Afterlife: Fact or Fiction?
When I was nineteen-years-old, I worked part-time as a respiratory therapist. On one of my first calls to the emergency room, we worked on a five-year-old boy who had been hit by a truck. As we treated him, the story unfolded: he had been walking to his first day of kindergarten and was the only child of young parents. Despite hours of resuscitative care, he died from multiple injuries. In shock, I stumbled out into the hall just in time to see his parents’ faces contort in grief as a doctor told them the news.
I went outside, shook my fist at the sky, and cursed God. How could an all loving, powerful, and knowing God allow a little boy to die so tragically? What kind of world was this where innocent children suffer and die and people experience such losses? Afterwards, I entered a period of agnosticism and experienced the emotional pain and confusion that accompany a bleak spiritual perspective.
Over time, this and other difficult events in my life motivated me to search for answers to life’s existential questions such as: ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Is there a loving, just God? Why is there so much suffering? What happens after I die?’ You know the questions. I began a quest to prove to myself whether or not God and the afterlife really exist.
After thirty years of intense searching, I’ve assembled convincing proof that we each really are timeless spiritual beings who are here to learn, love, serve and enjoy. There is a Divine Presence whose love and fairness know no bounds. We suffer when we forget to view life from a spiritual perspective. For example, that little boy’s "tragedy" compelled me to find sensible answers to life’s most difficult questions. Since then, thousands of people have been helped by my outreaches and I’m just getting warmed up. So was his death a tragedy or a victory?
The word ‘afterlife’ is really a misnomer; it’s all life. Life is an unending adventure with periodic changes, like birth and death, that don’t end but merely alter the journey. Many cultures celebrate the transition from formed to formless dimensions and rightly so. Those who pass on have graduated from this physical experience. Their souls evidently fulfilled required lessons and moved on to the next set of growth opportunities.