This week someone stole a dead body!

A family in Christchurch lost a husband and father to an early death.
While he lay in state at a local marae, some family from up north came in and stole away his body…
Now it has turned ugly!
The grieving family are left without someone to say goodbye too.
The extended family are ready to defend their ’right’ to the body because of the family connection.
The courts are involved.
The police are involved...well sort of.

When I first heard the story I was angry to be honest.
My initial reaction was to be resentful towards the extended family because they robbed his current family.
Then I had a chance to think and look at why not just what happened...

Most of it comes down to belief and perception.
The extended family talk about things like the need to be buried with his
father, to be buried near where his umbilical cord was buried…
It is a picture of life being more than the what exists breathing now.
It is about something after life. A connection to something else beyond this natural world.
While I might not agree with these beliefs, at least they consider life to be more than the here and now.

In an email from preacher J John I read this story recently...
The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky told the story of the time he was arrested by the czar and sentenced to die.
The czar liked to play cruel psychological tricks on the people who rebelled against him by blindfolding them and standing them in front of a firing squad. The blindfolded people would hear the gunshots go off, but would feel nothing. Then they would slowly realise that the guns were loaded with blanks.Dostoevsky went through this experience himself. He said that going through the thought process of believing he was really going to die had a transforming effect on him. He talked about waking up that morning with full assurance that this would be his last day of life. He ate his last meal and savoured every bite. Every breath of air he took was precious to him. Every face he saw, he studied with full intensity. Suddenly, every experience was etched in his mind.
As they marched him into the courtyard, he felt the heat of the sun and appreciated its warmth like never before. Everything around him seemed to have a magical quality to it. He was seeing the world in a way he had never seen it before.
He was fully alive!
When he realised that he had not been shot and that he was not going to die that day, everything about his life changed. He became thankful for everything about his life. He became grateful to people he had previously despised. It was this experience that persuaded him to become a novelist and write about life in a way that before would have never been known to him.

Please don’t forget that your life is more than just the here and now!
You were created to live forever…
Let that flavor who you are and how you live your life today...