FOREVER IS FOREVER

(These One A Days are added to each day)

Perhaps one of the most amazing stories I know of concerning life after death was told by Dr. George C. Ritchie Jr., practicing physician in Richmond, Virginia where I went to seminary. Affidavits from both the attending doctor and nurse attest to the fact that on the morning of December 20, 1943, George C. Ritchie, then 19 and an army private, was pronounced dead.

Briefly, here are a few of the facts he relates concerning his experience. In his own words this is what happened. “I looked down at the bed I had just left. I stepped closer in the dim light, then drew back… I saw that the ring on the young man’s left hand was the Phi Gamma Delta ring I had worn for two years. The dead man was me… I was looking at myself… the body on that bed was mine. And I thought suddenly, this is what we human beings call death. This splitting up on one’s self.

It was the first time I had connected death with what had happened to me. In that most despairing moment, the little room began to fill with light, but there is no word in our language to describe brilliance that intense. I must try to find words, however, because incomprehensible as the experience was to my intellect, it has affected every moment of my life since.

The light that entered that room was Christ: I know because a thought was put deep within me, “You are in the presence of the Son of God.” I have called Him Light, but I could also have said Love for that room was flooded, pierced, illuminated, by the most total compassion I have ever felt. It was a presence so comforting, so joyous and all satisfying, that I wanted to lose myself forever in the wonder of it. But something else was present in that room. With the presence of Christ there had also entered every single episode of my entire life. There they were - every event and thought and conversation, as palpable as a series of pictures. There was no first or last event, but each one asked a single question, “What did you do with your time on earth?”

I looked anxiously among the scenes before me; school, home, scouting and the cross-country track team - a fairly typical boyhood, yet in the light of that presence it seemed a trivial and irrelevant existence. I searched my mind for good deeds. “Did you ever tell anyone about me?” came the question. “I didn’t have time to do much,” I answered. “I was planning to, then this happened. I’m too young to die.” “No one,” the thought was inexpressibly gentle, “is too young to die.”

And then I saw a city. It was only a moment’s vision. At the time I had not read the Book of Revelation, nor incidentally anything on the subject of life after death. But now I no longer seemed to be on earth, but immediately far away, out of relation to it. And I saw a city in which the walls, houses, and streets seemed to give off light, while moving among them were beings as blindly bright as the One who stood beside me. This was only a moment’s vision for the next instant the walls of the little room closed around me, the dazzling light faded and a strange sleep stole over me.

To this day, I cannot fully fathom why I was chosen to return to life. All I know is that when I woke up in the hospital bed in that little room, in the familiar world where I’d spent all my life, it was not a home-coming. The cry in my heart at that moment has been the cry of my life ever since; “Christ, show me Yourself, again.”

It was weeks before Pvt. Richie was well enough to leave the hospital. Today you can still read his hospital chart: Pvt. Richie died December 20, 1943, double pneumonia. His doctor affirmed he was dead for nine minutes and cannot explain why irreparable brain damage was not done.

Dr. Ritchie went on to become very active in youth work in Richmond, Virginia. In 1957, he founded the Christian Youth Corps of America. He describes his mission in this life-of-a-second-chance this way; “A world run by men who are run by God.” If he is still alive, he is in his eighties.

We are all living on borrowed time. We just don’t happen to know the size of the loan. “I am come that ye might have life.” (John 10:10) It is the source speaking. “Because I live, ye shall live, also.” It is the Alpha and the Omega speaking, “the Word made flesh” speaking. I, therefore, challenge you to stand before Jesus and say, “Today I live, but one day I will die, Lord, therefore ‘teach me to number my days that I may get a heart of wisdom.”

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