The light fades as you lose the radiance of your earthly home… no, no longer your home, your former temporary state. Its light, you realize for the first time, had not been a mere natural phenomenon. It somehow emerged from within nature, but also beyond it. The light, you now understand, defied explanation. Everything had. In death, your surroundings grow darker than you might have anticipated… then darker than you have ever known… then darker than you have feared in your worst nightmares. Cold envelops you, one you cannot comprehend. A bitter chill that paradoxically burns your flesh. The cold and darkness continue to wrap around and penetrate you until they begin to enter your pores. Oppression suddenly becomes a welcome concept, because it would give you some bearing. You have no sense of orientation, only an endless spinning and falling and suffering with no conceivable pattern to calculate. This is… impossible… yet so very real. The dark, the cold, the burning, they seem to separate you, first at the molecular, then the atomic, then the subatomic level. Trillions of nano-explosions, that’s the best way you can describe them, erupt all throughout your body. You feel as though your are being ripped apart, as though everything that has sustained you has been revoked. Because it has. What you finally realize, as time expands to the horizon and contracts to the narrowest sliver simultaneously, is that your entire essence had been held together, not by gravity, not by the laws of nature you once so happily relied upon. No, you had been held together by something beyond nature. The very one you denied. “Jesus Christ is Lord of All…” you hear your own voice say the words. “Jesus Christ. The Alpha. The Omega. The Beginning. The End. The Creator of all, Author of life, Judge in death.” You cannot stop yourself. The realization so fills your mind that somehow you lose all other rational thought. Warm memories drain away. Every golden sunset, ocean breeze, swaying tree, friendly laugh. Kind smiles of beloved family and friends. All that remain are the images of every evil you once committed. Each act, even the ones you had caused indirectly, play in an endless loop, producing a howling, screaming agony that you are horrified to discover is your own voice filling your ears. You have only those soul-rending recollections, awareness of your own limitless, supernatural suffering, and the repeated affirmation you had denied for decades, now to be babbled in vain repetition, but also final acknowledgement. “Jesus Christ. Alpha. Omega. My Lord. My God. My Judge.”