Spiritual Advice and Guidance Blog: Urantia Book: November 2008

10 years ago I had an abortion. I really regret what I did and I wonder what has happened to the soul of the child. How can I come to terms with what I did and will I meet my child after death?

I am so sorry...regret is a terrible thing to bear, and I can sympathise. I don't share your same experience, but I have wrestled with overwhelming regret, and it can be debilitating.

First of all, let me try to put your mind to rest regarding the fate of your child. According the the teachings of The Urantia Book, your child is safe. While your child was not old enough to have possessed a soul (and this is true of any child under the general age of five years), it does have a potential soul, and a potential identity. Your child is located at the probationary nursery , and is being lovingly cared for by the cherubim until such time as either of its parents arrive on the Mansion Worlds.

Here's a wonderful quote from The Urantia Book regarding your possible future experience with your child:

But irrespective of parental experience, mansion world parents who have growing children in the probation nursery are given every opportunity to collaborate with the morontia custodians of such children regarding their instruction and training. These parents are permitted to journey there for visits as often as four times a year. And it is one of the most touchingly beautiful scenes of all the ascending career to observe the mansion world parents embrace their material offspring on the occasions of their periodic pilgrimages to the finaliter world. While one or both parents may leave a mansion world ahead of the child, they are quite often contemporary for a season. p531:3

In any event, your child is not lost, so please try to take heart from this information. Our Father is not willing that any should perish, and knowing that, we have to trust that even unborn mortals are given the same opportunity for eternal life that all mortals enjoy. I like to think that there are special places in the nursery where the unborn are nurtured and grown in safety and love. That is my own imagining, since this specific circumstance is not covered in The Urantia Book, but I feel sure that some provision is made, so that eventually, he or she will be able to choose to advance...and that you will sometime be able to meet. There is nowhere in The Urantia Book that teaches otherwise.

And, just in case you have questions about your own survival, please see our featured page on Life After Death>

As for coming to terms with your actions, let me quote a favorite passage from The Urantia Book that has been of great solace to me:

Do not become discouraged by the discovery that you are human. Human nature may tend toward evil, but it is not inherently sinful. Be not downcast by your failure wholly to forget some of your regrettable experiences. The mistakes which you fail to forget in time will be forgotten in eternity. Lighten your burdens of soul by speedily acquiring a long-distance view of your destiny, a universe expansion of your career. p1739:3(156:5.8)

It is important that you learn to forgive yourself, and move forward. I am sure that, at the time, you did this for what may have seemed to be good and sufficient reasons. Ten years is a long time to carry this burden on your heart, and for your own well-being, you must release it. Maybe the knowledge that your child is not really lost will help you to do that.

Said Jesus: "My disciples must not only cease to do evil but learn to do well; you must not only be cleansed from all conscious sin, but you must refuse to harbor even the feelings of guilt. If you confess your sins, they are forgiven; therefore must you maintain a conscience void of offense." p1736:4(156:2.7)

So, you can see from this comforting passage from Jesus that the first step in your renewal is to confess your wrongdoing, which you likely have already done, and receive God's forgiveness for it. And one of the surest ways to receive that forgiveness is to practice the forgiveness of others in your life who may have wronged you.

Again, from The Urantia Book:

The Father in heaven has forgiven you even before you have thought to ask him, but such forgiveness is not available in your personal religious experience until such a time as you forgive your fellow men. God's forgiveness in fact is not conditioned upon your forgiving your fellows, but in experience it is exactly so conditioned. P1638,(146:2.4)

So, while you are already forgiven, you will actually experience the fullness of that forgiveness as you, in turn, forgive others.

Yours is not the first case that I have heard of where there is regret following this decision. I am adding your letter to our site (minus any identifying information, of course) in hopes that others may see your experience and think twice before making this life-changing choice.

Maybe you could look for an opportunity to personally minister to women who are facing this dilemma; in this way, you could see some real good come from your experience.

Labels: abortion, forgiveness, Jesus, life after death, probationary nursery, regret, The Urantia Book, unborn

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Friday, November 07, 2008

How can I help someone who is very angry at God?

