will unthinkingly accept all local standards. The fact that everyone else chews betel nut does not mean that I will take it up. But I will want, as far as possible, to live the sort of life that it would be suitable for a native Christian to imitate.1
It’s helpful to ask yourself whether your neighbors or visitors feel comfortable and at home when they visit you. Is your way of life so foreign that they can’t relate to it or envision it as something they could adopt or see as fitting with their culture?
The real deal
Cultural adaptation is not meant to be simply a show for visitors. Nor is it about pretending to be something or someone you’re not. It’s about taking up the challenge to “become all things to all men,” or as one translation of the Bible puts it, “trying to find common ground with everyone.”2 It’s about love in action, and a willingness to change and adapt because you genuinely love and respect people.
Cultural adaptation also means finding the methods and means that will be the best and most effective way to reach people in your city, state, or country. It takes adapting your presentation of the message, your manners, your dress, and your speech, if necessary, to effectively reach the people of that country or culture. If you are trying to launch a charitable project, for example, it means that you’ll seek to find out from knowledgeable sources or social action groups what is needed and adapt your approach accordingly. Likewise, you’ll strive to ensure that the way you present the message is culturally acceptable and will not unnecessarily offend people.
Cultural adaptation does not mean being like everyone else and doing what everyone else does. It allows for being different and unique, and for finding a niche where you can stand out with your skills and experience. You still want to showcase the things that you have to offer, so that they can benefit the people you are trying to reach and the work you are trying to do. Cultural adaptation provides the balance between blending in and presenting things in a way that people can accept and tolerate, while being innovative and striking a responsive chord with the audiences you are trying to reach.
As we strive to broaden our relations with others and bring more people into our circle of friendship, being culturally sensitive is an important element.—Adapting to people, rather than expecting them to adapt to our lifestyle and culture; showing a respect for the local culture, working within the framework of expected manners, behavior, and etiquette as much as possible; being perceived as a contributor and an asset to the community, and not just pushing our own program and agenda.
One of the more predominant failings of foreign Christian missionaries has been their promotion of Western culture as equated with Christianity, and even in some cases with receiving Jesus. This approach has turned many away from the Lord. It has also caused some people to fear Christianity, for fear that they would lose or betray their local culture.
It is so important for you to do all you can to become one.Some of the major and most obvious ways arethrough learning the language, eating the food, and dressing appropriately, but there are also other ways—like taking time to understand the culture and the needs of the people and then adapting your speech, altering your thinking, your habits, and even your personal preferences to better relate to them.
The Jesus we know and love “became all things to all men,” and that’s why we have the gift of salvation today. He did the ultimate in becoming one when He took on frail human flesh and lived and died among us. He loved us so much that He became one of us, so that we could understand Him, relate to Him, and know His love.3
Cultural sensitivity and adapting your presentation to become one is not meant to be an accommodation to the things which need to be changed, particularly those that are ungodly, inhumane, or that cause hardship and inequality in a society. Not everything we do and value as Christians will be in harmony with the status quo.
Many missionaries have taken on controversial causes for the betterment of people, which ultimately brought about important social change.—Missionaries such as Gladys Aylward in China, who helped to overturn foot-binding, or William Carey, who was instrumental in seeing the edict passed prohibiting sati (burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands), or Mary Slessor, who saved twins from being killed, or Mother Teresa, who worked with the outcasts of society, or John Goheen, who campaigned vigorously for literacy and agricultural reform in India, to name a few. But in each of these cases, they first became one with the people of the nation so that they could more easily reach the people the Lord had laid on their hearts to help without being perceived as a threat.
Missionaries may be involved in charitable works that address a social problem that needs highlighting, and in such a case, the Lord could call them to be a force for change. As Christians, “becoming one” doesn’t mean that you passively accept the wrongs of a society or don’t fight for causes the Lord calls you to fight for. Becoming one does, however, make it easier for people to understand and receive the message and to accept and even welcome your presence and contribution.
An important goal in cultural adaptation is establishing relationships—forging friendships, networking, collaborating, and welcoming people into our hearts and lives, while also entering into theirs. This allows people to bridge the differences between their lives and our lives and lifestyle as committed Christians, and in some cases, as foreigners. Becoming a force for good in the community will depend on people’s perception of you and your actions. For this reason, your respect for local customs, your dress code, manner of speech, how you care for your property, etc., will often be scrutinized, and if they don’t match up with people’s expectations, this can work against your witness, to where your talk and your walk don’t add up in the eyes of the local community.
It pays to be sensitive to others and conscious of how your actions will be perceived, as well as to be as considerate as possible of their customs. The goal is that people will welcome you as a positive influence—a force for good—in their neighborhood or community.
It is important to understand and be sensitive to the culture of your mission field. That means being aware and respectful of the mentality of the people, their history, customs, traditions, national holidays, and cultural expectations. Having an understanding of their main religions and political system is also important. It’s also wise to stay abreast of important news and events happening in your city, province or state, and country, so that you are aware and knowledgeable, and so that your actions and words are not out of step with issues of significance to your country.
As many of us move into new spheres of influence in society, whether through our mission activities, building community, school, work, or other new ministries, taking the “becoming one” concept to the next level can be very beneficial. It can be the key to opening new doors of opportunity to reach and minister to the many people the Lord has prepared for us to meet and work with.
Let’s do our part to open our hearts and homes to a closer relationship and friendship with the people the Lord brings into our lives. Let’s ask the Lord to help us to truly become one with the people He has called us to minister to, and pray that this will result in greater opportunities to reach the people in our country.
Originally published January 2011. Excerpted and republished May 2013.
Read by Simon Peterson.
1 Mabel Williamson and the China Inland Mission, Have We No Rights? (Chicago: Moody Press, 1957).
2 1 Corinthians 9:22 TLB.
3 Maria Fontaine. Originally published February 2009.
Download Audio (10.9MB)
“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.”—1 Corinthians 9:22 NIV
Successfully becoming one with the people we try to reach with the Gospel often has to transcend adopting a certain manner of dress or speech while in public or when with visitors. It means taking it to the next level by having a lifestyle that is in harmony with the local culture and is not perceived as offensive or unappealing to the very people we are trying to reach. The following excerpts highlight the ways in which the life of a missionary needs to harmonize with the local culture as much as possible:
Now, what principles will guide us as we adopt the local way of life? Well, in the first place we will certainly want to become familiar enough with it so that we feel at home in their homes. If we find their way of sitting uncomfortable, and their food unpleasant, they are not going to enjoy having us as guests. …
It is also in their homes that we may become really acquainted with them, and learn to know their needs. When we have become familiar with how they eat, how they sleep, how they work, how they play, what they like, what they dislike, what they hope, what they fear, how they think, how they feel—when we really understand them, then, and only then, will we be able to present the Gospel to them in an adequate way.
In the second place, we will want to live in our own homes on the mission field in such a way as to make our neighbors feel at home when they come to call on us. The fundamental attraction will not be externalities and material things. Even though I live in a little hut that is identical with their own, if in my heart I just do not like to have them around, they will know it, and they will not be attracted to me. But if not only the love and the welcome are there, but also a way of life that corresponds to their own, the approach will be made still easier.
