You Fall Asleep, You Wake Up
I was about ten, in my doctor’s office, having been taken there directly from the playground where my arm had been broken. My adult surmise is that since it was a simple break my doctor was able to set it in his office. What I remember is they put gauze over my nose and mouth and told me to close my eyes and breathe. I remember seeing elephants. Then I was awake and found my arm was in a cast.
They had been dripping ether onto my mask, and I fell asleep from it. For those who were watching, time passed as normal. My mother was beside me, and told me later of nausea as I came out of it. Of that, too, I have no memory. For me, that was just missing time, a strip of some few minutes that had been snipped out of my life. I fell asleep, I woke up—and for me, there was nothing in between.
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This is peculiar to anesthesia. The chemicals and their administration are much more precise today than a half century ago, but they still do the same thing: they take away a piece of your life. It continues to amaze me, whenever I have what we delicately refer to as a “procedure,” that one minute the doctor is talking to me, and the next minute I’m opening my eyes in a different room. Of course, it’s not the next minute: it’s an hour later, say. But that hour never happened to me. Or more exactly: it’s an hour during which “I” was absent.
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Sometimes I’ve thought this will be our experience of the inauguration of the life of the world to come. Everyone who has died will wake up together. But it won’t be that, say, some have slept for thousands of years and others for hundreds and others for just ten years—and of course, a few for only a few days. Rather, that waking up moment will be exactly the same moment for everyone. The “in-between time” won’t have been in-between for them. It will be time in which they just weren’t there, weren’t in the place where time moves on.
Time belongs to the universe; when we sleep in Jesus, we are not in the universe, and thus not in either time or space. I think this is true because Jesus is not somewhere in the universe. But, of course, I have no idea what those words mean. Who can know what it means to “ascend into heaven”? All we know, really, is that he didn’t go to Mars—or Mesquite or any other such place.
The fascinating thing is this. We will fall asleep, and we will wake up.
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Out & about. Last Sunday the Human Life Review posted “Mental Pictures Catching up with our Minds.” I begin:
“Our little guy is now the size of my thumbnail.”
This fellow was telling me how his wife was doing during her pregnancy. They had recently visited their obstetrician and, as is customary these days, had seen their growing child via sonogram.
I was struck by the change that had occurred since our own children were conceived. Back then, prenatal life was still pretty much shrouded in darkness.
You can read the rest of it here: https://humanlifereview.com/mental-pictures-catching-up-with-our-minds/