Exit Stage Left

Hi Skylark, what a wonderful gift that was that you heard a man sing the Lord's Prayer - twice! - and in between your mother's saved soul tried to explain to you the higher reason for her earthly sufferings...
See, the Lord's Prayer says "Thy Kingdom come, Thy Will be done as perfectly on Earth as it already is done in Heaven." This wish has not been made true yet, and in the future when it will come true a good person won't have to die from cancer no more. Till this time if good persons have to suffer it is for the benefit of the world. There is lots of stupid and evil people running round here who don't take responsibility, and their bad karmas, i.e. Sins, often are too heavy to carry for themselves, and thus good souls take part of them on their own shoulders, as Jesus, and "through Him and with Him and in Him" as the wonderful Mass prayer of Catholics says. This is perhaps what your Mom tried to explain. Did I guess that correctly? Tell me!
I moreover think I understand your nickname, Lark of the Sky; this bird symbolizes the soul rising up above the dust of the ground to praise the Lord. "Sursum corda" - rise your hearts up - says the Mass prayer again, this is the Lark flying up to sing.
And thirdly, perhaps I am only too eager to fantasize, but are you fond of the music of RUSH?
"Exit Stage Left" is the title of a great Live Album of theirt... And on this album is a song called Jacob's Ladder which really can help a heart to rise. I would recommend it to you if you don't know it.
RUSH keep showing themselves to the public as Agnostics but this is a fake. Their songs show they know the Lord, not from books but I suppose from watching the run of Nature... My nickname is taken from another RUSH song which is even more spiritual, every modern believer should have heard it. The reason why they keep off church and temple affairs is that they loathe dogmatic narrow-mindedness.
God is greater than any image we make of Him, and His true temple is the whole world. Not even on the loo or in the pub is He absent enough to ignore our thinking of Him.
And He surely won't judge souls by to which church or religion they belonged when alive - no matter if Christians or Muslims still think so... The Kingdom on Earth will take us beyond such boundaries, it will give us God beyond Religion.
The true Sun will shine upon us instead of our present sitting before some imperfect carven image of the Sun and desperately trying to imagine that it can shine until this self hypnosis works and it seems true to us... This is how all our Religions still function! What a miserable poverty!
Let us look forward to this future and try to act as if it were already true, so that we become worth it, and so that it may come soon even to those still not worth it.

We've been learning in our sermons lately about how God uses sufferings to help prepare us spiritually and to get closer to Him.

I think a lot of our sufferings--especially right before death are not wasted- but are used to supercharge our Spirits-- preparing us for union with Him.

Your mother did need to suffer- but as God said to David in the Bible, He will make "all our enemies our footstools" Enemies, in this case being our trials and sufferings serving as a stepping stool to bring us closer to Him.

Your mother truly did visit you before she crossed over and what she said was definitely true!

I would read the Lords' Prayer again-and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten you when reading it- I think there are some things in that prayer that illustrate what your mother was saying to you:-)

Martin, thank you for the advice. I will sign up for an account and hopefully avoid such problems.

There was a duplicate post and I unpublished the wrong one, apparently.

If you want to avoid situations like that, it's better to simply register and have your own account. Anyone can post as guest and use whatever username they want, even someone else's. With an account, we'll know it's you.

Dear Skylark. If it's a prankster then it has to be someone who has access to the website data. Either a hacker or someone who in involved with this site. What happened to my original message? The one posted by Skyhy is exactly the same as the one I posted except for the small changes I wrote. I will report this to the webmaster perhaps and see what answer I can get.

Nataszha, that is very weird! And the name is similar. Maybe it is just a prankster.

Dear Skylark, for some reason my response on 4-14 appears under the guest name Skyhy. The text has also been slightly modified from what I had submitted, but the meaning is pretty much the same. Younger sibling should be changed to baby child, and the last phrase after the dots... Was not written by me. Maybe some computer bug? Strange.

Thank you Skyhy for your kind comments. Nataszha, I wish I could tell exactly what my Mom said, but it was lost, like a dream, all I know is it has to do with me. Suffering is a strange mystery. We hear different theories about it. It must be tied somehow to Jesus' suffering on the Cross. And what about after one suffers, like after childbirth? The relief and the joy are almost Heaven. Lots of food for discussion here!

Dear Skylark, thank you for your insight. What you've explained helps to reinforce the following belief. I have a child and instinctively I feel that I have the ability to take their pain and in some way deal with it. I do so in thanking Jesus for dying on the cross for us. He suffered for us and any pain that I may have, he will take.

All I can say is it had a lot to do with me for whatever reason. I was her only child and we were very close as if we had known each other in previous lives.

I am curious about the part where you say that your mom explained to you why she had to suffer. If it is not too personal, could you shed a little more light on this aspect of the story? I am curious about the relationship between suffering and coming closer to God.