This does not mean, of course, that I will unthinkingly accept all local standards. The fact that everyone else chews betel nut does not mean that I will take it up. But I will want, as far as possible, to live the sort of life that it would be suitable for a native Christian to imitate.1
It’s helpful to ask yourself whether your neighbors or visitors feel comfortable and at home when they visit you. Is your way of life so foreign that they can’t relate to it or envision it as something they could adopt or see as fitting with their culture?
The real deal
Cultural adaptation is not meant to be simply a show for visitors. Nor is it about pretending to be something or someone you’re not. It’s about taking up the challenge to “become all things to all men,” or as one translation of the Bible puts it, “trying to find common ground with everyone.”2 It’s about love in action, and a willingness to change and adapt because you genuinely love and respect people.
Cultural adaptation also means finding the methods and means that will be the best and most effective way to reach people in your city, state, or country. It takes adapting your presentation of the message, your manners, your dress, and your speech, if necessary, to effectively reach the people of that country or culture. If you are trying to launch a charitable project, for example, it means that you’ll seek to find out from knowledgeable sources or social action groups what is needed and adapt your approach accordingly. Likewise, you’ll strive to ensure that the way you present the message is culturally acceptable and will not unnecessarily offend people.
Cultural adaptation does not mean being like everyone else and doing what everyone else does. It allows for being different and unique, and for finding a niche where you can stand out with your skills and experience. You still want to showcase the things that you have to offer, so that they can benefit the people you are trying to reach and the work you are trying to do. Cultural adaptation provides the balance between blending in and presenting things in a way that people can accept and tolerate, while being innovative and striking a responsive chord with the audiences you are trying to reach.
As we strive to broaden our relations with others and bring more people into our circle of friendship, being culturally sensitive is an important element.—Adapting to people, rather than expecting them to adapt to our lifestyle and culture; showing a respect for the local culture, working within the framework of expected manners, behavior, and etiquette as much as possible; being perceived as a contributor and an asset to the community, and not just pushing our own program and agenda.
One of the more predominant failings of foreign Christian missionaries has been their promotion of Western culture as equated with Christianity, and even in some cases with receiving Jesus. This approach has turned many away from the Lord. It has also caused some people to fear Christianity, for fear that they would lose or betray their local culture.
It is so important for you to do all you can to become one.Some of the major and most obvious ways arethrough learning the language, eating the food, and dressing appropriately, but there are also other ways—like taking time to understand the culture and the needs of the people and then adapting your speech, altering your thinking, your habits, and even your personal preferences to better relate to them.
The Jesus we know and love “became all things to all men,” and that’s why we have the gift of salvation today. He did the ultimate in becoming one when He took on frail human flesh and lived and died among us. He loved us so much that He became one of us, so that we could understand Him, relate to Him, and know His love.3
Cultural sensitivity and adapting your presentation to become one is not meant to be an accommodation to the things which need to be changed, particularly those that are ungodly, inhumane, or that cause hardship and inequality in a society. Not everything we do and value as Christians will be in harmony with the status quo.
Many missionaries have taken on controversial causes for the betterment of people, which ultimately brought about important social change.—Missionaries such as Gladys Aylward in China, who helped to overturn foot-binding, or William Carey, who was instrumental in seeing the edict passed prohibiting sati (burning widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands), or Mary Slessor, who saved twins from being killed, or Mother Teresa, who worked with the outcasts of society, or John Goheen, who campaigned vigorously for literacy and agricultural reform in India, to name a few. But in each of these cases, they first became one with the people of the nation so that they could more easily reach the people the Lord had laid on their hearts to help without being perceived as a threat.
Missionaries may be involved in charitable works that address a social problem that needs highlighting, and in such a case, the Lord could call them to be a force for change. As Christians, “becoming one” doesn’t mean that you passively accept the wrongs of a society or don’t fight for causes the Lord calls you to fight for. Becoming one does, however, make it easier for people to understand and receive the message and to accept and even welcome your presence and contribution.
An important goal in cultural adaptation is establishing relationships—forging friendships, networking, collaborating, and welcoming people into our hearts and lives, while also entering into theirs. This allows people to bridge the differences between their lives and our lives and lifestyle as committed Christians, and in some cases, as foreigners. Becoming a force for good in the community will depend on people’s perception of you and your actions. For this reason, your respect for local customs, your dress code, manner of speech, how you care for your property, etc., will often be scrutinized, and if they don’t match up with people’s expectations, this can work against your witness, to where your talk and your walk don’t add up in the eyes of the local community.
It pays to be sensitive to others and conscious of how your actions will be perceived, as well as to be as considerate as possible of their customs. The goal is that people will welcome you as a positive influence—a force for good—in their neighborhood or community.
It is important to understand and be sensitive to the culture of your mission field. That means being aware and respectful of the mentality of the people, their history, customs, traditions, national holidays, and cultural expectations. Having an understanding of their main religions and political system is also important. It’s also wise to stay abreast of important news and events happening in your city, province or state, and country, so that you are aware and knowledgeable, and so that your actions and words are not out of step with issues of significance to your country.
As many of us move into new spheres of influence in society, whether through our mission activities, building community, school, work, or other new ministries, taking the “becoming one” concept to the next level can be very beneficial. It can be the key to opening new doors of opportunity to reach and minister to the many people the Lord has prepared for us to meet and work with.
Let’s do our part to open our hearts and homes to a closer relationship and friendship with the people the Lord brings into our lives. Let’s ask the Lord to help us to truly become one with the people He has called us to minister to, and pray that this will result in greater opportunities to reach the people in our country.
Originally published January 2011. Excerpted and republished May 2013.
Read by Simon Peterson.
1 Mabel Williamson and the China Inland Mission, Have We No Rights? (Chicago: Moody Press, 1957).
2 1 Corinthians 9:22 TLB.
3 Maria Fontaine. Originally published February 2009.
Life After Death—What will it be like?
by D. Brandt Berg
Mountain-Streams
What will it be like?
In recent years a number of prominent doctors have observed and documented hundreds of cases of what they call “clinical deaths.” Their patients actually died, and all vital functions ceased for from several minutes up to a half an hour, but then the patients revived. Hundreds of these survivors of death told amazingly similar accounts of their life-after-death experiences.
Almost all of them said it was a marvelous feeling, like floating on air, no longer weighed down by their physical bodies. Their anxieties and worries suddenly vanished as they realized that although their bodies were dead, their spirits were still very much alive and God was lovingly caring for them. In almost every account, those who returned from such experiences had a great change in their outlook on life. They were more loving, more full of faith, found greater purpose in living, and were convinced that they had been spared from death so that they could return and fulfill their mission in this life. (For documented accounts of more than two hundred life-after-death experiences, read Life After Life by Dr. R.A. Moody.)
According to God’s Word, the next life is not so terribly different from this present existence that we can’t comprehend it. We are going to be much the same as we are now, except that our eternal bodies going to be supernatural, like the one Jesus had after He was resurrected (Philippians 3:21; 1 John 3:2). Jesus was able to materialize or dematerialize, appear or disappear. Think of that! He could pass from one dimension to the other, and walk through locked doors and solid walls (John 20:19, 26).
