Beyond death

What were you doing Saturday night? I was laid out on the floor of a restaurant lady's room, yellow as a plastic kidney-shaped sputum cup and with a heart rate of 32 beats per minute. The EMTs and ER staff efficiently performed various functions on my body and handed me a "Final Diagnosis" of "vasovagal syncope" --- which is more of a description than an explanation.

The whole illness lasted about an hour. It was all good. I know that I will have more compassion toward sick people from now on, having stored up in my heart how it felt to be stupid and helpless and humbled with illness, and what words and gestures ministered to me then.

Also, I gained insight into suffering from an eternal perspective, which helps considerably with my protracted philosophical wranglings about "the problem of evil":

Did you mark how naturally --- as if he'd been born for it --- the Earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous? I know what the creature was saying to itself! 'Yes. Of course. It always was like this. All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottleneck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! You were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?' (The Screwtape Letters, C.S.Lewis)