Q: I have a friend who's husband is really, really angry at God for the terminal cancer that his brother-in-law is facing. His brother has two small children, and it seems so unfair to him. Do you have any insight as to how to address this - to give her (my friend) some words of wisdom that she might be able to help her husband with?

A: The most important thing I would tell someone who was angry at God for the illness and impending death of a loved is that everyone dies. There is nobody on earth that doesn't die sooner or later. This is a fact of our existence and to some degree the only variable is how we will die. There are some blessings involved in dying with an illness that allows everyone time to assimilate the reality of it, take care of business and say their goodbyes. It's much harder when someone dies accidentally and leaves many things undone. Even so, death happens to everyone and it will happen to this woman's husband too.

From God's point of view, death is not an end but a beginning and it helps to try to get people to look at it that way. Death is really just another birth in an endless cycle of life. The analogy of birth really helps me a lot. Before a person is born they have everything they need. They are in a warm and nurturing environment. Then suddenly the same environment that sustained their being is now totally rejecting them. It must be terribly traumatic. Soon they go from a very small closed environment, where everything is provided rather automatically, to a huge open environment where nothing is provided except when they cry. No wonder they cry so much. But think of the loving hands and warm smiling faces that greet new babies.

Emergence into the next world is no different. Perhaps your friend can get her husband to imagine the joy on the other side when a newly born soul arrives over there. Imagine the joy of reunion for those loved ones who have already passed over and the joy of God and the angels to welcome this beloved child to the shores of the next phase of their ongoing existence. Also, there is the indescribable personal joy of the one who dies but then makes the awesome discovery that there really is no death.

She can remind her husband that because God is the perfect loving parent he feels our pain and is afflicted with us, just as her husband would be afflicted by the pain of his own children.

Some human suffering is unavoidable. God does not dole out death and suffering, these things are brought about by life on the material worlds. However, trust in the goodness of God does give us the comfort and hope that gets us through these difficulties.

Also, comfort your friend with the simple reality that God understands why we humans get angry at him but truly experiences nothing but love for us. Anger does not exist in God. He knows that, compared to eternal viewpoints, human viewpoints are as limited as the vision of a new born baby. Her husband will come to peace in time, anger is part of a grieving process and most people move beyond it, sooner or later.

Please see our Life After Death page, where you'll find our e-magazine "There Is Life After Death," as well as flash movies about life after death, and other uplifting features that will help and inspire you and your friend.

Labels: anger, cancer, God, illness, life after death, suffering, The Urantia Book

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When I die and go to Heaven, how can I be happy when I realize that someone I love is not in Heaven with me?

Q: When I die and go to Heaven, how can I be happy when I realize that someone I love is not in Heaven with me?

A: Your question reminds me of a similar question I asked myself some 34 years ago when I was just 16 and studying the Bible with a group of religionists. While these folks did not believe in Hell, they did believe in Armageddon. Their doctrine was that at Armageddon, God would destroy everyone on earth who was not a part of their church.

At the time, I met a woman (whom I'd never seen before nor since) and I was talking to her about the teachings of this group. She told me something I never forgot. She said, "You have the ability to know the truth in your own heart. If something grinds against your own natural and logical beliefs don't except it as being true." I felt then that this made a great deal of sense, in fact it actually rang as truth to me, so I took it to heart.

Shortly after that, I went to study with the woman who was helping me learn the church's doctrines, which adherents of this church simply called "The Truth." I had been studying with her for about 6 months at the time. She told me, "My Dear, if you don't convert your parents to 'The Truth' God will have to kill them at Armageddon and it will be your fault."

Well, here was a perfect example of something posed as "truth" that most certainly did "grind against my own natural and logical beliefs." I unequivocally balked at her audacious statement, and replied, "Are you saying that God is going to kill my parents?!"

To which she replied, "Well, yes, he will have to dispose of anyone who is not in The Truth."

