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THE TRANSITION
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, May 20, 2025 – Life after death is either a goal, a pipedream, a delusion, or a guarantee, depending on what you believe in. For me, life after death is a promise that I hope will be fulfilled as it was for Jesus and for others mentioned in scripture whose bodies changed from earthly to heavenly in a twinkling. This is the life after death I’m aiming for.
But getting to that heavenly body will require a radical transition. We won’t just wake up one day and find that our body is now perfect and immortal. No amount of diet, exercise, plastic surgery, or wishful thinking can make us perfect, let alone immortal: Only God can do that for us.
The transition from an imperfect mortal body to a perfect immortal one involves physical death. Just as we died spiritually to be reborn, gaining God’s Holy Spirit in the process, we’ll someday also die physically in order to gain physical immortality. And if the ecstasy of our spiritual rebirth is anything to go by, I expect the gaining of our heavenly body will be at least equally as ecstatic, if not more so. If this is the case (and I truly believe it is), it’s something to be desired; not feared, desired.
This transition is the resurrection. It’s what Jesus preached and what he underwent in the privacy of his tomb cave, after which he emerged unrecognizable both in form and voice, though his soul remained the same. It’s worth noting that being resurrected is not the same as being raised from the dead. Elijah raised a boy from the dead, as did Elisha. Jesus also raised several children from the dead and then famously raised his friend Lazarus. But these “raised” people retained the same earthly bodies (that is, imperfect and mortal) they had prior to their death, and so they weren’t resurrections. They were a return to life, much like people can be returned to life through medical interventions like defibrillators, heart massage, CPR, or adrenaline injections. In modern parlance, they’re NDEs (near-death experiences) rather than permanent deceases.
Resurrection requires the permanent decease of everything that is mortal. We’re not recycled back into a different body, like the deeply flawed reincarnation theory proposes; our body is transformed from mortal to immortal. When he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection, Jesus explained that he was not yet “ascended” but was in the process of being so. Still, in his newly immortalized body, he was able to appear and disappear at will and to have his wounds probed without feeling any pain. He then later literally rose up into the air in front of several witnesses, disappearing into the clouds. A mortal body cannot do these things.
Every one of us who makes it to Heaven will transition from an imperfect mortal body into a perfect immortal one. Our body will change at our resurrection the same way as our spirit changed at our rebirth, but our soul will stay the same because God made our soul to last forever. Did you know that your personality is seated in your soul? And just as your personality didn’t change at your rebirth, it also won’t change at your resurrection. The “you” you are now will continue for all eternity, shedding at physical death only those personality traits that don’t belong in Heaven. Hopefully, when our time comes, there won’t be that many traits to shed.
I don’t know about you, but I am so looking forward to the transition! I’m not going to do anything to hasten it (God doesn’t want us to do that), but I’m also not doing anything to delay it. I’m not interested in prolonging my days here on Earth; I’m grateful for whatever time God allots me, but I’m not going to beg for more time, like Hezekiah did. I want to be where Jesus is and to go through the transition that Jesus went through to get there. I want to be perfected and immortalized in the way that God promises us we will be and Jesus showed us we can be.
I want to be resurrected. I want to ascend.
I want to transition.
I want to go Home.
LIFE AFTER DEATH? WHAT TO SAY WHEN UNBELIEVERS DIE
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.
LAZARUS
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, July 8, 2016 – In Dante’s Inferno, Satan is imprisoned in the lowest pit of Hell. He is held in place not by chains but by the ice of a frozen lake which was formed by his tears and fanned frozen by his perpetually moving wings. Other condemned beings are in the lake with him, frozen in various agonizing contortions. When viewed from outside Hell, Satan appears to be frozen upside down.
Cryonics is the ‘science’ of preserving living organisms (such as human bodies) by freezing them in liquid nitrogen. The human “patients” are frozen upside down.
(You can’t make this stuff up.)
The human patients are frozen upside down and stored in a pod with up to three other patients and/or a couple of severed heads. What drove them to agree to such an extreme form of live burial is the hope that someday they’ll be brought back to life and made “whole” by future medical advances.
Cryonics patients are considered legally dead but not actually dead. They are dead insofar as their heart has stopped beating, but they are not beyond resuscitation. They could be resuscitated, but instead their blood is drained and replaced with antifreeze. And then they’re hung upside down like a bat out of Hell and immersed in liquid nitrogen to freeze them solid.
