It's early in the morning and I receive a telephone call. Someone in the hospital needs a visit from a pastor. A patient is dying. He is well past 70. I arrive thirty minutes later. He doesn't have to say anything. The questions are written all over his anxious demeanour. "Why is this happening to me? This shouldn't be happening to me! This is not the way it's supposed to be!" Yet it has happened to every member of the human race, without exception.

I reflect as I drive back to the office later that day. Why do we inherently doubt our mortality? Why do we act as if the great crisis will happen to everyone else but me? Why do we act surprised when it happens to ME?

I think there are good reasons why we do not easily accept reality on this level. Somewhere, we have picked up the notion that 'this is not the way it is supposed to be.' Death and sickness are unwelcome intruders. I believe our primal memories know better. We were made for the Garden of Eden, and although we were banished from that garden, we remember. We once had an immortal soul.

A former acquaintance of mine was in the final stages of Alzheimer's. He spent a lifetime fishing Lake Huron. He cannot remember his wife's name and shows no signs of knowing her. Yet, he remembers how to sew nets. At night (his wife tells us) as he is going to sleep, he grabs the edge of his bed sheets, and he thinks he is holding on to the lead rope of a net, and his fingers deftly go through the intricate motions of sewing net onto the rope. Doctors say that there is such a thing as muscle memory, whereby long after the mind forgets its stored up facts, the body will remember its motions and actions.

I would suggest that we have a kind of genetic memory too, which tells us that the Creator's original intention with us was something quite different than our present reality. Why else do I feel like at age fifty-two, I've only just begun to learn about life? We smirk knowingly at the cottage plaque that says "We get too soon old and too late smart!" Why else do most other middle agers and seniors tell me that they still feel like a kid inside?

Of course, I believe in our intended immortality, not just because I feel it instinctively, but also because Someone who claimed to represent God many years ago insisted that it was so. He said, ""I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die."

That's quite a bold and arrogant statement to make, unless of course it's true. Whether Jesus really was the Son of God is hotly debated in many circles today. It's interesting to observe though how dramatically those words affect a person in their last hours. That's usually where the debating stops and reality asserts itself. I've seen it all too often.