But just because we’ll have spiritual bodies doesn’t mean we won’t still be ourselves. We’re going to have a lot of the same characteristics that we have now, just as Jesus did after His resurrection. He could eat and drink and others could still touch Him as well as see Him, yet He was in a miraculous supernatural body, His new resurrected body (Luke 24:36-43).
You are still going to be you! You’re even going to look a lot the same, only better—much better! You’ll be much better off in every way, and you’ll be in more direct communication with the Lord, experiencing the fullness of God’s love and the realities of the world to come!
Those experiences of life after death that some have had are exceptional cases of course, and it’s obvious that most people do not come back after passing on. However, when your time comes, death is not something you should fear.
Contrary to the idea some people seem to have, God is not a cruel tyrant or some sort of monster who is trying to frighten everyone into Hell, but rather a loving and merciful Father who is trying to love everyone into Heaven. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and He wants to help and save you and make you happy with His love. In fact, this is why He created you: to love and enjoy Him forever, now and in the life to come.
But sad to say, at some time or other we’ve all been selfish, mean, unloving, or unkind to others—even to God! “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). None of us deserve to go to Heaven. But the Bible says that although “the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
Receiving God’s free gift of eternal life is like receiving a pardon from the guilt of sin. God loves you so much, He gave Jesus to die in your place, to ta ke your punishment for you (John 3:16). This is why Jesus could promise those who believe in Him that they “shall not taste of death” (Matthew 16:28). If we receive Jesus and His free gift of eternal life, our spirits—the real us—will never die or experience the agony of separation from God, even when our physical bodies die. “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment [condemnation], but has passed from death into life” (John 5:24).
If you haven’t yet received Jesus into your heart, you can right now by praying this prayer:
Jesus, I believe that You are the Son of God and that You died for me. Please forgive me for all my sins. I ask You now to come into my heart and give me Your gift of eternal life. Help me to love You, and to love others by telling them about You and Your love and truth. Amen.
Once you have Jesus in your heart, you have made the most important preparation for your life, as well as death. And when your time comes to die, well, hallelujah! You will have finished your earthly task. It will be your graduation day—graduation to the heavenly world of the hereafter where you will receive a glorious crown of eternal life and be with God and Jesus and your loved ones forever! We who know Jesus will awaken in the heavenly kingdom of God with peace and plenty and love for all forever! Are you ready?
Mountain-Streams
What will it be like?
In recent years a number of prominent doctors have observed and documented hundreds of cases of what they call “clinical deaths.” Their patients actually died, and all vital functions ceased for from several minutes up to a half an hour, but then the patients revived. Hundreds of these survivors of death told amazingly similar accounts of their life-after-death experiences.
Almost all of them said it was a marvelous feeling, like floating on air, no longer weighed down by their physical bodies. Their anxieties and worries suddenly vanished as they realized that although their bodies were dead, their spirits were still very much alive and God was lovingly caring for them. In almost every account, those who returned from such experiences had a great change in their outlook on life. They were more loving, more full of faith, found greater purpose in living, and were convinced that they had been spared from death so that they could return and fulfill their mission in this life. (For documented accounts of more than two hundred life-after-death experiences, read Life After Life by Dr. R.A. Moody.)
According to God’s Word, the next life is not so terribly different from this present existence that we can’t comprehend it. We are going to be much the same as we are now, except that our eternal bodies going to be supernatural, like the one Jesus had after He was resurrected (Philippians 3:21; 1 John 3:2). Jesus was able to materialize or dematerialize, appear or disappear. Think of that! He could pass from one dimension to the other, and walk through locked doors and solid walls (John 20:19, 26).
But just because we’ll have spiritual bodies doesn’t mean we won’t still be ourselves. We’re going to have a lot of the same characteristics that we have now, just as Jesus did after His resurrection. He could eat and drink and others could still touch Him as well as see Him, yet He was in a miraculous supernatural body, His new resurrected body (Luke 24:36-43).
You are still going to be you! You’re even going to look a lot the same, only better—much better! You’ll be much better off in every way, and you’ll be in more direct communication with the Lord, experiencing the fullness of God’s love and the realities of the world to come!
Those experiences of life after death that some have had are exceptional cases of course, and it’s obvious that most people do not come back after passing on. However, when your time comes, death is not something you should fear.
Contrary to the idea some people seem to have, God is not a cruel tyrant or some sort of monster who is trying to frighten everyone into Hell, but rather a loving and merciful Father who is trying to love everyone into Heaven. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and He wants to help and save you and make you happy with His love. In fact, this is why He created you: to love and enjoy Him forever, now and in the life to come.
But sad to say, at some time or other we’ve all been selfish, mean, unloving, or unkind to others—even to God! “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). None of us deserve to go to Heaven. But the Bible says that although “the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, our Lord” (Romans 6:23).
Receiving God’s free gift of eternal life is like receiving a pardon from the guilt of sin. God loves you so much, He gave Jesus to die in your place, to ta ke your punishment for you (John 3:16). This is why Jesus could promise those who believe in Him that they “shall not taste of death” (Matthew 16:28). If we receive Jesus and His free gift of eternal life, our spirits—the real us—will never die or experience the agony of separation from God, even when our physical bodies die. “He who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment [condemnation], but has passed from death into life” (John 5:24).
If you haven’t yet received Jesus into your heart, you can right now by praying this prayer:
Jesus, I believe that You are the Son of God and that You died for me. Please forgive me for all my sins. I ask You now to come into my heart and give me Your gift of eternal life. Help me to love You, and to love others by telling them about You and Your love and truth. Amen.
Once you have Jesus in your heart, you have made the most important preparation for your life, as well as death. And when your time comes to die, well, hallelujah! You will have finished your earthly task. It will be your graduation day—graduation to the heavenly world of the hereafter where you will receive a glorious crown of eternal life and be with God and Jesus and your loved ones forever! We who know Jesus will awaken in the heavenly kingdom of God with peace and plenty and love for all forever! Are you ready?
Proof of heaven popular, except with the church
By John Blake, CNN, May 19, 2013
“God, help me!”
Eben Alexander shouted and flailed as hospital orderlies tried to hold him in place. But no one could stop his violent seizures, and the 54-year-old neurosurgeon went limp as his horrified wife looked on.
That moment could have been the end. But Alexander says it was just the beginning. He found himself soaring toward a brilliant white light tinged with gold into “the strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.”
Alexander calls that world heaven, and he describes his journey in “Proof of Heaven,” which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks. Alexander says he used to be an indifferent churchgoer who ignored stories about the afterlife. But now he knows there’s truth to those stories, and there’s no reason to fear death.
“Not one bit,” he said. “It’s a transition; it’s not the end of anything. We will be with our loved ones again.”
Heaven used to be a mystery, a place glimpsed only by mystics and prophets. But popular culture is filled with firsthand accounts from all sorts of people who claim that they, too, have proofs of heaven after undergoing near-death experiences.
Yet the popularity of these stories raises another question: Why doesn’t the church talk about heaven anymore?
