Weird to think that I'm so certain about my best friend going on mission.

We're only 18 and I have not spent even a breath of it on devotion to anything beyond my sensory perception, while she's spent each and every one of those years dedicating herself to the church and Jesus Christ.

In school we learned about ways of knowing. Of course we used most of them all of the time; where I prefered memory and emotion, she used reason and language but that's not to say that I don't use logic or she can't remember things. The only place our profficieny differed was faith, which makes a lot of sense. She was raised religious and there was only 1 paragraph for me to read about faith as a way of knowing in the curriculum material.

How could I use it if I was never taught how?

I'm just as uneducated in practicing faith as ever, I don't know how to turn belief or trust into faith, or how to find belief and trust in old books written and used by orginizations with so many major flaws. I've learned a little about how to believe in a higher power, something more abstract than God, illdefined but meeting techinical qualifications for descriptions such as "divine"; I still have no idea how anyone can believe in Jesus Christ, as their Lord and Savior no less.

Yet,

Yet, I know without a shred or shadow of doubt that mission is right for Sam: that shipping off to some unknown corner of the world for 18 months and not being allowed to talk to me 6 out of 7 days a week and living in a modern day version of hermitage for almost 2 years is the right choice for her now.

Yet, when the person I have talked to every. single. day. for. three. years. asked if I thought mission would be right for her at all, I said don't worry about graduating in 4 years, or the loans, or anything other than making sure you have cultivated the right skills and midset to have a successful mission.

Yet, when the most devout person I have ever known asked me, an atheiest and recovering "Fuck God And You For Believing In Him" enthusiast, if she should dedicate her entire life to God, Jesus Christ, and the Gospel (of a religion I will never join), I said yes. Yes, she should.

Why? How could I be so certain? How could I know? There are so many scary, terrible, miserable sounding, and intimidating things that go along with mission, why would I support her in it? Why would I encourage her to put me through something that will be so miserable for so long?

Her reasoning, and her faith, say that this was the Holy Ghost speaking through me, some form of divine intent. However, one of the few hills of conviction I will die on is that these bone deep certainties and intuitions are my own, they are from me and apart of me, but this knowledge didn't come from nowhere.

I believe in very little--- past lives, circular time, ressurection, heaven, the Holy Ghost--- but some part of me that exists beyond the here and now, that knows how to listen to the cosmos around me, and understands constants like time very differently than the rest of me knows how to believe. And if theres anything in this world worth believing in, its myself.

We are all well aware how people have been using ideas of an after life (heaven and hell, reincarnation, The Millenium) to influnce others, whether that be an attempt to control a population or comfort them.

Could be that whatever happens to us after death will be better than anything happening now, so people feel better.

Could be that the choices you make in life will determine the quality of your existence after death.

Could be the difference between being eternally rewarded or punished based on a system of pre described rules.

Could be that the lack of an after life is a way of assigning special meaning to the life we have now.

All of these systems serve as a way of changing how we regard the world.

But what would a fair, just after life look like?

I think it should address the fundemental changes that occur between life and death, one that holds us responsible for our actions and still gives us room to change and move on.

Most importantly, it should address the reality that exsitence after death is incomprehensible.

A system that does justice to each of these principles would be one that exists solely in the transition from being alive and here to being dead and not with us anymore.

If a near death experience flashes your life before your eyes, then a beyond death experience should show your life from other peoples eyes.

We all know the ways that the world changed us, but imagine how it would feel if you knew how you changed the world back.

Think of the person you love most in the world, and imagine them perfectly understanding that love. Same for the person you hate most. Or that one brief interaction that has stuck with you for years, how you wish to know how to be friends with someone.

It would be empathy going from an experience based in theory to one based in tangible application. Imagine how it would feel, how it would change you.

I can't.

But if I could, if I did understand even one other person's experiences without limit or bias, I think I would be ready for the great beyond.