I thought for a moment and then said, "My parents are the most loving people I know. They are kind and loyal and trusting and sincere. They are truly good, even wonderful people and you say that God is going to kill people like them just because they don't belong to your religious group?"

Again, she vainly tried to explain to me how God would have no choice but to do such a thing.

I then told her, "You may think it would be Heaven to live forever on earth in peace, where the lion lays down with the lamb, etc., knowing that God had killed your loving parents. But that wouldn't be Heaven for me, that would be Hell."

At this point she was aghast, and she exclaimed, "Oh you can't feel that way!"

I simply said, "I'm sorry but I do feel that way and I can't study with you anymore."

I left her standing there with her mouth open. As I walked alone the twelve blocks to my house, I talked to God. I said, "God, you may just as harsh and unforgiving as they say you are. Perhaps you are willing to kill good people because they don't follow one religion or another and if you are that way, I'm sorry but I can't worship you." Then, after a moment's reflection I thought, "Somehow God, I just can't believe that you are that way.

But if you want me to know who you really are, you are going to have to reveal yourself to me because I'm not getting involved with anymore religions." I felt good in my heart about that declaration and I left it at that.

Four years later, during the worst crisis of my life, The Urantia Book came into my life. It claims to be a revelation of God to humankind. Well, I asked God to reveal himself so my mind was open to such a thing. Imagine my joy when I found the God that was so loving, so merciful, so just, so perfect that I joyfully worship him with every fiber of my being.

Here are three great quotes from that wonderful book that I hope will reassure you that God, our truly loving Heavenly Father, takes no delight in causing any harm to any of his children.

P.39 -(2:5.2) It is wrong to think of God as being coaxed into loving his children because of the sacrifices of his Sons or the intercession of his subordinate creatures, "for the Father himself loves you." It is in response to this paternal affection that God sends the marvelous Adjusters to indwell the minds of men. God's love is universal; "whosoever will may come." He would "have all men be saved by coming into the knowledge of the truth." He is "not willing that any should perish."

P.2017 -(188:4.8) When once you grasp the idea of God as a true and loving Father, the only concept which Jesus ever taught, you must forthwith, in all consistency, utterly abandon all those primitive notions about God as an offended monarch, a stern and all-powerful ruler whose chief delight is to detect his subjects in wrongdoing and to see that they are adequately punished, unless some being almost equal to himself should volunteer to suffer for them, to die as a substitute and in their stead. The whole idea of ransom and atonement is incompatible with the concept of God as it was taught and exemplified by Jesus of Nazareth. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature.

P.60 -(4:5.4) The barbarous idea of appeasing an angry God, of propitiating an offended Lord, of winning the favor of Deity through sacrifices and penance and even by the shedding of blood, represents a religion wholly puerile and primitive, a philosophy unworthy of an enlightened age of science and truth. Such beliefs are utterly repulsive to the celestial beings and the divine rulers who serve and reign in the universes. It is an affront to God to believe, hold, or teach that innocent blood must be shed in order to win his favor or to divert the fictitious divine wrath.

I hope this helps.

And another view:

There would probably be no way in heaven that you could be happy if that were the case. I suspect that you are a Christian -- you may be interested to know that not all Christian sects promote a belief in hell. And, as you put it, if there were a hell wouldn't it seem contradictory for you to be happy in heaven?

The Urantia Book provides an exalted vision of God, that God is as Jesus saw him and described him, a loving heavenly Father even so much better than an earthly parent. And Jesus asked, if a loving earthly father would not exhibit wrath and retribution toward his own children why do we choose to believe that the heavenly Father of us all would treat us even worse than a human parent? That seems contradictory too, doesn't it?

If you've not already done so, may I recommend subscribing to our Quote of the Day. It offers daily inspirational and meaningful quotes from The Urantia Book along with a great picture. It's an easy way to become familiar with the teachings of this marvelous book.

And please, I invite you to take a look at our web page dedicated to the teachings of The Urantia Book regarding Life After Death

Labels: fear of God, God, hell, Jesus, life after death, mercy, The Urantia Book

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