The Fear Of Death

Dear Michael,

Your web page is a big blessing to me. I would like to return a part of that blessing by sharing my testimony, which shows that the Lord is good indeed. I know the Lord now for three and a half years. My name is Heiko, I am 29 years old and come from a small town in Germany. Now, here is my testimony:

I grew up in a family where there was always fighting. My parents always argued with each other, and the climate in our home was absolutely sub zero. I remember always being afraid of hearing Mom and Dad screaming at each other the next time. I have little detailed memory of all that, I believe I cast it out of my mind because it hurt too much.

But I know that the first question I remember asking was to my mother: "Mom, what will happen when I die?" Since my Mother is an unbeliever and an atheist, she was very little convincing in trying to explain to me that Christians (which is what most Germans believe to be while being trapped in dead religion and going to hell) only live this life as a preparation for eternity in any kind of afterlife. As I already said - she was quite unconvincing by preaching what she herself didn't believe, so a terrible fear arose in me and gripped my heart: The fear of death, of simply perishing some day without anything that remains. I thought that even if I die and go to hell for eternal pain, that would still be better than to simply die and cease to exist.

This fear began to fill my life more and more. While I was lying in my bed at night and sweating for fear when I thought of death, unable to sleep, I made my way as a teenager first into alcohol, then into heavy metal and occultism, then into pornography and fast changing relationships with many girls, sometimes more than one at a time. I tried to find anything that would fit into this hole in my heart and would take the fear and depression away from me. The harder I tried, the deeper I fell. I am a gifted musician and played guitar in several bands, and I tried to express what was going on inside me by writing depressive lyrics about death and a hope of afterlife, trying to find any sense in my existence. This made me slip away still further into occultism, searching for hope in Eastern religions. All I knew about Christianity was the Roman Catholic church. I even believed in a way that Jesus lived and was God, but I did not know about his "exclusiveness" and nothing about being born again and knowing Jesus personally. Therefore "Christianity" left me also empty and I turned totally away from it. My music became a tool for me to easier get into relationship with women. I wanted my girlfriends to fill this emptiness in me. It did not work at all. All this time in my bed at night I was silently screaming for God to reveal himself so that I could have any proof or sign that I would not perish if I die.

One day it all began to change. I went out to celebrate my birthday in a town nearby, and there I met my former guitar teacher, whom I hadn't seen for 8 years. He was married (a wonder to me - he was sex & drugs & rock'n roll when I had seen him the last time) and told me he now believed in Jesus and that God had turned his whole life around. I immediately felt that this was what I was searching for - I knew he did not talk some form of religious stuff but that he had experienced something with the true God I was looking for. The following months I visited him and his wife over and over, always hungry to hear abo

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