Preachers used to rhapsodize about celestial streets of gold while congregations sang joyful hymns like “I’ll Fly Away” and “When the Roll is Called up Yonder.” But the most passionate accounts of heaven now come from people outside the church or on its margins.
Most seminaries don’t teach courses on heaven; few big-name pastors devote much energy to preaching or writing about the subject; many ordinary pastors avoid the topic altogether out of embarrassment, indifference or fear, scholars and pastors say.
“People say that the only time they hear about heaven is when they go to a funeral,” said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Heaven in the American Imagination” and a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Talk of heaven shouldn’t wait, though, because it answers a universal question: what happens when we die, says the Rev. John Price, author of “Revealing Heaven,” which offers a Christian perspective of near-death experiences.
“Ever since people started dying, people have wondered, where did they go? Where are they now? Is this what happens to me?” said Price, a retired pastor and hospital chaplain.
Price didn’t always think heaven was so important. He scoffed at reports of near-death experiences because he thought they reduced religion to ghost stories. Besides, he was too busy helping grieving families to speculate about the afterlife.
His attitude changed, though, after a young woman visited his Episcopal church one Sunday with her 3-year-old daughter.
Price had last seen the mother three years earlier. She had brought her then-7-week-old daughter to the church for baptism. Price hadn’t heard from her since. But when she reappeared, she told Price an amazing story.
She had been feeding her daughter a week after the baptism when milk dribbled out of the infant’s mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. The woman rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where she was resuscitated and treated for a severe upper respiratory infection.
Three years later, the mother was driving past the same hospital with her daughter when the girl said, “Look, Mom, that’s where Jesus brought me back to you.”
“The mother nearly wrecked her car,” Price said. “She never told her baby about God, Jesus, her near-death experience, nothing. All that happened when the girl was 8 weeks old. How could she remember that?”
When Price started hearing similar experiences from other parishioners, he felt like a fraud. He realized that he didn’t believe in heaven, even though it was part of traditional Christian doctrine.
He started sharing near-death stories he heard with grieving families and dejected hospital workers who had lost patients. He told them dying people had glimpsed a wonderful world beyond this life.
The stories helped people, Price said, and those who’ve had similar experiences of heaven should “shout them from the rooftops.”
“I’ve gone around to many churches to talk about this, and the venue they give me is just stuffed,” he said. “People are really hungry for it.”
Many pastors, though, don’t want to touch the subject because it’s too dangerous, says Lisa Miller, author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.”
Miller cites the experience of Rob Bell, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors.
Bell ignited a firestorm two years ago when he challenged the teaching that only Christians go to heaven in “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
The book angered many members of Bell’s church as well as many in the evangelical establishment. He subsequently resigned.
“Farewell, Rob Bell,” one prominent evangelical tweeted.
“It’s a tough topic for a pastor,” said Miller, a former religion columnist for the Washington Post. “If you get too literal, you can risk sounding too silly. If you don’t talk about it, you’re evading one of the most important questions about theology and why people come to church.”
If pastors do talk about stories of near-death experiences, they can also be seen as implying that conservative doctrine—only those who confess their faith in Jesus get to heaven, while others suffer eternal damnation—is wrong, scholars and pastors say.
Many of those who share near-death stories aren’t conservative Christians but claim that they, too, have been welcomed by God to heaven.
“Conservative Christians aren’t the only ones going to heaven,” said Price, “and that makes them mad.”
There was a time, though, when the church talked a lot more about the afterlife.
Puritan pastors in the 17th and 18th centuries often preached about heaven, depicting it as an austere, no fuss-place where people could commune with God.
African-American slaves sang spirituals about heaven like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They often depicted it as a place of ultimate payback: Slaves would escape their humiliation and, in some cases, rule over their former masters.
America’s fixation with heaven may have peaked around the Civil War. The third most popular book in 18th century America—behind the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—was “Gates Ajar,” written in the wake of the war, Miller says.
The 1868 novel was “The Da Vinci Code” of its day, Miller says. It revolved around a grieving woman who lost her brother in the Civil War. A sympathetic aunt assures her that her brother is waiting in heaven, a bucolic paradise where people eat sumptuous meals, dogs sun themselves on porches and people laugh with their loved ones.
“This was a vision of heaven that was so appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who had lost people in the Civil War,” Miller said.
Americans needed heaven because life was so hard: People didn’t live long, infant mortality was high, and daily life was filled with hard labor.
“People were having 12 kids, and they would outlive 11 of them,” said Smith, author of “Heaven in the American Imagination.” “Death was ever-present.”
The church eventually stopped talking about heaven, though, for a variety of reasons: the rise of science; the emergence of the Social Gospel, a theology that encouraged churches to create heaven on Earth by fighting for social justice; and the growing affluence of Americans. (After all, who needs heaven when you have a flat-screen TV, a smartphone and endless diversions?)
But then a voice outside the church rekindled Americans’ interest in the afterlife. A curious 23-year-old medical student would help make heaven cool again.
Raymond Moody had been interested in the afterlife long before it was fashionable.
He was raised in a small Georgia town during World War II where death always seemed just around the corner. He constantly heard stories about soldiers who never returned from war. His father was a surgeon who told him stories of bringing back patients from the brink of death. In college, he was enthralled when he read one of the oldest accounts of a near-death experience, a soldier’s story told by Socrates in Plato’s “Republic.”
His fascination with the afterlife was sealed one day when he heard a speaker who would change his life.
The speaker was George Ritchie, a psychiatrist. Moody sat in the back of a fraternity room as Ritchie told his story.
It was December 1943, and Ritchie was in basic training with the U.S. Army at Camp Barkeley, Texas. He contracted pneumonia and was placed in the hospital infirmary, where his temperature spiked to 107. The medical staff piled blankets on top of Ritchie’s shivering body, but he was eventually pronounced dead.
“I could hear the doctor give the order to prep me for the morgue, which was puzzling, because I had the sensation of still being alive,” Ritchie said.
He even remembers rising from a hospital gurney to talk to the hospital staff. But the doctors and nurses walked right through him when he approached them.
He then saw his lifeless body in a room and began weeping when he realized he was dead. Suddenly, the room brightened “until it seemed as though a million welding torches were going off around me.”
He says he was commanded to stand because he was being ushered into the presence of the Son of God. There, he saw every minute detail of his life flash by, including his C-section birth. He then heard a voice that asked, “What have you done with your life?”
After hearing Ritchie’s story, Moody decided what he was going to do with his life: investigate the afterlife.
He started collecting stories of people who had been pronounced clinically dead but were later revived. He noticed that the stories all shared certain details: traveling through a tunnel, greeting family and friends who had died, and meeting a luminous being that gave them a detailed review of their life and asked them whether they had spent their life loving others.
Moody called his stories “near-death experiences,” and in 1977 he published a study of them in a book, “Life after Life.” His book has sold an estimated 13 million copies.
Today, he is a psychiatrist who calls himself “an astronaut of inner space.” He is considered the father of the near-death-experience phenomenon.
He says science, not religion, resurrected the afterlife. Advances in cardiopulmonary resuscitation meant that patients who would have died were revived, and many had stories to share.
