This weekend I had another one of my 4:00 a.m. wake-up calls
and my thoughts went to the word, soul. I
knew I needed to get up and write it all down, but God must have known I needed
sleep so he didn’t push me. But that
Spirit, ever so Holy, has been needling me since, and I still can’t get the
thought of the soul out of my mind. Now
here it is All Souls Day, a flashing sign to get to work if ever there was
one.
Last year my sisters, my cousin the Artist, one of the twin
girls, and I spent a day with my aunt, the Sister, and I recorded the whole
day on a small voice recorder I bought just for that purpose. Being a nun afforded my aunt the
honorary title of Family Spiritual Advisor.
My mother never put much credence in anything her children told her, but
there were three people to whom she heeded all advice: her sister the Sister,
any priest, and any doctor (in that order).
If my aunt said it to be so then it was and that was the end of that. So it was no surprise many of the questions
we asked my aunt that day leaned towards spiritual matters. One conversation went like this,
Aunt Frances: “No, because they say when you die you don’t
think of anybody. It’s such peace, such happiness you don’t see anybody. Just God. You know, we try to figure God out; we can’t
do it. We can’t. It’s impossible. It’s impossible.”
I could see the disappointment in my family’s faces and hear
it between the lines of the recording.
We all want to believe we will be reunited with our loved ones, that
they will be there waiting to embrace us like the end scene in “Ghost”. I want to believe that, truly, I do, but I’m
beginning to shift towards my aunt’s beliefs and another idea entirely.
You see, I believe we humans can only think in an earthly
way because that is the way we are wired.
The bible says so, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the
ground..” Genesis 2:7. Our meager human
minds cannot grasp the reality of heaven.
We can only imagine it from the smidgen of description that has been
revealed in God’s Word. We have too much
dusty ground in us to understand the whole truth.
That verse continues, and it is this last part which holds
the basis of my theory, “… and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
and man became a living soul.”
God gave life to mankind and we became living souls. Have
you ever counted how many times the word, soul, appears in the bible? I have, with the help of an electronic bible,
of course. In the King James Version the
word, soul, appears 459 times in 432 different verses. The bible pairs the words heart and soul
about 73 times. As in Matthew 22:37 when
Jesus said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all
thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Our soul
is as much of our being as our heart or our brain.
All of these little tidbits are meant to bring you to my new
revelation. I think when God breathed life into Adam and
made him a living soul He gave a bit of himself in each of us. We strive for heaven not because we will be
reunited with individuals, but because our souls must be reunited with God’s. Each of us carries within us a piece of a
puzzle that fits in a certain place.
When we get to heaven our souls will interlock with each other’s and stitch
together as a collective, eternal voice of praise. In this way, yes, we will be reunited with
those who have gone before us, but in a way we cannot possibly understand while
our bodies remain grounded. I am not a theologian and I
did not spend hours studying God’s Word to come to this conclusion, so this is only my
opinion, not gospel. You should study
for yourself and listen for God to reveal Himself to you.
As my aunt said, “You know, we try to figure God out; we
can’t do it. We can’t. It’s impossible. It’s impossible.” I have to believe she’s telling the truth. My mother would insist on it.
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