Grateful

Grateful
I am grateful for many things in my life. I am grateful that I was given life by God. I am grateful that He created me. I did not create myself. I did not will myself into existence. I had no control over the events that led up to my existence. Sometime around 1956, in Harriman, Tennessee, George Arlen Bryant was working at a gas station that his father owned, and Janice Ann Brown came to the gas station with a flat tire. They met, dated and got married in 1957. They had four sons within a span of five years. I was the third of four boys born to them. These are the basic events that led up to my conception and birth.
God uses many different circumstances to bring people into existence. Some of the circumstances appear to be good, some appear to be bad. We have no control over how we got here. It could be rightly argued that the ones producing me did have control, to an extent, but I did not. My parents could have chosen to use many different types of birth control, including surgical, and never conceived me, or my brothers. They could have chosen to abort me, but they did not. My mother could have married a different man and conceived a baby that was born on the exact same day as me, but it would not be me. I would not exist. A different egg in her uterus could have been fertilized. She may have had the baby on what is my birthday. She may have named the baby Daniel Mark Bryant. But it would not be me. I would not exist.
Whatever circumstances produced your life, whether in the material sense, they are considered good or bad, does not negate the fact that you have been given life. Life is a gift. We do not control when it starts, and we do not control when it ends.
Suicide does not end anyone’s life, the life of their spirit. All suicide does is end the life of the physical body temporarily, so it is not a solution to anything. People who think of suicide as an escape from existence are badly mistaken.
I have heard people make the argument that abortion can be justified because a baby born in certain circumstances will suffer and be better off if it was never born. That is a flawed argument based on the idea that we, as human beings have the right to decide who will live and who will die because we do not want to see them (potentially) suffer. People have suffered, in one way or another, since the beginning of time. Suffering is a part of human life for everyone, in one way or another. There have been billions of people that have been born into or lived in extremely troublesome and evil circumstances who have lived powerful, influential, and productive lives. God allows us to grow, by His grace, through suffering. Life is a gift from God, no matter how it is brought about, and no one has the right to take it away because of some misguided idea that, in so doing, we are eliminating suffering.
Once you have been given life, you exist as an eternal being who is designed to live forever. You have an eternal soul that never ceases to exist. (Some would argue that soul and spirit and different things, but essentially, that is a pointless argument. Your spirit, the thing that animates your flesh, is eternal. When the spirit gives life to the flesh, the living being is considered a soul, a living being.)
Life is a great mystery that science cannot solve. I have a theory that every spirit must live in a body to be able to interact with the rest of reality. I do not think there is any Scriptural proof to substantiate the idea that there is any such thing as ghosts, or disembodied spirits that are capable of interacting with the physical world in which we live. This is a great mystery that we cannot understand. The scriptures foretell of a resurrection when everyone’s spirit will be reunited to their bodies, either in a glorified state, or in a state of damnation.
We have a belief within the Christian faith that when a person dies, their spirit goes to be with the Lord until the resurrection, and is then reunited with their body, and the body is glorified, or, if they are of the damned, the spirit is held in prison in Hades until the resurrection, when it is reunited in a state of damnation.
Everyone alive who believes this must admit that we do not understand this because, if we are currently living, it is something we have never experienced, and we have nothing to compare it to.
How does our spirit exist apart from its being disengaged from our dead body, if a spirit has to have some kind of body in order to interact with reality? I have no idea, and neither does anyone else currently alive, because as I said previously, none of us have experienced it. Having said that, I do have a theory, but I do admit that it is just a theory, and I would never teach it as a doctrine, or anything like that, just something to consider:
The Scripture reveals to us that God is an eternal being, without beginning or end. He has always existed. How do we explain that? We can’t. We have never experienced that, and we compare everything to what we know, or have experienced, so we can’t explain it. To try to figure it out would drive a man mad. It cannot be done. Knowing that God is an eternal being, I have to conclude that, with God, there is no such thing as time as we understand it. We live our entire earthly life along the trajectory of linear time as we understand it. We have no other way of understanding our existence. God exists in the eternal Now. If our spirit goes to be with God when we die, or if it goes to Hades, it enters into the realm of the eternal Now, so what we perceive as a lapse of time between the time a person’s spirit is reunited to their body, in the realm of God, is perhaps no time at all, as we understand time. Admittedly, that is a difficult concept to grasp.
I am grateful for the wonderful gift of life. It is a great tapestry of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, but when we turn it over to God, He uses it to conform us to His image, and in eternity, the place we are going, that is all that matters. Life will either turn you to your Maker, or drive you away from Him, into the abyss of hell. There are no other options.