immediately infused with peace, bliss, and total recall of Home and the truth of eternity. With that recall came a release of all worry about the loved ones I’d left behind. I knew they would be fine as they proceeded living out their charts, and I also knew that in what would seem like the blink of an eye to me, we’d be together again on the Other Side, so there was no sadness, no sense of loss, and no missing them.

• The sacred, brilliant white light appeared ahead of me. Everything I’d heard and read about it was true— somehow, it seemed almost alive, pulsating with God’s love and His infinite knowledge, and an awareness flooded through me that the light was as familiar to me as my own soul.
• The figure of a loved one appeared in the large opening at the end of the tunnel. (In my case it was my cherished Grandma Ada, whom I’d yearned to see again since I was eighteen.) Beyond her I could see a grassy, flower-filled meadow, like the most beautiful meadow on Earth with its colors enriched and magnified a thousand times.

That trip Home for me was obviously interrupted, by Grandma Ada gesturing for me to stop and by a distant voice of a friend by my hospital bed pleading, “Sylvia, don’t go, you’re so needed.” I was deeply depressed for days about finding myself back on Earth, and while I eventually became grateful to have stayed, I can promise you from the core of my soul that death was and is absolutely nothing to fear. It is exactly the return to the all-encompassing love of God’s arms that we’ve all hoped it will be—and that our spirits remember perfectly and look forward to.

Before I describe the utter joy of our actual arrival on the Other Side, I want to clarify my strong beliefs about a couple of the most breathlessly anticipated events of the end of days, urging you as always to study, think, and come to your own conclusions.

The Second Coming and the Rapture

According to Christian literature and legend, two major events involving Jesus Christ will be among the most telling signs that the end of days are at hand: his reappearance on Earth in human form, and his appearance among the clouds to take the faithful to heaven in a phenomenon called the Rapture.

They’re both beautiful thoughts, but I don’t happen to believe that either of them will happen when the end of days arrives.

I take Jesus at his sacred word when he said, in Matthew 28:20, “And lo, I am with you always, to the very end of time.” He didn’t say, “I will be with you,” which implies some future event, but of far more importance, it also implies that there might be some period of time when he’s absent from us. That’s simply not true. He’s been with us every second since his divine Resurrection, he’s with us at this moment, he’ll be with us when we return to our lives on the Other Side, and he’ll be with us throughout our joyful eternity at Home. We can stop waiting for him and watching for him. He’s already here, an essential part of our present tense.

Didn’t he accomplish everything we could ever want or need or hope for during his one divine incarnation? For what reason would he come again? To prove that he’s real, and that he truly is the Son of God? Don’t we already know that beyond all doubt? And sadly, isn’t it likely that his Second Coming would create the same controversy and skepticism he faced two thousand years ago?

Besides, what more effective way to put every phony “reincarnated messiah” out of business—and believe me, more and more of them will be cropping up as this century progresses—than to say, and mean, “I’ve stopped looking for Jesus ‘out there,’ because I have the peace of knowing he’s already right here.”

Then point to your heart and remember:

And lo, I AM with you always, to the very end of time.

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