Life After Life!

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

Rabindranath Tagore

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Leaving this life is just like going from one room to another and closing the door.

DBB

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Let us believe that when death comes, and it will come sooner or later to every human being, we can be assured it will come as a friend who lovingly leads us to our eternal home, Heaven. 

CLA

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Death is but a passage out of a prison into a palace.

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Living is death; dying is life. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that, citizens; on this side, orphans, on that, children; on this side, captives; on that, freemen; on this side, disguised, unknown; on that, disclosed and proclaimed as the sons of God.

Henry Ward Beecher

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What we call life is a journey to death. What we call death is the gateway to life.

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I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.

Lyman Abbott

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To die is to go and live in another home.

CLA

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I am standing on the seashore. A ship spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. I stand watching her until she fades on the horizon, and someone at my side says, “She is gone.” Gone where? The loss of sight is in me, not in her. Just at the moment when someone says, “She is gone,” there are others who are watching her coming. Other voices take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!” That is dying.

Henry Scott Holland

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This world is to be likened to the porch; the world to come unto the palace.

The Talmud

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When Robert Browning’s father lay dying - he was past eighty at the time - his cheerfulness alarmed the attending physician. “Does the old gentleman know he is dying?” the doctor inquired of his daughter in a low voice.

The father overheard him and smiled, “Death is no enemy in my eyes.”

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Peace, peace! He is not dead,

he does not sleep -

He hath wakened

from the dream of life.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, writing about
the death of his friend John Keats

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The Apostle Paul wrote, “The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). The physical dies away, but the spiritual is forever.

DBB

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Life! We have been long together,

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather,

’Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps ’twill cost a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away; give little warning;

Choose thine own time.

Say not, ‘Good-night!’ but in some brighter clime,

Bid me, ‘Good-Morning!’

Anna L. Barbauld

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Your body is not the real you. It’s just the physical house you live in. The real you is your spirit, which will live on forever. 

DBB

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[In the day of death:] Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:7

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From dust thou art to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

H.W. Longfellow

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Cartoonist Arthur Brisbane once pictured a crowd of grieving caterpillars carrying the corpse of a cocoon to its final resting place. The poor, distressed caterpillars, clad in black raiment, were weeping, and all the while the beautiful butterfly fluttered happily above the muck and the mire of Earth, forever freed from its earthly shell.

Needless to say, Brisbane had the average funeral in mind and sought to convey the idea that when our loved ones pass, it is foolish to remember only the cocoon and concentrate our attention on the remains, while forgetting the bright butterfly.

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God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for He shall receive me.

Psalm 49:15

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A soldier said, “When I die, do not sound taps over my grave, but reveille - the morning call, the summons to rise.”

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Epitaph of Benjamin Franklin

The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer, like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stripped of its lettering and gilding, lies here. ... Yet the Work itself shall not be lost; for it will, as he believed, appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.

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Death is not something to be feared, but rather anticipated. Of course, we are not to precipitate it ourselves, as suicide is surrender and defeat of the worst kind. But if each of us can have the patience to wait and die in God’s time, when His time has come for us, that’s the day we’re going to be the most thankful. We’re going to arrive in our heavenly home and see that it was really worth it all!

DBB

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The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

1 Corinthians 15:26

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Death from this life is just graduation from this grade. It’s our release, our graduation, our promotion. School is out! We’ve finished our schooling in this grade and we pass on to the next grade.

DBB

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Even though we have so much to live for on this earth, there is even more to live for in the next life. Death does not cheat a person out of life; death enriches life.

CLA

When Christ calls me Home I shall go with the gladness of a boy bounding away from school.

Adoniram Judson, first Christian missionary to Burma

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I am the Resurrection, and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.

Jesus, John 11:25,26

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Once the great evangelist, Moody, said in his buoyant way: “Some day you will read in the papers that D.L. Moody, of East Northfield, is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all; out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body that death cannot touch.”

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Because I live, ye shall live also.

Jesus, John 14:19

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Lord, when Thou seest that my work is done

Let me not linger on,

With failing powers,

Adown the weary hours,

A workless worker in a world of work.

But with a word,

Just bid me home,

And I will come

Right gladly,

Yea, right gladly

Will I come.

John Oxenham

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I shall not live ’till I see God; and when I have seen Him, I shall never die.

John Donne

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For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

2 Corinthians 5:1

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God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.

Jesus, Matthew 22:32

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Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed” (Matthew 13:31). Just as the seed is the beginning of growth, so this life is the beginning but not the end. We continue living the moment our spirits are released from our bodies.

CLA

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Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you” (John14:2). We do not enter the next life as strangers. We are expected and prepared for. We are eagerly desired.

CLA