“Now that we have these means for snatching people back from the edge, these stories are becoming more amazing,” said Moody, who has written a new book, “Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.”
“A lot of medical doctors know about this from their patients, but they’re just afraid to talk about it in public.”
Ritchie’s story was told through a Christian perspective. But Moody says stories about heaven transcend religion. He’s collected them from Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists.
“A lot of people talk about encountering a being of light,” he said. “Christians call it Christ. Jewish people say it’s an angel. I’ve gone to different continents, and you can hear the same thing in China, India and Japan about meeting a being of complete love and compassion.”
It’s not just what people see in the afterlife that makes these stories so powerful, he says. It’s how they live their lives once they survive a near-death experience.
Many people are never the same, Moody says. They abandon careers that were focused on money or power for more altruistic pursuits.
“Whatever they had been chasing, whether it’s power, money or fame, their experience teaches them that what this (life) is all about is teaching us to love,” Moody said.
Alexander, the author of “Proof of Heaven,” seems to fit Moody’s description. He’s a neurosurgeon, but he spends much of time now speaking about his experience instead of practicing medicine.
He’d heard strange stories over the years of revived heart attack patients traveling to wonderful landscapes, talking to dead relatives and even meeting God. But he never believed those stories. He was a man of science, an Episcopalian who attended church only on Easter and Christmas.
That changed one November morning in 2008 when he was awakened in his Lynchburg, Virginia, home by a bolt of pain shooting down his spine. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a disease so rare, he says, it afflicts only one in 10 million adults.
After his violent seizures, he lapsed into a coma—and there was little hope for his survival. But he awakened a week later with restored health and a story to tell.
He says what he experienced was “too beautiful for words.” The heaven he describes is not some disembodied hereafter. It’s a physical place filled with achingly beautiful music, waterfalls, lush fields, laughing children and running dogs.
In his book, he describes encountering a transcendent being he alternately calls “the Creator” or “Om.” He says he never saw the being’s face or heard its voice; its thoughts were somehow spoken to him.
“It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I’ve always associated with human beings and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos … even irony and humor.”
Holly Alexander says her husband couldn’t forget the experience.
“He was driven to write 12 hours a day for three years,” she said. “It began as a diary. Then he thought he would write a medical paper; then he realized that medical science could not explain it all.”
“Proof of Heaven” debuted at the top of The New York Times bestseller list and has sold 1.6 million copies, according to its publisher.
Alexander says he didn’t know how to deal with his otherworldly journey at first.
“I was my own worst skeptic,” he said. “I spent an immense amount of time trying to come up with ways my brain might have done this.”
Conventional medical science says consciousness is rooted in the brain, Alexander says. His medical records indicated that his neocortex—the part of the brain that controls thought, emotion and language—had ceased functioning while he was in a coma.
Alexander says his neocortex was “offline” and his brain “wasn’t working at all” during his coma. Yet he says he reasoned, experienced emotions, embarked on a journey—and saw heaven.
“Those implications are tremendous beyond description,” Alexander wrote. “My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness; that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us.”
Alexander is writing another book on his experience. “Once I realized what my journey was telling me,” he said, “I knew I had to tell the story.”
“God, help me!”
Eben Alexander shouted and flailed as hospital orderlies tried to hold him in place. But no one could stop his violent seizures, and the 54-year-old neurosurgeon went limp as his horrified wife looked on.
That moment could have been the end. But Alexander says it was just the beginning. He found himself soaring toward a brilliant white light tinged with gold into “the strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.”
Alexander calls that world heaven, and he describes his journey in “Proof of Heaven,” which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for 27 weeks. Alexander says he used to be an indifferent churchgoer who ignored stories about the afterlife. But now he knows there’s truth to those stories, and there’s no reason to fear death.
“Not one bit,” he said. “It’s a transition; it’s not the end of anything. We will be with our loved ones again.”
Heaven used to be a mystery, a place glimpsed only by mystics and prophets. But popular culture is filled with firsthand accounts from all sorts of people who claim that they, too, have proofs of heaven after undergoing near-death experiences.
Yet the popularity of these stories raises another question: Why doesn’t the church talk about heaven anymore?
Preachers used to rhapsodize about celestial streets of gold while congregations sang joyful hymns like “I’ll Fly Away” and “When the Roll is Called up Yonder.” But the most passionate accounts of heaven now come from people outside the church or on its margins.
Most seminaries don’t teach courses on heaven; few big-name pastors devote much energy to preaching or writing about the subject; many ordinary pastors avoid the topic altogether out of embarrassment, indifference or fear, scholars and pastors say.
“People say that the only time they hear about heaven is when they go to a funeral,” said Gary Scott Smith, author of “Heaven in the American Imagination” and a history professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
Talk of heaven shouldn’t wait, though, because it answers a universal question: what happens when we die, says the Rev. John Price, author of “Revealing Heaven,” which offers a Christian perspective of near-death experiences.
“Ever since people started dying, people have wondered, where did they go? Where are they now? Is this what happens to me?” said Price, a retired pastor and hospital chaplain.
Price didn’t always think heaven was so important. He scoffed at reports of near-death experiences because he thought they reduced religion to ghost stories. Besides, he was too busy helping grieving families to speculate about the afterlife.
His attitude changed, though, after a young woman visited his Episcopal church one Sunday with her 3-year-old daughter.
Price had last seen the mother three years earlier. She had brought her then-7-week-old daughter to the church for baptism. Price hadn’t heard from her since. But when she reappeared, she told Price an amazing story.
She had been feeding her daughter a week after the baptism when milk dribbled out of the infant’s mouth and her eyes rolled back into her head. The woman rushed her daughter to the emergency room, where she was resuscitated and treated for a severe upper respiratory infection.
Three years later, the mother was driving past the same hospital with her daughter when the girl said, “Look, Mom, that’s where Jesus brought me back to you.”
“The mother nearly wrecked her car,” Price said. “She never told her baby about God, Jesus, her near-death experience, nothing. All that happened when the girl was 8 weeks old. How could she remember that?”
When Price started hearing similar experiences from other parishioners, he felt like a fraud. He realized that he didn’t believe in heaven, even though it was part of traditional Christian doctrine.
He started sharing near-death stories he heard with grieving families and dejected hospital workers who had lost patients. He told them dying people had glimpsed a wonderful world beyond this life.
The stories helped people, Price said, and those who’ve had similar experiences of heaven should “shout them from the rooftops.”
“I’ve gone around to many churches to talk about this, and the venue they give me is just stuffed,” he said. “People are really hungry for it.”
Many pastors, though, don’t want to touch the subject because it’s too dangerous, says Lisa Miller, author of “Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.”
Miller cites the experience of Rob Bell, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors.
Bell ignited a firestorm two years ago when he challenged the teaching that only Christians go to heaven in “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”
The book angered many members of Bell’s church as well as many in the evangelical establishment. He subsequently resigned.
“Farewell, Rob Bell,” one prominent evangelical tweeted.
“It’s a tough topic for a pastor,” said Miller, a former religion columnist for the Washington Post. “If you get too literal, you can risk sounding too silly. If you don’t talk about it, you’re evading one of the most important questions about theology and why people come to church.”
