One Minute After You Die

"The other day I was browsing in the travel section of a bookstore. Potential travelers were buying maps and guidebooks on Hawaii and Europe. Some were purchasing booklets to help them learn some phrases of a foreign language. No doubt they had saved their money, blocked out their vacation schedules, and purchases airline tickets. All that just for a two-week journey.



I wondered how many of them were giving at least that much attention to their final destination. I wondered how many were reading the guidebook, studying the map, and trying to learn the language of heaven. Europe and Hawaii seemed so much more real than the unseen realm of the dead. And yet, even as they planned their vacations, they were en route to a more distant destination."

The above quote is from One Minute After You Die by Erwin W. Lutzer. I have only read the introduction to the book and it reads with a certain urgency.

"Those who find themselves in heaven will be surrounded with friends whom they have known on earth. Friendships once rudely interrupted by death, will continue where they left off. Every description of heaven they have ever heard will pale in the light of reality. All this, forever.



Others--indeed many others--will be shrouded in darkness, a region of deprivation and unending regret. There, with their memories and feelings fully intact, images of their life on earth will return to haunt them. They will think back to their friends, family and relatives' they will brood over opportunities they squandered and intuitively know that their future is both hopeless and unending. For them, death will be far worse than they imagined."

The idea of living with regrets is bad enough when as human, as finite creatures, we can only comprehend a temporary state of existence. Imagine living with regret forever. Forever! That there would be no end to that feeling. Consider a time you hurt someone you love and never asked for forgiveness, that is such an ill feeling, yet, apart from God, that feeling will remain forever. That ill feeling will permeate your soul for all eternity. I think about times when I am not necessarily living in God's peace, for whatever reason, and how I live with a hopelessness. I live with things eating away at me. I never have stopped to consider that I have always thought of those feelings as being temporary. I always know that God will bring me through it. The introduction to this book has made me try to imagine what it would be like to have those feelings forever. To have to live with memories, regrets, darkness and ill feelings for eternity, forever, is really a scary kind of thought...But true. Those feelings would not ever cease to consume the soul. Not ever! What hopelessness! In this life we can sometimes muddle through the "not-so-good times" by thinking that "tomorrow is another day" but what if tomorrow was never going to come? What if our temporary existence suddenly passed on through to eternity and we were stuck with those poor decisions from that moment on?