I have recently been watching an old TV show called Mork and Mindy in my free time. Today I watched an episode titled Morkville Horror. For those who don't know anything about the series, it is about an alien from the planet Ork named Mork lands on earth and is tasked with observing earth and the customs of the people on earth. He ends up living with a woman named Mindy. In this particular episode, Mindy's father has decided to sell his house since it was not getting used with him out touring with the orchestra that he was leading. With all the memories in the house, Mindy is hesitant to sell the house. When Mork is cleaning up after some upgrades he was helping Mindy with, he had a strange encounter that made the house seem haunted. While Mindy was skeptical at first, when the house acted the same way for her, she was scared even further. Mork was more sensitive to the spirits, and they assumed his body. The last spirit that had assumed his body was Mindy's mother who had died in the house. This last encounter is the one that caught my attention the most and the reason that I am bringing it up in this blog post. The way that Mork was able to show the spirit and the way that the spirit communicated made me realize how much the soul is what we care about in a person. The soul is the true person. Our souls are what make us unique. Our bodies are mere physical cells grouped together, but out souls are something much more that. I might only be able to see them expressed through our physical bodies, but they are what we care about when we care about a person. We don't care so much for the person's body if we truly care about them. We care about their souls. We care about their thoughts.
The idea of the soul is something that I have long had a hard time grasping hold of. For some reason, when I think of a person, my mind always goes straight to the body, not the soul. However, this is not consistent. Abortion comes into this argument as well. When does a baby have a soul? Does a baby's soul go to heaven after they are killed in an abortion? I cannot judge the baby and therefore I don't know if they do or not. What I do know is that they should have the chance, just like everyone else to be able to accept Jesus as their Savior so that they can save their souls. I believe that a baby's soul is created at conception and therefore the baby's soul should have the right to grow up.
This is the way that I have come to understand the soul as of right now. The soul is the inner most part of a person. I'm not talking about the physical side of it. Our body is just merely a container for our soul that allows our soul to express itself on earth, however, once our bodies have died, we are no longer in need of these containers as our souls have either gone to heaven or hell. Whenever Jesus Christ died on the cross, he gave us the choice to follow him to everlasting life or die a painful death. This is the life of the soul that we are talking about here, not the life of the body (obviously). Our God is a great and powerful God, and he has been nice enough to grant us the option of eternal life for our souls. Something that I found extraordinarily difficult was to understand what it would be like to still have my soul but to not have the body to contain it. As MercyMe would say, I Can Only Imagine.
One of my friends once told me that they didn't believe that people would go to heaven or hell when they died. They believed that was too cruel and not characteristic of God. It is a lot more characteristic of our God than making these people stay on earth in different bodies. It is a generally accepted idea that the earth with eventually be no more. The earth will soon dissolve like snow, as "Amazing Grace" says. Leaving these people on earth is much worse than giving them to choose to follow him and worship him forever more without temptation, without troubles, without any worries of the world.
I've had the discussion with many of my friends about the idea of hope. Most people have hope that something will happen in the short term but have no plan for what will happen to their soul after they are dead. This is something that I have long struggled with as I cannot understand how someone could risk losing their soul in hell for fear of being wrong. If you believe and find out that there is no after-life, what have you lost? Nothing. If you don't believe and find out that there is a heaven and a hell, what have you lost? You have lost your chance for everlasting life; a life more beautiful and pleasant, happier, and more joyous that any mortal human can comprehend. How is anyone willing to take this risk?
I know that I am not willing to risk it and so if I know Jesus as my Lord and Savior, there is nothing else that matters in this life. While I still want to do good things and I want to see God's will carried out so that all his creation can be saved, I know that it will not be important. It is not by works that we making it into heaven, but by faith. However, faith without works is about as useless as a screen door on a submarine.Everything that I have and everything that I do in the long run won't matter all that matters is that I have Jesus as my Savior and no one can take that away from, no matter how hard they try.