Heaven and Hell

Amy from Portland, MI, asked:

Hi Julie,

I have a loaded question for you … does Hell exist?

My son died instantly in a car accident so I don’t know if he had time to go through the 12 Phases of Transition. 

At the time of his death, I know he and my other son were not only questioning the existence of God, they said there was no God. 

It hurts so much that part of my future is gone and I feel, in a word, “hopeless”. 

I am curious if my son is in Hell, (if there is one), or in Heaven?

Life is not supposed to work in this order.

Thanks,

Amy

Hi Amy,

My sincere condolences on the loss of your son. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.

I truly believe, when he transitioned, your son absolutely experienced the Twelve Phases of Transition®, was surrounded by angels and the spirits of deceased loved ones and pets, and was then escorted to Heaven by angels.

Time doesn’t exist is the non-physical-spirit reality, (time is a human creation), and regardless of whether someone dies instantly like your son, or over days, weeks, months, years, we all go through a glorious process I call the Twelve Phases of Transition®.

As for whether your son is in Heaven or Hell, I believe he is absolutely in what we know as Heaven and is surrounded by love, joy, and the spirits of deceased loved ones. I also believe he’s around you.

Religious leaders and scholars have been debating for millennia whether an afterlife exists and includes paradise or eternal suffering.

In a papal audience on July 28, 1999, Pope Saint John Paul II said, “More than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.”

And, in his book Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife, Bart D. Ehrman, distinguished professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill and a leading authority on the New Testament and early Christianity states, “Jesus stood in a very long line of serious thinkers who refused to believe that a good God would torture his creatures for eternity. The idea of eternal hell was very much a late comer on the Christian scene, developed decades after Jesus’ death and honed to a fine pitch in the preaching of fire and brimstone that later followers sometimes attributed to Jesus himself. But the torments of hell were not preached by either Jesus or his original Jewish followers; they emerged among later gentile converts who did not hold to the Jewish notion of a future resurrection of the dead. These later Christians came out of Greek culture and its belief that souls were immortal and would survive death.”

Regarding Hell, Professor Ehrman goes on to say, “The word Jesus uses is ‘Gehenna’. The term does not refer to a place of eternal torment but to a notorious valley just outside the walls of Jerusalem, believed by many Jews at the time to be the most unholy, god-forsaken place on earth.”

So, do Heaven and Hell really exist? Guess we’ll find out when we die.

In the meantime, as humans, all we can do is conjecture by listening to differing points of view and paying attention to what resonates with us.