Dr. Mary Neal was dead for 25 minutes. They pulled her lifeless body, swollen and blue from the churning waters of the Fuy River in southern Chile where she’d been trapped under the rapids until she drowned.
It’s quite a story – the way she tells it.
Somewhere between a turbulent death and waking on a muddy river bank, she met Jesus and he changed the way she saw her life. One of the things that struck me most about the story was her life review. I remember her saying she was able to see the ripple effects of her actions out to 30 places – the way her actions had hurt or helped someone.
Actions can really hurt people. I remember lying awake at 3:00am the night after Sheree (my late wife) took her life. Twenty three and a half years of building dreams together, adventures and laughter, fights and making up, gone in an instant. I don’t blame her and I could never hold it against her, but I’ve never experienced pain like that. The loss crashed down on me like the churning, thundering waters of a broken dam. Some things never really heal, you just learn to carry them. Even now as I write, almost ten years later, tears roll down my face.
I’m not the first person who’s hurt because of something someone else has done. I can’t help thinking about the ripple effects of my choices and the way their pain would be multiplied across the lives of the people affected.
What if when I died, I had to feel all the pain that I’d caused. Not just the pain to the people immediately around me, but all the ripples of pain I’d caused to others. What if I shouted at my son, so he shouts at his son, and he shouts at his son? One of my actions could have painful effects for generations.
It’s only fair, after all, that I get a taste of my own medicine. I cringe at the thought. It’s terrifying to think what the Hitlers and Stalins of the world would suffer – or perhaps some CEOs of chemical or pharmaceutical companies.
When I imagine the giant bank account of suffering waiting for me when I die, I can’t help but think of Jesus and his offer to pay the price for my wrongs. Suddenly his words have a whole new meaning.
The Bible doesn’t say this explicitly, so don’t take it as gospel, but what if Jesus didn’t just die a horrible death on the cross? What if the cup of God’s wrath included all of the pain we humans caused each other over the thousands of years we’ve walked the earth? A lot of people have accepted Jesus’s offer. What if he suffered all that pain so we wouldn’t have to?
Suddenly it makes sense when the one person who wasn’t afraid of anything starts sweating blood.
Suddenly, the idea of “saving” me brings tears to my eyes. Gratitude is too small of a word. In fact, words are too small. Falling to my knees seems like the only reasonable response.
Maybe now I have the tiniest, tiniest glimpse of what Dr. Neal saw when she met the Lord, “We are loved more than we can ever imagine.”
Title image of Fuy River is from Zet Kayaks