Afterlife

Most of my blog posts are flourished from my Catholic Faith. But the tenets of my faith to love yourselves and others are universal to every human. So if you are reading this and you are not Catholic, I hope you still enjoy and can take something out of it. 

An answer to the question of why I want to go to heaven is that I want to see my family and friends in the afterlife. I would have spent my whole earthly life with these people, and to not spend eternity with them, praising God, makes me nervous and frightened for death.

When you deeply care about someone it goes far beyond the physical. It goes deep down, right to the soul. When you care for someone so much, you obviously want the best for them. And the ultimate best wish for someone is for them to go to heaven.

So how do we go about doing this? Haven’t you noticed when a friend of yours is heading down the wrong path, how difficult it is to address said friend. Don’t we have doubts of confronting this person? We have a voice telling us, “No! This is not our place to tell them what to do. No! You will lose this person from your life if you point out their wrong doings.” We feel shy, awkward, and nervous about talking to this person. And next thing you know, the voice inside us over takes any reasoning, and we ultimately turn the blind eye to the friend’s behaviors. What we are losing by remaining comfortable and not speaking up is our friend’s chance at eternal salvation. Isn’t it a common fear held by many to be alone? Think about being alone forever. For all of eternity.

It is said that saints enter Heaven right away. Many of us are familiar with and have prayers asking for saint’s intercessions through Christ, such as Padre Pio, St. Therese, and St. Jude, to name a few. But many of us forget that these saints had troubled upbringings just as ourselves. We forget that these saints had some of the hardest trials and tribulations that they had to overcome.

These saints are humans just like us. But by letting Christ takeover their hearts. They were transformed with love. They transformed others. They led lives of pure excellence.

These are not isolated incidents. These are not works of pure fiction. These are everyday people who, by letting Christ take over their lives, were able to take on the world. And this world is filled with the hardest battles our souls can take. God does not give us anything that we cannot handle.  But we cannot keep looking away when something is going wrong. We cannot be held back in guiding other people. We cannot be shy about our faith towards God.

Maybe we don’t all have to go gung ho and list all the things someone is doing wrong. Maybe we could just say a few comforting words, lend a shoulder to cry on, smile to strangers. That feel good factor inside of us, when someone commits an act of love, even of the smallest nature. Where does that love originate? Is God not pure love? Which King would leave his paradise to become human, be tortured, humiliated, and endure the cross, only to give us hope for something better than this life? 

When we commit acts of love we are aligning ourselves directly with Christ. And this is bringing pieces of Heaven down here on Earth.