Our Life

The other day a young man got onto my bus wearing a t-shirt which read:   A Soul is a terrible thing to waste.  I asked him the background for this.  He said it had sounded deep; he liked that. I kind of gathered that he had not thought deeply himself about this saying!  But it did make me think.

A soul is a terrible thing to waste, eh?  Is that the same as saying that a life is a terrible thing to waste?  Quite universal is the sense that our lives carry some sort of meaning, that we are here for a purpose, that we have tasks to do, work that needs accomplishing.

I once heard a friend talk about working on a task, some emotional or spiritual issue.  She kept feeling that maybe she could "cheat" death by not finishing this task too early!  Like, if I complete my work, I will transition to the other side, I will die.  I am not sure this is true, but it shows that we have this sense that we have work to do in our life on earth.

Let's carry this a step further.  What if we participated in the process of deciding what that work would be that we are to accomplish while incarnated on earth?  Is that so far-fetched?  There does seem to be growing evidence that we are pre-existent souls, that we existed in a spiritual dimension prior to our coming to earth to be born.

First, there is direct evidence this was true of Jesus.  If he is our forerunner, the one we follow,  "the firstborn of many brothers and sisters..." (Rom 8.29), "the author. . . .of our faith" (Heb 12.2), can we not use Jesus' experience as a blueprint for our own?  The scriptures tell us he ". . . emptied himself, . . . being born in the likeness of men." (Phil 2.7)

The second source of evidence that we are pre-existent souls, is from many who have come back from the other side, in the form of NDE's (near-death experiences) who have mentioned experiences similar to Jesus'.  The most vivid experience I have read is probably Betty Eadie's.  She talks in her book, Embraced By The Light, of meeting with her Spirit friends, guides, angels, and being shown what her task had been during her life on earth.  She was then shown that she was not yet done with this task, and was encouraged to return to complete it.

When she returned to earth she went through an "emptying", an erasing from memory of these conversations with her "support group" in heaven.  She returned just like each of us do when we are first born; we carry with us no memory of what our heaven-assigned task is for our lives.  We then spend most or all of our life learning what this might be, and doing what we feel we are "called" to do with our life.

I do not believe it is essential to our well-being (salvation?) that we believe we existed prior to our incarnation.  But, what it does, is to add an entire layer of seriousness to our lives.  So many people wander through life aimlessly with no sense of purpose.  If we believe we came here deliberately, that we chose to come to earth as material beings for a specific purpose, it can profoundly change our outlook.  It can begin to give us direction, a reason to be, something to do.

A popular poster in the nineties read, "We are not so much physical beings having a spiritual experience, but rather spiritual beings having a physical experience."