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Do Hard Things Conference Philippines

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Death Is Certain

As a child, my mind tirelessly worked around thoughts, questions, imaginations and childhood fantasies (which I still often do despite my age, well, I'm not that old). One of them was dying. I didn't want to die. I would like to live forever. I've even picked the age I wanted to be like forever. I wanted to be fifteen. Its years are in between childhood and that of adulthood where I can still play and still take matters seriously. Fifteen was both close to 12 and 18 so I decided I wanted to be fifteen forever. Well, that was until I read Tuck Everlasting.

I, then, decided that I wanted to die and that I should die.

But the question why must people die still lingered. Why didn't just God create people not to die? And as I grew I began to understand little by little His design for man. As children usually have, I have had strings of questions (and still do) that sometimes upset adults. How would the earth have been if Adam and Eve did not fall into sin?

People generally want to be certain of all things especially that of the future but one thing certain that they certainly don't like is death. They want to live on forever in this world where in a funny sense people and things die everyday. In short, a living and dying world. Dying was here even before we were born. It's something certain to happen to everyone. There is a time to be born and a time to die. Even if I was born, I am to die. You are to die.

"He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men;
yet they cannot fathom what God has done
from beginning to end." (Ecc. 3:11)

But even if we die, God designed something wonderful for us after death. Another life, life much more wonderful than anything in this world. Only that He gives us the choice to choose whether we'll have life after death or death after death.

You might not understand so much what I'm saying if you don't believe that there is something in store for us after death. It's written in the whole of the Living Book, the Bible. And by His words I live. For to me to live is to know and cherish Christ and to die is a very great gain.

For all its worth, I'll wager that there is life after death. As put by the famous philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal,

"If I believe in God and life after death and you do not, and if there is no God,
we both lose when we die.
However, if there is a God, you still lose and I gain everything."


What will you choose?