One hundred questions,
and a third were about death.
Is heaven real?
Is hell real?
What happens when I die?
Not many of us like to ask it.
Google asks about our digital assets,
I don’t care about my emails—
I do care about my soul.
Four theories walk beside me:
You rot.
You are recycled.
You are weighed on the scales of justice.
You wake with Christ.
Three people die every second.
Yet we speak of slipping away,
we hide the coffin from sight,
we spend fortunes on longevity weeks
as though life could be embalmed for later.
Eulogies catalogue
births, places, achievements—
but in the end
people only care about character.
We say: They’ve gone to a better place.
We long for it to be true.
A surgeon tells my friend:
six to nine months.
And my friend replies:
“This is the start of my life.
For forty-two years
Jesus has been my Lord and Saviour.
Now I go home.”
When the body fails—
blood slows, rattles rise,
“Mum, are you still in there?”
No.
This is her shell.
She has gone through the departure gate.
We are left waving farewell.
She is sleeping in Christ.
And sleep always ends in waking.
But there is more:
A day is coming—
judgement day.
Not the long line of condemnation,
but a courtroom of justice
where the judge is Jesus—
compassionate, merciful, true.
The separation will be sharp,
two destinies,
not decided by our résumés
but by whether we believed.
Hell is a horror—
a chasm fixed,
darkness, teeth gnashing.
If it is true—
and Jesus says it is—
we must warn those we love.
Silence is not friendship.
And yet—heaven.
Try to imagine,
like twins in the womb
speaking of sunlight and air.
A place with no tears,
no coffins, no cemeteries.
Resurrection bodies,
perfect justice,
God face to face.
Enough violence,
enough sickness,
enough terror,
Jesus will shout, “Enough!”
and every longing heart
will rest.
And so I ask again,
what happens when I die?
I will not live for stuff,
or for goals that turn to dust.
I will live for people,
and wait to wake—
in a second,
in a shout,
in the arms of Christ.
Original message by Paul Dale, The Bridge Church Macquarie Park NSW
21 September 2025
The Afterword 
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