Tonight a friend and I talked about experience, faith and death.
It started with a conversation on heaven and all the different views on it and on afterlife in general. There are so many ideas, like flutes and harps, or wings and halos. And to be honest, I was rather fascinated with that before now. Whether I was LDS, wicken, pagan, taoist, it mattered a lot. I've faced death enough times to honestly consider this topic.
But since accepting Christ into my life, things changed. As I said to this friend, “I used to care about the afterlife or heaven and I guess I still do somehow. I remember asking Carol questions about it when we first started talking. But when I accepted Christ then I shrugged it off and haven't though about it much since then. Because past this point there's not really anything I can do to change where I'm going to go after I die. And if it's good enough for God, then it's good enough for me and I don't think I need to worry myself about heaven's details.”
She said that it made sense, since in other religions you worry about the afterlife because you still have the chance to change it. And if you can't, you don't worry much. “It shows your depth of faith in God, Jen. We do believe, as Christians, that we can't earn our way to heaven, but often in life we try to manipulate it anyway as if we could.”
I thought about what she said and agreed that it was true. Then I thought about how many times in my life where I've been at that moment where you are looking death in the face and you see rushing at you. In that moment you realize that this may be the last moment you have on earth and you go through an amazing amount of thought in those one or two seconds. Not a whole life flashing behind your eyes thing, at least not for me, but beyond the fear is a serious query of where are you going when you die.
When I saw the car would smash into the mountain, when I saw the rocks rushing up to meet us over the waterfall, I had fear that this was it, or worse, that there was an eternity that I hadn't been prepared for and was doomed because of it. This last time as I was lying on the road, possibly going to be run over by a car as I lay helpless, it was different. This time, I could feel God was there. I didn't worry about heaven or hell for once. He'd be there and that was what really mattered at that moment. As I thought this and expressed some verbally, the depth of my change hit me. I'm not who I was.
I suppose that means I'm learning to trust God.
The conversation shifted to experience. Just the day before, I had someone think I was 30 after talking to me because I'd “experienced so much life in 22 years, that it could give many a 50 year old a run for their money” as she said. My friend there also said, “There's not really a replacement for experience. We can sympathize and empathize to our hearts content, but once we've gone through it, we understand fully in a way we never did before.”
I told her, “One experience I haven't had fully, but understand much more now than ever before is cancer. I've watched friends go through it and lost many. I've held hands and helped cheer up. But this time... I have now experienced what it is like to work out and work at building your strength up, working so hard, knowing that you are about to go through another procedure that will strip all of that work away. But more than that. To do this again and again, knowing that all the struggle will be for nothing except to keep you strong enough to be stripped of your strength. You don't know if you'll ever win the battle and sometimes you even know that you won't. It's tougher than I could have ever known before. And being a Christian, mentally, you know that Christ is all you need, so you shouldn't be depressed by all of this. Depression isn't really acceptable as a side effect where other stuff is, though, really it's natural.”
My friend said, “I've watched my mom get diagnosed and die from cancer. And despite how close I was to her, you just verbalized what I could see in her struggle better than I ever could have said it. But I've never been through that myself, so I can only imagine.”
Depth. I suppose that one word describes much of what I've gained during all of this. Depth in relationships, including with God. Depth of understanding. Depths of humility. Depths of pain and depression. Depths of joy. Depths of peace. Depths of trust in God.
