My brothers and I learned the Heimlich maneuver in scouts. If someone is choking, you get behind them and wrap your arms around the person’s waist. You make a fist with one hand, grabbing it with the other, and positioning it below the rib cage and above the navel. You then make a series of quick thrusts pulling inward and upward to dislodge the object in their throat.
I actually saw my dad perform the Heimlich on a person at a restaurant. A person started choking, had their hands on their throat, and was turning red in the face. My dad got up behind them, did the thrust, and the food particle blocking their ability to breathe spewed out.
Can you imagine what might have happened when that person started choking on the piece of food if someone stood up and asked: “Is there a doctor in the house? We need a doctor right now!”
With the person choking and turning several shades of color and no doctor being present, the EMTs are called. By the time he’s connected with the specialist, to the person who knows the most about it, it could very well be too late. Tragically, a lot of us are making that mistake with someone's spiritual survival. Instead of treating them where they are, we keep waiting until they might get connected to a specialist.
Life is short, eternity is forever. Everybody is going to spend eternity somewhere. God wants us to be with Him in heaven. All of us have the power to help someone live eternally in heaven. The life-saving of people who don't know Christ isn't just in the hands of some religious professionals. It's in our hands. If someone is choking to death at a restaurant, we need to know how to rescue them. Their life might be lost if we wait for someone else to get to them. The rescue is in our hands because we're there, we're close. We can’t just depend on a specialist being on the scene. As Christ followers, we are called to bring help to those around us in need, not just wait for them to come for help.
Everybody is going to spend eternity somewhere. We might help make the difference where. I like what one person shared, “My purpose in life is to get to heaven and bring as many people as possible with me.” May we all be so like-minded!
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us. God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:17-20)
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