If pastors do talk about stories of near-death experiences, they can also be seen as implying that conservative doctrine—only those who confess their faith in Jesus get to heaven, while others suffer eternal damnation—is wrong, scholars and pastors say.
Many of those who share near-death stories aren’t conservative Christians but claim that they, too, have been welcomed by God to heaven.
“Conservative Christians aren’t the only ones going to heaven,” said Price, “and that makes them mad.”
There was a time, though, when the church talked a lot more about the afterlife.
Puritan pastors in the 17th and 18th centuries often preached about heaven, depicting it as an austere, no fuss-place where people could commune with God.
African-American slaves sang spirituals about heaven like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” They often depicted it as a place of ultimate payback: Slaves would escape their humiliation and, in some cases, rule over their former masters.
America’s fixation with heaven may have peaked around the Civil War. The third most popular book in 18th century America—behind the Bible and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—was “Gates Ajar,” written in the wake of the war, Miller says.
The 1868 novel was “The Da Vinci Code” of its day, Miller says. It revolved around a grieving woman who lost her brother in the Civil War. A sympathetic aunt assures her that her brother is waiting in heaven, a bucolic paradise where people eat sumptuous meals, dogs sun themselves on porches and people laugh with their loved ones.
“This was a vision of heaven that was so appealing to hundreds of thousands of people who had lost people in the Civil War,” Miller said.
Americans needed heaven because life was so hard: People didn’t live long, infant mortality was high, and daily life was filled with hard labor.
“People were having 12 kids, and they would outlive 11 of them,” said Smith, author of “Heaven in the American Imagination.” “Death was ever-present.”
The church eventually stopped talking about heaven, though, for a variety of reasons: the rise of science; the emergence of the Social Gospel, a theology that encouraged churches to create heaven on Earth by fighting for social justice; and the growing affluence of Americans. (After all, who needs heaven when you have a flat-screen TV, a smartphone and endless diversions?)
But then a voice outside the church rekindled Americans’ interest in the afterlife. A curious 23-year-old medical student would help make heaven cool again.
Raymond Moody had been interested in the afterlife long before it was fashionable.
He was raised in a small Georgia town during World War II where death always seemed just around the corner. He constantly heard stories about soldiers who never returned from war. His father was a surgeon who told him stories of bringing back patients from the brink of death. In college, he was enthralled when he read one of the oldest accounts of a near-death experience, a soldier’s story told by Socrates in Plato’s “Republic.”
His fascination with the afterlife was sealed one day when he heard a speaker who would change his life.
The speaker was George Ritchie, a psychiatrist. Moody sat in the back of a fraternity room as Ritchie told his story.
It was December 1943, and Ritchie was in basic training with the U.S. Army at Camp Barkeley, Texas. He contracted pneumonia and was placed in the hospital infirmary, where his temperature spiked to 107. The medical staff piled blankets on top of Ritchie’s shivering body, but he was eventually pronounced dead.
“I could hear the doctor give the order to prep me for the morgue, which was puzzling, because I had the sensation of still being alive,” Ritchie said.
He even remembers rising from a hospital gurney to talk to the hospital staff. But the doctors and nurses walked right through him when he approached them.
He then saw his lifeless body in a room and began weeping when he realized he was dead. Suddenly, the room brightened “until it seemed as though a million welding torches were going off around me.”
He says he was commanded to stand because he was being ushered into the presence of the Son of God. There, he saw every minute detail of his life flash by, including his C-section birth. He then heard a voice that asked, “What have you done with your life?”
After hearing Ritchie’s story, Moody decided what he was going to do with his life: investigate the afterlife.
He started collecting stories of people who had been pronounced clinically dead but were later revived. He noticed that the stories all shared certain details: traveling through a tunnel, greeting family and friends who had died, and meeting a luminous being that gave them a detailed review of their life and asked them whether they had spent their life loving others.
Moody called his stories “near-death experiences,” and in 1977 he published a study of them in a book, “Life after Life.” His book has sold an estimated 13 million copies.
Today, he is a psychiatrist who calls himself “an astronaut of inner space.” He is considered the father of the near-death-experience phenomenon.
He says science, not religion, resurrected the afterlife. Advances in cardiopulmonary resuscitation meant that patients who would have died were revived, and many had stories to share.
“Now that we have these means for snatching people back from the edge, these stories are becoming more amazing,” said Moody, who has written a new book, “Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife.”
“A lot of medical doctors know about this from their patients, but they’re just afraid to talk about it in public.”
Ritchie’s story was told through a Christian perspective. But Moody says stories about heaven transcend religion. He’s collected them from Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and atheists.
“A lot of people talk about encountering a being of light,” he said. “Christians call it Christ. Jewish people say it’s an angel. I’ve gone to different continents, and you can hear the same thing in China, India and Japan about meeting a being of complete love and compassion.”
It’s not just what people see in the afterlife that makes these stories so powerful, he says. It’s how they live their lives once they survive a near-death experience.
Many people are never the same, Moody says. They abandon careers that were focused on money or power for more altruistic pursuits.
“Whatever they had been chasing, whether it’s power, money or fame, their experience teaches them that what this (life) is all about is teaching us to love,” Moody said.
Alexander, the author of “Proof of Heaven,” seems to fit Moody’s description. He’s a neurosurgeon, but he spends much of time now speaking about his experience instead of practicing medicine.
He’d heard strange stories over the years of revived heart attack patients traveling to wonderful landscapes, talking to dead relatives and even meeting God. But he never believed those stories. He was a man of science, an Episcopalian who attended church only on Easter and Christmas.
That changed one November morning in 2008 when he was awakened in his Lynchburg, Virginia, home by a bolt of pain shooting down his spine. He was rushed to the hospital and diagnosed with bacterial meningitis, a disease so rare, he says, it afflicts only one in 10 million adults.
After his violent seizures, he lapsed into a coma—and there was little hope for his survival. But he awakened a week later with restored health and a story to tell.
He says what he experienced was “too beautiful for words.” The heaven he describes is not some disembodied hereafter. It’s a physical place filled with achingly beautiful music, waterfalls, lush fields, laughing children and running dogs.
In his book, he describes encountering a transcendent being he alternately calls “the Creator” or “Om.” He says he never saw the being’s face or heard its voice; its thoughts were somehow spoken to him.
“It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I’ve always associated with human beings and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos … even irony and humor.”
Holly Alexander says her husband couldn’t forget the experience.
“He was driven to write 12 hours a day for three years,” she said. “It began as a diary. Then he thought he would write a medical paper; then he realized that medical science could not explain it all.”
“Proof of Heaven” debuted at the top of The New York Times bestseller list and has sold 1.6 million copies, according to its publisher.
Alexander says he didn’t know how to deal with his otherworldly journey at first.
“I was my own worst skeptic,” he said. “I spent an immense amount of time trying to come up with ways my brain might have done this.”
Conventional medical science says consciousness is rooted in the brain, Alexander says. His medical records indicated that his neocortex—the part of the brain that controls thought, emotion and language—had ceased functioning while he was in a coma.
