Wednesday, April 16, 2014

In the Blink of an Eye... (More Passover Meditation)

...your life can end.  In the blink of an eye, you could die.  It happens all the time.  One moment you're alive, the next moment you're dead.  I even watched my second-born son die before my very eyes eight and a half years ago.  You don't imagine your child dying before you.  One moment he was breathing, the next moment he was white as a sheet, and I couldn't bring him back.  No amount of breathing for him or screaming at him did the trick.

The following is a small portion of my Passover night entry in my prayer journal, the entries of which are to my Eternal Father God and also for my Lord Salvation the Anointed Firstborn:

I also thought about how quickly our lives can end.  I had told the kids that, in the afternoon before this Passover night, because a squirrel had been electrocuted.  That explains why the previous morning or two mornings before, there was a loud boom, followed immediately by the electricity flashing off and back on.  Then later Nathan went to get ice, and he came across that terrible wreck.  Again, it's a reminder that your life could end just that suddenly, or at least be changed drastically in that instant.

I was getting the kids ready for bed at the beginning of the evening of Passover, and my husband (currently agnostic) left to go get ice, just about a ten- to twelve-minute drive from here.  A good while had passed, and he sent me a message to say he was ok, that there had been a wreck.  He had been on his way back, and he'd noticed a pole down and the line across the road.  Then he saw the crashed vehicle.  He was the first on the scene of the accident, quickly followed by a young guy and gal, the latter of which turned out to be a friend of the victim.  My Love and the younger guy searched for the driver.  The one guy looked in the demolished vehicle.  At that time my husband heard the victim.  He was making a horrible "snoring" noise at a quick rate and was totally unresponsive.  Nathan was sure he was witnessing the man dying.  He was lacerated all over, and it appeared by his position that his arm(s) and neck and vertebrae were broken.  He'd been ejected at least ninety feet from the vehicle.  Nathan instructed the younger guy to not attempt to move the victim, and he left to drive down the road to get cell service so that he could call 911.  Before he got in the truck, though, the girl who had stayed at their vehicle asked whether her friend was going to be ok.  He told her he was in trouble and needed immediate help, so she broke down.  When he got back, another couple had stopped who also knew the victim.  A different girl asked my husband whether he was alive, and he could said that he was breathing, but it wasn't good, so then she broke down.

This was all a very traumatic ordeal.  Nathan came home pale and distraught.  Thankfully, though, this story has a good ending.  He found out the next day which hospital the man was in and called to check on him.  The injuries were considered "moderate."  Amazingly his head did not receive any injuries.  The nurse said it was a miracle.  He had a broken vertebrae and something else (I think that one arm was broken) and then cuts all over, none of them major.  He'd only finally come to a few minutes before Nathan called and was informed of where he was and that he'd been in an accident.  His terrible breathing had been as I suspected, due to the traumatic nature of what had happened to him.

His accident was almost certainly due to folly, driving too fast on that potentially very dangerous road.  Thankfully the fellow will live to be given the opportunity to change, to make sure he's driving safely and to urge others to do so.  My husband is also apt to drive too fast much of the time, and this helped him to realize what can happen.  He said he'd resolved to slow down on these roads.

Unfortunately for the aforementioned squirrel whose life ended abruptly by electrocution, he or she will not get a chance to change its ways and not run down the electrical lines anymore.  Sometimes the same goes for people.  Sometimes an act of folly will be the last thing a person does in this life.

There were a couple different things that triggered meditation from these events, one of them being that our Lord's friends must have reacted in much the same way as those frightened girls of the vehicle accident victim, when the Lord's friends heard of his plight and saw him beat and then later staked/nailed to wood to hang.  I could imagine their cries and hysteria, and it caused me to be grieved, too, as if I was really there.

But more so I meditated on the fact that we do not know when our last moment of life in this body will be.  We do not know when we will draw our last breath.  And when we die, do we want to die with hope and expectation or with dread and fear of the second death?  Christ is our Passover Lamb who has made it possible for us to escape the second death!  But it's not a guarantee for all.  That is what links the message of the Passover to the message of Unleavened Bread.  We must repent of our sin—transgression of the Ten Commandments—if we want to be spared the second death in the lake of fire. Christ was sacrificed, but the prerequisite to being begotten by the Royal Sperm—the God Spirit—is repentance!  We must make the choice to obey the Law (Acts 5:32; 2:38), and then we will receive the Helper, which is God's very own spirit DNA.  But we must keep ourselves pure so as not to corrupt the gestation and spontaneously abort, or we will not make it to our birthday at Christ's next coming.

We need to carefully examine ourselves each Passover and Unleavened Bread week and note which areas need work in our lives.  We also need to watch other brethren and spend more time with those who are zealous and strong in their walk and be more cautious about others, because "a little leaven can leaven the whole lump" (1 Cor. 5:6; Gal. 5:9).  I've observed very well over the years that you become like the company you keep, so we should be diligent to keep the right company.  I prefer to keep my closest friends as ones who value truth the most, are not lukewarm, who will set a good example for me, and who will reveal my errors (which doesn't always require them saying anything; sometimes it just takes seeing that they're doing it right, and I'm not).   I also want to make sure that I'm a good friend and keeping my friends on the right track.

Younger siblings, by nature, mimic and follow the older ones, regardless of whether the older one(s) are doing what is right or wrong.  Since we are fallen, though, it does not come natural to us to follow our Lord Brother the Righteous Firstborn.  We must make a voluntary choice to do so, and then we must choose wise siblings in the Royal Family to imitate.  When things are working the way they should, you are imitating them, and they are imitating you, and you keep each other on the right path that way.

What about you?  Have you come close to death before or have been close to someone who has unexpectedly died or nearly died?  Did it cause you to re-examine your life?

You do not know when you will die!  You can be healthy and full of life one moment and be out of the game the next.  You can be rich one year and poor the next.  You can walk on two legs one day and be sitting in the hospital with no legs the next.  You could see one hour and be blind the next.  We should be thankful for all that we've got and be diligent to make the best of what we've got when we've got it.  We must repent and stay on the path of righteousness while we can.

In the blink of an eye, your life can end.  Do not wait until it's too late.

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