Pull Over

     I had a fairly typical experience with learning to drive.  I was very easily excited and I was also very impatient in wanting to give it a try.  For my first driving experience, my wise and battle hardened mother who has already taught my older brother how to drive, drove me over to a local parking lot to practice in a low stress area.  After gaining enough confidence in the parking lot and driving around for about an hour, she also let me drive around my neighborhood for about half an hour.
     The next weekend I was given an unusual opportunity.  We needed to go to downtown Denver and I asked if I could drive.  My mother said that would be ok.  I was so elated!  The problem came when we actually got downtown though, the suburban our family owned, seated 8 people and seemed to me to be wider than the lanes I was supposed to be driving in.  After a couple of close calls, I heard the sirens of an ambulance coming up behind me.  I panicked and attempted to pull the car over to the side of the road, out of the way.  I over-steered and curb checked at a little higher speed than I meant to come in at and the car jostled violently as 2 of the wheels went up onto the sidewalk.  I looked up and saw 2 pedestrians right in the path of my travel who looked like deer caught in my headlights.  After a second they seemed to laugh it off after having seen my pathetic driving prowess.
     The point of this story is to illustrate that there is life after death.  When an ambulance is pulling up behind you, all cars eventually get out of the ambulance's way.  Likewise we all will one day die.  When we die, our spirits go to a place called the spirit world where, if we are righteous, we will be in a state of rest and of happiness.  While if we are not righteous then we will be in a state of unhappiness.  When it was my time to pull over, I found myself unprepared and feeling unready.  The result was quite the stressful situation, I was not happy that I had to pull over. In fact, the ambulance's sudden appearance scared me to half to death! It can be the same with death in this life, if we find ourselves unprepared for that day then we will find ourselves in a state of unhappiness.   While if we prepare ourselves, "pulling over" will not be nearly so traumatic an experience.