Was life planned before birth? What did you come here to learn?

By David McElroy · January 28, 2022

I got a work-related email Thursday that made my stomach churn. It was from a client asking me about an issue I’d managed to avoid to avoid talking with him about. I knew he wouldn’t be happy with a decision I’d made related to his account — and I dreaded the day when I would have to deal with it. That day had come.

For a few minutes, I stewed in my unhappiness. I worried about how I was going to handle it. And then something finally clicked in my brain. I forced myself to ask the question I needed to ask.

“What is it that I need to learn from this?”

It sounds ridiculously naive, but for the last few years, that one question has saved me from a lot of grief. It doesn’t protect me from my own mistakes, but it puts me in the right frame of mind to deal with problems. But this isn’t some technique I learned from a book.

It’s something I learned from the experience of a woman who says she died briefly and visited heaven. It might sound crazy, but it’s been useful for me.

I’ve become fascinated with people who have what’s called a “near-death experience.” I first heard of these back in college, but I didn’t think much about them. They’re experiences had by many, many people who have reached the point of being clinically dead for some period of time — typically minutes — and then returned.

(I’ve mentioned before that my other had one such experience as a child, even though I didn’t think much about it when she told me.)

Some of these people can recount ethereal experiences they had while they were clinically dead. Although the specifics can vary, the quality of the experiences is remarkably similar. I’ve been reading and listening to people’s stories for several years now.

I’ve read skeptical doctors explain them away. And I’ve read counter-evidence that makes the skeptics’ explanations look laughable. I don’t claim to know for sure what’s going on, but I’m fascinated by it.

A lot of these people say that they discover while they visit “heaven” that they were living lives they had planned before they were born. It’s common for people to come back from such an experience with the belief that he or she had helped to plan the person’s current life on Earth, sometimes by agreement with God.

One of the common themes was that each person has come here to learn something or to grow in some way. A few years ago, I heard a woman tell a very vivid account of such an experience. Even though I can’t verify that anything happened to her, it seemed profound and it affected me deeply.

And then I realized something interesting. Whether it’s true or not, it could be a useful way to view my narrative for my life. If God had sent me here — and we had agreed I was here to learn something — what would this particular life be trying to teach me?

So that has become a common lens through which I look at my life. If I were living my particular life with the goal of learning something which had been planned for me before my birth, what are the lessons I should learn from what I am experiencing in this moment?

I’ve found that to be a life-changing question.

If I’m here to learn something, what can my life teach me? What can I learn from the things I go through, both the good and the bad? How can those lessons make me a better and more loving person? How can they make my soul just a bit closer to being what I was created to be?

Since I started asking myself these questions a few years ago, I’ve often calmed myself and found more enlightening ways to frame things I was going through. I still experience grief and pain and frustration and loneliness — just as I also experience happiness and joy and exultation and connectedness — but I interpret those things in very different ways now.

I see life as less of a thing which happens to me against my will. Even the things which hurt me deeply can be learning experiences. Framing the world this way has led me to think deeply about responsibility and patience and gratitude, as well as helping me to understand grace and mercy. Most of all, though, it has helped me to understand unconditional love — in a way I’d never seen it before.

I can’t say you would have the same results if you tried my mental and spiritual exercise, but I can say that it’s been very valuable for me.

I’m not yet the man I believe I was made to be, but by trying to learn from my hurts and fears, I think I’m finding ways to get closer to my goal.

Whether people who have “near-death experiences” are delusional or if there’s something spiritual going on, it doesn’t matter. They’ve taught me something. They’ve helped me to be a better man.

Above all else, they’re teaching me to be more authentic in my love for those who people here who I want so badly want to love.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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