Alexander says his neocortex was “offline” and his brain “wasn’t working at all” during his coma. Yet he says he reasoned, experienced emotions, embarked on a journey—and saw heaven.
“Those implications are tremendous beyond description,” Alexander wrote. “My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness; that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us.”
Alexander is writing another book on his experience. “Once I realized what my journey was telling me,” he said, “I knew I had to tell the story.”
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Struggling with Holiness?
By Dennis Edwards:
Dear Friend,
Thanks for your second letter which I was so glad to receive. When I read it the part the struck me the most was when you wrote, “I struggle mightily with holiness.” I will address this point. Since you are already a believer, I will use scripture. I am praying that it will be a blessing to you.
We all struggle with our besetting sins common to man. Paul said, “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold unto sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. …For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwells no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil that I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwells in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (It is Jesus that is going to deliver and does deliver as we call upon Him) (Romans 7:14-25)
So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, (If we are not doing things which we know we should not, then we should not fall into condemnation. If we are doing things we know we should not, then we will probably need confession and prayer to gain victory over deep spiritual sins and problems) who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God. (Romans 7:25-8:8)
But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwells in you. …For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For we have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba; Father. The Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ, if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together. For I reckon that he sufferings of this present time are not to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. … Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and travails in pain together until now. And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body. For we are saved by hope: but hope that is not seen is not hope: for what a man sees, why does he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it. (Romans 8:11, 14-18, 20-25)
Likewise the Spirit also helps our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groaning which cannot be uttered. And he that searches the hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because he makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his promise…(Even our sins and problems can work together for God’s good if we confess and ask for prayer and get the counseling and support we need for greater victories).What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect?... Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? …. Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:26- 28, 31-33, 35-39)
”Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so easily beset us, (We may need help in laying our sins aside. It helps greatly to have others pray for you when you feel oppressed, or distressed, afflicted or attacked by the enemy. One can chase a thousand, but two can put ten thousands to flight.) and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the thrown of God. For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest you be wearied and faint in your minds. (Don’t faint in your mind, God will give you the strength if you come unto him with all your heart mind and body.) You have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin. And you have forgotten the exhortation which speaks unto you as unto children, My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, nor faint when thou are rebuked of him: for whom the Lord loves he chastens, and scourges every son whom he receives. If you endure chastening, God deals with you as with sons, for what son is he whom the father chastens not? (Hebrews 12:1-7)
Now no chastening for the moment seems to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. Wherefore lift up the hands which hang down, (Start praising God for the victory by faith!) and the feeble knees; and make straight paths for your feet, (In other words, don’t be doing the things the Lord has told you not to do.) lest that which is lame be turned out of the way; but let it rather be healed. Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord: looking diligently lest any man fails of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness trouble you, and thereby many be defiled; lest there be any fornicator, or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. …. See that you refuse not him that speaks. For if they escaped not who refused him that spoke on earth, much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from him that speaks from heaven….For our God is a consuming fire.” (Hebrews 12:11-16, 25 & 29) “By him therefore let us offer the sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of our lips giving praise to his name.” (Hebrews 13:15)
“Blessed is the man that endures temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to them that love him. Let no man say when tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempts he any man: but every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust has conceived, it brings forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, brings forth death. ….But be you doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.” (James 1:12-15, 22) “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he shall flee from you. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up.” “Be you also patient; establish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draws nigh. (James 5:8)
“Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he has committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. Confess your faults (Confession helps to take a stand against our sins and temptations and we can get the support and help of others) one to another, and pray one for another, that you may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much.” (James 5:13-16)
“Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these you might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; and to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things be in you and abound, they make that you shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But he that lacks these things is blind, and cannot see afar off, and has forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if you do these things, you shall never fail.” (2Peter 1:4-10)
“Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted…. Neither murmur you, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer. Now all these things happened unto them for exsamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. Wherefore let him that thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. There has no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that you are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that you may be able to bear it.” (1 Corinthian 10:6,10-13)
“Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be like crimson, they shall be as wool. If you be willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land.” (Isaiah 1:17-19) “Thou will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusts in thee.” (Isaiah 26:3) “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1John1:8-9)
(Again we see the importance of confessing, getting prayer and spiritual support from those that love us in the Lord, so that we can overcome our besetting sins, get victories and be the more than conquerors that God wants and needs us to be. Ted, don’t fall into this holiness trip where you are striving in your own flesh for righteousness. You will never be righteous enough. Stay on the straight and narrow and get prayer when you need it.
Don’t be doing things that you know you shouldn’t. For to him that knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin. In any case, you will never be holy enough or your own righteousness could have saved you. But it didn’t. It is His righteousness that counts. Stay close to Him. Obey His still, small voice in your heart and you can’t go wrong. But if you do, ask for help. God is more than willing to help if you will call upon him with all your heart.) Hope this helps. I have included a letter called “Flesh or Spirit?” which I think will help clarify what the Bible teachers.
http://fightforyourfaith.blogspot.pt/2013/05/flesh-or-spirit-mountain-streams.html Dennis
Hezbollah Aids Syrian Military in a Key Battle
By Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad, NY Times, May 19, 2013
BEIRUT, Lebanon—Syrian government forces backed by Lebanese fighters from the militant group Hezbollah pushed Sunday into parts of Qusayr, a strategic city long held by rebels, according to an antigovernment activist and pro-government news channels. If the advance holds, it would be a serious setback for opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.
Both sides called it one of the war’s most intense ground battles. The fight seemed likely to inflame regional tensions as Hezbollah plunges more deeply into the conflict in Syria, increasing fears of a regional conflagration.
The Syrian military hammered Qusayr, on the Lebanon border, with airstrikes and artillery, killing at least 52 people and wounding hundreds. By day’s end about 60 percent of the city, including the municipal office building, was under the army’s control for the first time in months, one activist said. Residents said rebels kept fighting into the night in Qusayr, killing a number of Hezbollah and government fighters.
Syrian state television said the army had “tightened the noose on the terrorists,” the government’s term for its armed opponents, by attacking from several directions. State news media said the army had “restored security and stability” to most of the city, killing many rebel fighters and capturing others.
The battle for the city, in heavily contested Homs Province, is viewed by both loyalists and government opponents as a turning point that could, in the words of one activist in Qusayr, “decide the fate of the regime and the revolution.”
“It is one of the hardest days all over Syria,” said the activist, Tarek, who would give only his first name because he was concerned for his safety. “If Qusayr is finished, it will be the end of the revolution in Homs.”
Mr. Assad, according to people who have spoken with him, believes that reasserting his hold in Homs Province is crucial to maintaining control of a string of population centers in western Syria, and eventually to military campaigns to retake rebel-held territory in the north and east. Many analysts say it is unlikely that the government will be able to regain control of those areas, but that it could consolidate its grip on the west, leading to a de facto division of the country.
Though many Lebanese Shiites support Mr. Assad, there is quiet consternation over the fact that Hezbollah fighters are being killed in battles with fellow Arab Muslims, in a country where they have many ties, rather than fighting the group’s primary enemy, Israel.
