Did you learn…

Life. All of us experience life either as another obstacle to get around, over or through; or as a school, where you get knocked around until you learn from your mistakes and graduate to the next lesson. I’m not much into the dualistic mentality these two offerings present and tend to view life in a “both/and” frame of mind. Life is a school where you must navigate a course filled with a number of obstacles, each one trying to kill you – mentally, emotionally and physically – and it is your responsibility to learn how to overcome these issues by recognizing their pattern of occurrence throughout the journey you’re on. At the end, after having traveled your path with success, and sometimes failures, you get the rich reward of…

It gets kinda murky here. Various religions of the world, and even those few non-religions, have a view of something “other worldly.” Let’s face it, at the end of your life is a point we call death. You go through life to learn, and then die. What is the point of it all? That is the $64,000 question!

In the western religious framework, the deceased enters into a heavenly paradise and receives judgment for the life they’ve lived. A bad life’s work, according to some strands of believing, will force the deceased to spend the rest of eternity in the darkest regions of hell tormented by unquenchable tongues of fire. Conversely, all faiths abide in the notion that a good life’s work rewards the deceased with a heavenly home and reward. What often is not stressed in either of these options is…

Advances in medical treatment, from hand washing to prescription drugs, have today created an entirely new segment of people who have encountered near-death experiences (NDE). These people of all ages and social classes have truly died for several minutes and then been revived. Many of these people have documented stories of “other-worldly” experiences meeting loved ones who had gone on before them; or of seeing a bright light at the end of tunnel they traveled through; or being enveloped in an atmosphere of unimaginable love and serenity; and of course, the proverbial “life-before-my-eyes” sequence – the point behind my writing this.

The NDE people who experienced this cinematic cavalcade of past life experiences all admit that they were being judged. The criteria for judgement was one simple question which they were asked in a variety of forms: “Did you learn to love?” The judgement, which came after viewing an entire lifetime of actions and their results upon all the other people the deceased interacted with, was rendered by the harshest of judges – the deceased!

There are testimonies from a multitude of people who claim how a person who experienced an NDE is different in their interactions after the NDE then how they were prior to it. They claim how with the NDEr there is a greater level of compassion for all people, a humility which allows people to reach for their highest aim. It’s as if they’ve passed through a place and found their purpose to living.

Now I know there are many of you who will dismiss this writing because in your fundamental mindset there is no record of any of this in your bible. However, I think there is, and plenty in just the New Testament alone. The trouble is congregations have never been shown what to look for. Recall, all these advances in medicine really haven’t been around except for the last 150 years. Coming back to life wasn’t something that was very possible when a person died back in the days of the bible writers. Except…

Saul was a vile, maliciously religious man who felt it his duty to protect Israel from anyone who believed that a crucified criminal was the messiah and king. Sure, we all know how Saul persecuted the church in its early days by killing and imprisoning the earliest believers across the land. Then one day while on his way with his companions toward the city of Damascus to arrest the followers therein, something happens to Saul. I know how the story reads, yet, how do you explain something you’ve never encountered, something which your language isn’t prepared to define? One thing all who experience an NDE confirm is that there aren’t words capable of describing or even able to capture the magnitude of the event.

What if Saul, knocked from his donkey, suffers a blunt force trauma which enables him to have an NDE. Consider how this event forever changes the character of Saul and causes him to be called Paul.

Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, Doesn’t have a swelled head, Doesn’t force itself on others, Isn’t always “me first,” Doesn’t fly off the handle, Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, Doesn’t revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. Love never dies. (1Co 13:4-8 MSG)

Did Saul learn to love? Maybe Paul has been telling us the answer to this question all along, but we never considered how he came to the answer. Paul claims in 2 Cor 11:23 that he suffered many deaths – not fictious ones – but life stopping events which catapulted him out of his mortal form into a spiritual condition. I believe that it is quite possible that Paul suffered one of these events just prior to his first visit to the city of Corinth. I make this claim based upon the reading of 1 Cor 2 where I feel that Paul is trying to convey a reality which he just encountered but has a limited language set which would enable him to confidently proclaim his truth.

Consider how Paul becomes recognized as the apostle of grace, a revelation which comes through multiple NDEs. How could it be any other way? A person must discover whether the most important lesson in life – did you learn to love – will allow them to return grace-filled in order to resolve the acts they have done which they alone judged as unloving.

While a rise in NDEs may be a recent occurrence in humanity, the results, which have been documented in multiple studies, have the same impact on the lives of people just as Paul experienced in his life. If life is a school where we are here to learn a valuable lesson, did you learn to love, seems to determine whether we live in the grace we need to accomplish it. It might not be simply that we need to die to self as much as we simply just need to die so we can see our life pass before our eyes and judge our actions. Then we’ll truly know if the lesson has been learned or we need to come back a resolve the breach.