If there's one thing I've been blessed with, it's good health. It shouldn't be the case considering the nonsense sold here in the US including the "bio-engineered" cookies I was eating before I noticed it on the ingredients list. I have a relative that just turned 100. With any luck I'll make it there and hopefully be lucid as well (I'm sure Hive will help me keep my mind sharp).

There have been so many people who've passed here, many of them young (nobody should die at 23, for example). Months after month get the "Did you hear about so-and-so? I just spoke to him last week!" Accidents, murders, cancer, or the good old standby, heart attacks. Its strange to be speaking to a vital person full of energy one week, and then the next week, they're in a box.

I started thinking about death when my sister tole me about it as a little boy. She said: "Dying is when you go to sleep, and you never wake up." Something about that description stayed with me enough, so that even as a boy I was always thinking about what I would leave behind if/when that day comes.

If say "if" because in my (backslidden) religion we believe in something called 'The Rapture' where in The Bible it says in the book of 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17: "Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord."

And what that means to us is that right before everything goes to hell here on Earth, Jesus will arrive here in the clouds (without setting foot on the ground) and "snatch up" the living believers. So if you're lucky enough to be a believer and are alive when that happens, you won't have to experience physical death.

Nice, huh? Be nice if it actually happens because no one wants to die.

But right now we do, so I try to live my life knowing that somebody up there is watching everything I do, and that I will have to give account of it all, good and bad.

Last year we lost a guy to cancer in his mid 40s, crazy. There was no sign that anything was wrong with him and I can still remember our last conversation when he said he saw me in the store. There was no long drawn out illness. One day he simply failed to show up when he was expected, and after a few days missing, a welfare check was done, and he was found on the floor.

I hope it was peaceful.

NDEs

I've read accounts of people who have had NDEs or Near-Death Experiences, and they all report the same thing. Going down a long tunnel towards a bright light. Appearing before God and going through a LIFE REVIEW, where they see everything they've done from birth to death in a short period of time.

What surprises all of them (in cases that I've read about) is that God speeds past the good deeds they've done, and SLOWS DOWN the scenes where they've committed evil acts.

They also report experiencing that act not only from their perspective, but also being in the body of the person they're hurting, AND witnessing and experiencing the ripples of consequences their act had on everyone who's life was connected to that person.

Here are just a few people who've had the chance to get a glimpse of the other side:

However, not every NDE is a beautiful experience of light, colors, un conditional love, and a feeling of never wanting to leave. In fact, some of them are experiences of Hell. The following is an account of exactly that:

Something to think about when you're planning on "sticking it" to someone, right?

Picture that guy in the pickup truck that mowed down all of those people in New Orleans. He died, and went through his life review and had to experience not only his own death, but the demise of all of those people he ran over and killed. PLUS, he has to experience the effect that those deaths had on the friends and family members left behind. The "ripples" of his actions.

I always wondered what a terrorist bomber goes through. He hops on a bus and blows it up killing 40 people along with himself. He expects to be transported to "Paradise" but instead finds himself standing in front of God facing all of the people he murdered.

Just picture that.

Life is fragile, even more-so if you live in the gunslinging mecca of the USA. Please keep that in mind as you go about your daily walk. Try to lighten the load of the good people around you, and live your life as if God is watching. Because he is.