Whoops!

Heb 9:27 And inasmuch as it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment,
Heb 9:28 so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.

The quote above is from the Translation of the Bible that I have come to love to read. The NASB is as close as one can get to a word for word translation in the English language, I'm taught. Word for word translations, rather than idea for idea translations, pull no punches, they just give the facts, as close as possible to what God has left for our study and inspiration.

This week a Student Doctor 0f Neurology had the task of informing me that they were pulling away from any attempts to heal my, previously Remitting, Recurring Multiple Scleroses and were moving into the Maintenance Mode to keep me comfortable as I die. It was a great opportunity to witness and that is just what I did. I smiled, she looked distressed, and I told her I was on my way to Heaven and that only this shell would die and that I would just be transformed. That made the rest of the hour long encounter go so smoothly and she looked so relieved.

As a soldier in Vietnam I was not a Christian and I came face to face with death. I had to learn that for those thirty months I was a dead man walking and that just as we said many time every day, “It don't matter!” You cannot find your best friend blown into so many pieces that you cannot count nor recover all of them without deciding to either make them pay or to become completely useless. And if they could do that to Hienen, I knew they could do that to me. That was another reason to make them pay and being in control, to some extent of other men's lives I could not morn for more than a couple of hours, somebody else might get killed by my negligence.

When I decided I was dead and it didn't matter it set me up for a difficult culture shock when I arrived home alive. It took me the better part of eight years to wake up and stop fighting things when I was awake. Forty some years later the ghosts has, mostly, been put to rest at night with a miracle drug. But I digress.

Every man must die the first death where we shed this earthly body and transform into eternity. My last real hero, Ed Freeman, mostly known to folks like me as sir, passed this year and that broke my heart but I know where He is and that is a comfort beyond any imagination. “Snake,” so called because he could fly a helicopter lower than Snake Manure went to Heaven and so am I when this shell gets to tired to push on further.

It is a sweet hope that we Christians hold for a truth. Hope, the normal or lost man's term becomes reality for the saved man when the Holy Spirit indwells us at salvation. Every Christian knows that they were born to die the first death so that they might enter into the Kingdom. I will post this in several places on the net in the hope that one dying might read it and ask Jesus to forgive their sins and give to them eternal life, just as He did for me.

It's a simple thing, if you believe that Jesus died for your sins all you need do is to call out to Him for forgiveness and He will save you from Hell and the bottomless pit. (Rom. 10:9, 10)