Afterlife

If God was at the beginning of everything, that makes God very, very old.

People don't live to be that old, do they?

A very strange thing seems to happen to human people.

They do this thing they call "dying", and then they seem to be gone for ever.

They don't get extra lives, like computer sprites.

Does God ever die like people?

No way.

People get old because in this world we live our lives in Time,

always going in one direction, like a pen writing words across a piece of paper.

But God doesn't live in Time.

God always was, always is, and always will be.

But everything in this world comes to an end.

Everything that lives also dies.

Plants grow from a tiny seed, and sometimes live for hundreds of years,

but in the end, all growing things return to the earth from which they came.

Some fish and birds, insects and animals, live for a very long time as well,

but some things live their whole lives in a few hours.

Humans begin life weak, and needing to be looked after,

and if they live long enough they get weak again,

and sometimes an old person needs to be looked after like a baby.

But not everyone lives to be very old.

Death can come with an illness, or an accident,

and can come out of the blue, with no warning.

So it is as well to remember,

because all living beings get to meet death sooner or later.

All the things that we do in this world, we leave behind.

All the wonderful machines that we make get old and broken, and end up on the rubbish heap.

All the palaces we build will in the end be worn away by the rain and wind,

like the mountains that in the end get washed into the sea.

Golden girls and lads all must, like chimney sweepers, come to dust.

But isn't that rather silly,

making all these people live,

and then wasting everything they have done in their lives by making them die?

Well, it would be if this world was all there was, and death was the end of everything.

But it isn't,

and it isn't.

Human bodies come into this world as babies, live for some time and then they die.

But bodies aren't all there is to humans.

In fact, a lot of the time they just park them, and leave them to rest.

Most people like forgetting about their bodies for a while each day.

They like lying down in their beds and going to sleep.

There is nothing scary about it.

But a lot of people are scared of dying, because when they die they don't come back.

What they do, of course, is go somewhere else.

So what's it like, this 'somewhere else'?

That depends on what they did when they were alive.

In this life, people get to choose what they do and how they behave.

All through their lives, people get to know what is good and bad for other people and themselves.

If they choose to do good, during their lives people get to feel all good things after they die.

And if they choose what is bad during their lives, when they die they will feel very bad indeed.