Face it.
We all fear death. Maybe not the act of dying, but we fear the irreversible consequences. We fear losing the ability to communicate with those we love. We fear not being able to fulfill plans and dreams. We fear not being able to comfort those who mourn our passing. We fear losing all that comprises our identity – all our knowledge, all our memories, all the secrets of our lifetime. We fear taking that inevitable journey from which there is no return.
Most of all, we fear the unknown. The key to conquering the fear of death is to eliminate that “unknown” factor.
There is an expression many people use – “everything happens for a reason.” If we apply our logical thought process, we might discover the reason for death and reveal the benefits (yes, benefits) of transitioning from the human body form to the spirit form.
First of all, avoiding death is not an option. Yet why, we might ask, why would a loving God subject us to such a fate? Perhaps the answer is simply that there isn’t room or resources on the earth to support all the human lives which have existed and will exist in the future. Perhaps living a human existence on earth is a luxury for a spirit being, and limiting that experience allows opportunities for the next group of beings to enjoy that life. Perhaps each of us enjoys a life because those who lived earlier made room for us by passing on to the spirit realm.
Perhaps, in order to fully experience human life, we need to function with a limited ability to sense and recognize the totality of existence. In that state, we are blessed to always have unending goals to learn and understand all the secrets of our existence. Eventually, we reach the limits of understanding that we can absorb.
Death allows us to transition into a state where we can finally understand it all, and that is the ultimate benefit. In that state, we can fully understand the big picture – God’s big picture.
Conquering the fear of death means recognizing, and accepting the fact that, only through death, will we have the opportunity to experience the joy of full knowledge and appreciation of our existence.
When we begin to apply logic to our efforts to embrace faith, we look for evidence that justifies our faith. Once we open our eyes beyond the traditional church teachings, we might discover that there are many stories of people who have had the experience of passing beyond death’s door and returning to earthly existence. The commonalities of those stories are the clear evidence that we seek.
Among those commonalities are the expressions of unconditional love and peace, and a full appreciation of the mysteries we have sought to understand in our earthly days. Most of those stories conclude with the statement that the person who has had this experience, no longer fears death.
Once we accept the legitimacy of these tales of life after life, the unknown we feared is now the known, and we can conquer the fear of death, just by doing what faith has always taught.
Believe.