MCLEODS, New Brunswick, October 22, 2023 – One of the most difficult and heartbreaking situations we can encounter as born-again believers is dealing with a mother whose beloved child has died of suicide. In one recent incident brought to my attention, the daughter had killed herself after years of unsuccessful attempts. The mother, in tears, wanted to know whether her daughter had made it to Heaven.

Christian tradition holds that suicides cannot be buried in hallowed ground, and so those who’d killed themselves are usually interred (if in fact they are interred) outside “official” graveyards. No funeral mass is said for them. The reason for the corpse effectively being banned from receiving Christian burial rites is that it is assumed the deceased did not make it Home.

But hold on there a second. I was born-again from atheism over 24 years ago, and I died before I was born-again. I don’t just mean I was spiritually dead; certainly, I was spiritually dead, but I was physically dead, too. I died on a deserted beach in South Australia, and in the early stages of my physical death, God came to me and made me an offer. Not in words but in a series of images, he showed me that if I chose to forgive someone I thought I could never forgive, the pain that had driven me to my death would disappear; if I chose not to forgive, the pain would not only continue but grow worse.

The pain at that point was so unbearable, I didn’t care what I had to do to make it stop, including forgiving someone I considered unforgiveable. So, wanting only for the pain to go away, I chose to forgive. As soon as I’d made my choice, God showed me that the pain I felt – the pain that had so overwhelmed me, it killed me – was nothing more and nothing less than the sum total of the pain I’d inflicted on other people throughout the course of my life. The pain I’d felt was the pain I’d earned.

When I came back to life, everything was still in deep darkness, like it was when God made me the offer. Then I heard a loud, long inrushing of wind… and I found myself lying on the beach facing the ocean. I could see nothing but sand, sea, and sky.

And all the pain was gone.

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I mention my rebirth experience here briefly because people need to know I was dead. I died an avowed atheist and came back to life a born-again believer. God came to me and made me the offer when I was dead, both spiritually and physically. I don’t know why he brought me back to life instead of leaving me to rot on the beach, but the fact remains that he did bring me back to life in every conceivable way.

If I, the miserable sinner that I was, could be forgiven my sins after physical death, it must also be possible for others to be forgiven theirs after physical death.

So this is what I would say to those who, like the tearful mother, are wondering about the spiritual fate of their loved ones who die as unbelievers. God came to me after my death and gave me one last chance to make things right. No, I hadn’t committed suicide, but I’d certainly died deep in my sins as an unbeliever and I had attempted suicide previously. I know for a fact that God can work in souls even after the body dies, because he worked in mine; I also know for a fact that bodies can be resurrected, as we know from scripture and as I know from personal experience.

A few weeks after my own rebirth and resurrection, when I was pulling out some white hairs from my head (don’t ask lol…), I discovered that the roots were brunette, which is my natural (that is, pre-white) hair color. All of the white hairs I pulled out that day were about an inch brown at the root. This should not be, but it certainly could be if a body were brought back to life through an extreme energy burst or some unknown phenomenon. Jesus mentions in scripture about God being the only one who can turn hair black (or in my case brown), and that he surely did at my resurrection. It wasn’t just a spiritual rejuvenation that happened to me on the day of my rebirth, it was a physical one, too.

Judgement is reserved for God alone. None of us knows for sure (unless God tells us) whether we’ll make it all the way Home, so we have no right assuming that other people will be condemned. God can work in the souls of sinners even after physical death, like he worked in mine, making those souls an offer and giving them one last chance, like he did for me.

I believe that as born-again believers we are here to give spiritual guidance and hope to those who are open to receiving it. It’s never wrong to give people hope. There is no such thing as “false hope”. If a grieving mother wants to know whether her suicided unbelieving daughter made it to Heaven, tell her that with God all things are possible and that conversions can happen not just on deathbeds but after death as well. God is merciful and does everything he can to bring souls Home to him, even when to others it looks like it’s “too late”.

His mercy doesn’t stop at physical death. If it did, you wouldn’t be reading this because I wouldn’t be here to write it for you.