One time, after a very stressful day at work, on my way home, I suddenly felt a certain difficulty breathing. It’s as though no matter how I tried to inhale, I couldn’t take in enough air to sustain my breath.
Just then, a sudden fear struck me at that moment as I started to feel unable to continue normal breathing. In fact, I was afraid I may not be able to continue breathing at all! And we all know what that means. No breath means no life. And no life means dead end.
Oh my God! I didn’t want to die yet! And in my panic, my heartbeat started to accelerate more and more, which only created a vicious cycle since the more I panicked, the more I found it difficult to breathe, and the more I found it difficult to breathe, the more I panicked.
Soon I felt the palm of my hands becoming numb. Any minute then, I knew I may just faint and who knows where I’d end up when I wake up, that is, if I ever wake up at all. The mere thought of blacking out scared me. I didn’t want it to happen, I didn’t wanted to die. Not yet. I haven’t lived my life yet the way I wanted to, the way I knew I should have lived it.
All my previous religious knowledge seemed insufficient to calm my fears. I asked myself, “What if there is really no life after death? What if there is no immortal soul in the first place? What if scientists are correct in saying that we are all just a collection of cells, and the consciousness we know as the soul comes only from a very sophisticated network of brain cells?”
If I die right now, scientifically speaking, how can God be able to raise me up again? When all the cells in my body, specially in my brain, are destroyed, how can my memory ever be restored again? But then I thought, thinking the other way around, is it impossible for this to happen?
Is it not possible to restore something that which has been lost? To fix something that has been broken? If the corrupted files in my computers can be restored and recovered, can God not restore my body and soul so I can live again as the whole person I am today?
We can do so many things through our computers today. We can recover files, we can transfer information from one medium to another. If we look at a diskette or a compact disc, it really seems nothing but a small piece of crap. For what can it do? It can’t even serve as a plate for us to eat. Its extrinsic value is so small it can easily be disregarded by those who do not know its true value inside.
But if loaded in a computer, then the codes contained in it are decoded, codes that turn into magnificent lights and sound, into valuable information, and into a huge amount of data that used to occupy a whole room of books! The CD is our soul, and the computer is our body. There are many things that the soul cannot do by itself, but there are many things that the computer can’t provide if we don’t have the necessary files.
Just then, I thought it very much possible for God to upgrade our bodies, just as it is possible to upgrade our own personal computers. And it is similarly possible for our souls to fit into these new bodies as the information from a mere CD can be read by an upgraded computer model. What’s important however is that the CD remains intact and unscratched. In our case, that the soul remains whole so it can be compatible with the new bodies God will provide us with.
The thing about hope is that it’s a positive force that shines the most when it’s dark. When everything’s going well, we hardly notice it’s there. But when things go against us, when our dreams fade and when we see no immediate reprieve from our troubles, that’s when hope does its best work for us.
"Where Hope Can Be Found"