When the lights go out

Every night the lights go out. And you're alone. Maybe there's someone sleeping next to you that you deeply love. But at a certain point everything is taken away and it's just you, alone in your thoughts as you wait for the mystery of sleep to overtake your consciousness. In this short window of complete solitude, the realization of mortality comes. This life will end. When? We don't know, but the day is coming that will be our last. Is it this week? Is it this year? Will I live to see my grandchildren? What will the death of my body be like? This body that I'm in is merely a house for my soul. Everyone who has ever known me in this world recognizes me by this body that exists only in our physical world, but it's not actually me. If this body is in good enough condition to be shown at a funeral, those attending will look at my body with sadness, as if all that I was ceased to exist. In reality, none of what I was ceased to exist. Yet memories are all that's left of me to those who knew me in this body. Those memories are fragile shadows of reality that will ultimately be shattered when the bodies of those carrying them die as well. But we will still be alive. We will step into the next stage of life. When the lights go out we face the uncertainty of our immortality. Our souls long for truth because we know that there's more than this world and the bodies that house our souls. We have purpose. We know it. There's something out there that put us here, something that made us, and we long to connect with this being. Faith is a difficult thing in a physical world. Faith is believing in the unseen, in things not experienced. I know not to touch a hot stove not because I have faith it will burn me but because I know it will burn me from experience. The body I live in has never died before, so I can't know from experience what that's like. Yet I have faith- faith that there's a Creator of the universe that loves me and will redeem me despite of my flaws. A God that has so much more planned for me than whatever my quick years in this body on this earth will offer. When the lights go out, I'm alone in my body but not in my spirit. When the lights go out, all I need is faith.