The Egyptians were going for the same effect with mummification. The aim was to preserve the body toward some future resurrection and immortality. The mummies were entombed in a sarcophagus much like cryonics patients are entombed in a pod, which is for all intents and purposes a high-tech sarcophagus. Cryonics enthusiasts can only hope that cryonics will prove at least marginally more successful than mummification.
In ancient Egypt, it was mostly the so-called 1 percent who were mummified – the rich and famous; the pharaohs and their wives: maybe even some popular entertainers. Today, cryonics clinics take everyone, but given the price attached to the procedure, it’s mostly the 1 percent who can afford it.
The part that gets me about cryonics is that the patients are not actually dead. I was dead but not actually dead when I went through the process of being reborn. That’s when God gave me the chance to make a choice between forgiving and not forgiving. When I chose to forgive, I was exorcised of demons and then brought back to life. Lots of people are declared legally dead (or “brain dead”) and then come back to life. Legally dead is not actually dead. Believe it or not, people hanging upside down in liquid nitrogen are not actually dead.
Before I was born again, I used to suffer from frequent bouts of sleep paralysis. This was an ongoing occurrence from the time I was a child. As I grew older, I started to see figures sitting just beyond my full range of vision. I knew these figures were really there because, unlike figures in my dreams (which I saw with 20/20 clarity), the figures that appeared in my sleep paralysis episodes were blurry (I am almost legally blind). All I could make out was that the figures were clothed in black and had red eyes. I know now that these were demons, but at the time, as an atheist, I had no context for understanding who or what they were. I hated the sleep paralysis episodes, and dreaded each time they occurred. I have not had any since being born again 17 years ago.
Sleep paralysis is a horrible state to be in. You try to move, but you can’t. You’re frozen, trapped inside your own body. You can’t even scream. Imagine if cryonics were similar to sleep paralysis. Imagine if you’re in a state that is lucid enough to experience spiritual encounters like in sleep paralysis, but that you can’t communicate this to anyone because you can’t move. This, to me, would be a form of Hell on Earth.
Organ donors allegedly experience this very type of Hell on Earth. Donors who are declared brain dead may not in fact be actually dead. To bypass this inconvenience, and given that the organs are the most viable when the heart is still beating, doctors administer a drug that paralyzes the donor’s body so that the organs can be harvested as quickly as possible. No anesthetics (pain killers) are administered, just paralysis drugs. Opponents of this practice (including doctors and nurses who formerly supported organ transplantation) allege that some donors can actually feel their body being cut open and their heart, liver, pancreas, eyes, etc., being removed. They allege this because the deceased patients, who have been declared legally dead because they are allegedly brain dead, respond to the incisions by quickened heart and respiration rates and try to pull away from the scalpel; some even thrash around even after being administered paralysis drugs. I suggest that the terms “excruciating” and “terrifying” would not be sufficient to describe what these poor souls are experiencing, and yet this practice happens every day and has the seal of approval of most health care systems the world over.
Organ donation is, in effect, not that far removed from ancient rituals that saw sacrificial victims being held down while their still-beating hearts were ripped from their chests. The old practice required people to hold the victim down, whereas the new practice relies on paralysis-inducing drugs. “The more things change….”
When Satan is finally let loose from his prison, his second coming will in fact create genuine Hell on Earth. At that time, there will be very few believers remaining and everyone else will be damned. The damned will proudly bear the highly visible mark of Satan, and the believers will bear the invisible seal of God. The Age of Mercy will have ended (meaning, no more conversions) and the Age of Judgment will be in full swing. This is not a world I want to be part of.
And yet, the not-quite-actually-dead patients frozen upside down have willingly agreed to the cryonics “treatment” with the hope of some day returning to what they imagine will be a medically advanced world. The book of Revelation paints quite a different picture of future Earth, but sadly I doubt whether any cryonics enthusiasts are familiar with the New Testament.
Raising people from the dead was a hallmark of Jesus’ ministry; Satan and his demons often mimic what Jesus did, so raising cryonic patients from the dead would be right up their alley.
Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead after he was four days in the grave. He let Lazarus stay dead for four days to show that he was actually dead, not just legally or brain dead (or, as Martha described it, “stinking” dead). Many people began to believe Jesus was the Messiah after he brought Lazarus back to life.
Cryonics patients anticipate a significantly longer entombment than four days. I can only imagine what kind of spiritual state these resurrected people will be in, if and when they are brought back to some semblance of life some day.
I can only hope and pray that I’m not here to find out.
A BORN-AGAIN BELIEVER 