Anyone for Heaven?

As a friend of mine often reminds people, ‘We are not here to stay; we are here to go.’ I am writing these words in a Consultant’s waiting room in a London hospital. Some of the other patients are showing signs of great physical distress, moving reminders that the whole world is a hospital in which everyone is a terminal patient. The South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant operation in 1967 and the first double-heart transplant in 1974. Later in life he said, ‘At 79, people ask me, “Where do you go from here?” I say to them, “I’m on the waiting list. I don’t exactly know where I am on that, or where I’m going. But I’m on it”.’ So are you! Even as you read these words you are fighting a losing battle with death, whatever your age or present state of health. What will happen to you when death wins..?