Hi

Thanks Connie, Marina and Elyse for being willing to share something of your spiritual journey.

Truth, death and beyond

• If you could take a pill that would make you live for a thousand years, would you? Why?

Yes, because I’m scared of dieing as I’m not sure what happens after a person dies. No one has come back from the dead to tell us. Also I’d like to see what happens in the future.

A journey of discovery

This class is about exploring issues like; life after death and so I encouraged the students to look into this issue. However, they rightly pointed out that there is a lot of different ideas, different religions and it is difficult to know which one is true.

What is truth?

Truth is something that corresponds to reality. For example a pencil is not a snake. It is important to understand this principle because it will affect the decisions that we make. For example: you can have a relationship with someone and find that they were only using you, which hurts. So we discussed what truth is. It is something that is verifiable with evidence.

Someone came back

I asked whether they had heard of anyone coming back from the dead. The only person that we could come up with is Jesus Christ, he is said to have died and been buried three days and then rising from the dead. This generated a fair bit of discussion. How do we know he rose, we have not seen him for ourselves. This is a very good question. The account of Christ’s resurrection was written in the Bible during the life time of eye witnesses. They report that more than one person saw Jesus risen. In fact at one time Christ appeared before 500 people. If this did not happen then Christianity would not have continued because it would have been obvious to be untrue. For example if I went around telling people I had turned the container of pencils into a frog the students would quickly correct this by saying that I hadn’t. Here we have some verifiable evidence for Christ’s resurrection.

Family

• What is your position in the children of your family (oldest, second, middle etc) would you change this if you could?

One student shared that she was the oldest of three with another on the way. This brought with it trust (and privileges) from her parents as well as extra responsibilities. It was noted that the girls of the family regardless of whether they are older or younger are expected to do more of the cooking and cleaning than the boys. This at times is a source of frustration. I shared with the students that Jesus was very good to women; he treated them with respect, with equality, speaking and teaching them. This was unusual for that time. Over the ages women have been denigrated a lot. Even in this modern age things are much the same.

• What is something that you always put off doing for as long as possible?

Assignments; although the truth/reality of their existence can’t be ignored forever and they have to get done. Here is a classic example of not being able to change something by believing in it. You can’t make assignments go away by believing you don’t have them.

Summary

We have discussed a lot in a short time: What is truth and its importance to decision making? Our fear of death and what happens after. Our family’s values and how that impacts our lives.