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Hi I’m Paul. I have a gift. I see people inside out. Not literally, that would be gross! Good people shine. They have light under their skin and bad people have shadows. The shadows are scary and evil. Now I can hear them too! The shadows are always whispering suggestions to be bad. Most shadow people don’t know that they have a choice. They don’t actually have to listen to those suggestions. I try to help them figure that out. That’s not always easy. It’s not like I can just walk up to them and say ‘Erm you got a bunch of evil shadows crawling around under your skin. I think I can help you with that.’ Light is the only thing that scares them away. And sometimes even that doesn’t work!
“Friend, what am I doing here?” I blurted, “Did I die again?”
I didn’t mean to say that, it just shot out of my mouth. I guess I was surprised to be here again. I looked at his face. His eyes were so full of kindness and empathy; he always made me feel like the most important thing in the whole world.
I had missed him so much. I had missed him with such a great yearning inside my chest. Like a thirsty dog on a chain, straining to get a drink of water from a bowl that was placed a centimetre out of its reach. Over there it is impossible to close that centimetre, the shadows make sure of that. But here . . . when you are here that all goes away. The yearning, the hunger, the thirst, they don’t exist. You can just soak up all that light. It’s beyond incredible.
Friend smiled. “Don’t worry; you were gone for less than a second. No one even noticed.”
I understood, there we have time. But here there is no time. Less than a second there is as long as it is here. As long as it needs to be.
I have a little understanding of how it is here because I died before. I got pneumonia and I died. When that happened I left there. Our world. I passed through shadows and dark places and arrived here. This is our home. This is the home of every person in the whole world. Unfortunately, not every person in the whole world chooses to come home.
Here, our home is the reason we go through our entire lives feeling like something is missing. Successful people, rich people, famous people, poor people, jobless people, it’s the same feeling for everyone. Something is missing. Only when we get to know Friend, does that feeling go away. Because he is that part we are missing.