Perhaps seeking to address such concerns, Hezbollah, which depends on Mr. Assad for its shipments of weapons from Iran, recently acknowledged its military role in Syria more openly. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said the group would not allow Qusayr, or the Syrian government, to fall to a rebellion that it views as being instigated by Israel and the West.
For weeks, Hezbollah—which is both Lebanon’s most powerful political party and a militant group regarded by the United States government as a terrorist organization—has fought alongside the Syrian military and pro-government militias in villages near Qusayr.
The small city, about 100 miles north of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is crucial to supply routes for both sides. Qusayr is a conduit for rebel supplies and fighters from Lebanon, and it links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland for Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
The Syrian government appears to be trying to regain as much territory as possible, to strengthen its negotiating position while Russia and the United States try to organize peace talks for next month.
BEIRUT, Lebanon—Syrian government forces backed by Lebanese fighters from the militant group Hezbollah pushed Sunday into parts of Qusayr, a strategic city long held by rebels, according to an antigovernment activist and pro-government news channels. If the advance holds, it would be a serious setback for opponents of President Bashar al-Assad.
Both sides called it one of the war’s most intense ground battles. The fight seemed likely to inflame regional tensions as Hezbollah plunges more deeply into the conflict in Syria, increasing fears of a regional conflagration.
The Syrian military hammered Qusayr, on the Lebanon border, with airstrikes and artillery, killing at least 52 people and wounding hundreds. By day’s end about 60 percent of the city, including the municipal office building, was under the army’s control for the first time in months, one activist said. Residents said rebels kept fighting into the night in Qusayr, killing a number of Hezbollah and government fighters.
Syrian state television said the army had “tightened the noose on the terrorists,” the government’s term for its armed opponents, by attacking from several directions. State news media said the army had “restored security and stability” to most of the city, killing many rebel fighters and capturing others.
The battle for the city, in heavily contested Homs Province, is viewed by both loyalists and government opponents as a turning point that could, in the words of one activist in Qusayr, “decide the fate of the regime and the revolution.”
“It is one of the hardest days all over Syria,” said the activist, Tarek, who would give only his first name because he was concerned for his safety. “If Qusayr is finished, it will be the end of the revolution in Homs.”
Mr. Assad, according to people who have spoken with him, believes that reasserting his hold in Homs Province is crucial to maintaining control of a string of population centers in western Syria, and eventually to military campaigns to retake rebel-held territory in the north and east. Many analysts say it is unlikely that the government will be able to regain control of those areas, but that it could consolidate its grip on the west, leading to a de facto division of the country.
Though many Lebanese Shiites support Mr. Assad, there is quiet consternation over the fact that Hezbollah fighters are being killed in battles with fellow Arab Muslims, in a country where they have many ties, rather than fighting the group’s primary enemy, Israel.
Perhaps seeking to address such concerns, Hezbollah, which depends on Mr. Assad for its shipments of weapons from Iran, recently acknowledged its military role in Syria more openly. The group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has said the group would not allow Qusayr, or the Syrian government, to fall to a rebellion that it views as being instigated by Israel and the West.
For weeks, Hezbollah—which is both Lebanon’s most powerful political party and a militant group regarded by the United States government as a terrorist organization—has fought alongside the Syrian military and pro-government militias in villages near Qusayr.
The small city, about 100 miles north of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is crucial to supply routes for both sides. Qusayr is a conduit for rebel supplies and fighters from Lebanon, and it links Damascus to the Mediterranean coast, which is the heartland for Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect.
The Syrian government appears to be trying to regain as much territory as possible, to strengthen its negotiating position while Russia and the United States try to organize peace talks for next month.
Catholic rocker Matt Maher finds cross-over appeal among evangelicals
Omar Shamout, Religion News Service, May 17, 2013
Growing up Roman Catholic in Newfoundland, Matt Maher never imagined that his childhood interest in music would lead to a career as a Grammy-nominated, chart-topping Christian rocker—let alone a crossover artist featured on Christian radio and in evangelical worship.
After he stopped going to Mass as a freshman in high school, Maher wasn’t even sure about his own faith. The idea of maintaining a personal relationship to God seemed a foreign concept.
“Where I grew up, evangelical Christianity really hadn’t made any strides,” said Maher, now 38, describing the mainline religious culture of his wind-swept Canadian homeland.
Listen to any of his catchy, guitar-driven pop-rock anthems, such as his new single, “Lord, I Need You,” and it’s clear God is never far from Maher’s mind these days.
Maher’s 2009 album, “Alive Again,” reached No. 6 on Billboard’s “Top Christian Albums” chart, and he’s received two Grammy nominations for songs co-written for Christian singer Chris Tomlin. He just launched a five-month North American tour in support of his new album, “All The People Said Amen.”
“Lord, I Need You” is already climbing the Christian radio charts, proving that Maher’s lyrics strike a chord with Protestants too.
Maher said one of the things that reignited his love for Catholicism is what he describes as its “all-encompassing worldview” that welcomes people from all walks of life. He said the same principle drives his songwriting, and the title of his new album is intended to spread this message of “unity” and “community.”
Maher is one of the most successful Catholic artists to cross over into mainstream Christian rock and find an audience among evangelicals, said David Wang, a Catholic rock musician and lead singer of the Canadian band Critical Mass.
“The evangelicals are seeing that it’s the same style of music they’re used to hearing, but with a little more depth to the lyrics,” Wang said, adding that it used to be “unheard of” for Christian radio stations to play music by Catholic artists.
Jonathan Mason, an evangelical who plays bass in a group called the Andy Needham Band, said he often plays Maher’s songs when he performs at worship services.
“I don’t look at the lyrics of his songs and see things that contradict what I believe,” said Mason. “He’s just a great songwriter. He’s very Christ-focused.”
Maher said he didn’t find Jesus until 1995, when he moved to Phoenix to study at Arizona State University. His cousin started taking him to Mass, and one night she suggested they go to a youth group event organized by members of the parish.
Maher said he was shocked to see people his age talking about how their love for Jesus had changed their lives for the better. Maher recalled feeling very confused. “I thought, what is this, a cult?”
Turns out, it was a meeting of charismatic Catholics, part of a movement called the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Many observers have likened charismatic prayer sessions to Pentecostal revival meetings.
He went back to Mass and youth group meetings over the summer, though he still had “no clue what was happening on a spiritual level.”
But one night that fall, it all clicked. On the weekend of his 20th birthday, Maher watched his new friends perform a skit called, “The Broken Heart,” about a young girl who gets a new heart from God after giving hers away to a young boy.
As he watched, Maher experienced what he called a “profound awakening.”
“I was standing in the back of the room and I burst into tears,” Maher remembered. Not long after, he started writing worship songs for the group’s prayer sessions and devoted himself to performing Christian music.
Maher said he believes God called him “to write music with Protestants and be in ministry with them” as a means to strengthening his own faith.
None of Maher’s current tour mates, singer-songwriter Chris August, or the six members of the band, Bellarive, are Catholic.
“What’s fantastic about it is we’re all Christians from different denominations and we’re learning to understand each other,” Maher said. “It just means that we’re writing about mysteries that we don’t fully understand.”
