“Hey, Dave,” Esther greeted me as I walked through the door, “we received more donations over the weekend. Do you mind looking through them?”

“Sure, not a problem.” I walked to the back of the Second Chance Thrift Shop and was stunned by the mountain of clothing that stood before me. “Well,” I said to no one, “I’d better get started.”

I sorted the clothes into two categories: discards (which go into garbage bags) and inventory (which goes into cardboard boxes to be added to our inventory list and tagged).

After an hour, I had filled up five large boxes and two full garbage bags of clothes. As I reached into the pile again, I felt a familiar texture. After I pulled it out, I held in my hands a crushed red velvet dress. My breath caught as I rubbed my thumb across the surface. “Janet,” I whispered as my mind went back to that day—the day my wife died.

We were on our way to a friend’s winter wedding when our car was t-boned from the right at an intersection. Janet was wearing a lovely new black velvet dress that made her look stunning—a dress that would be forever stained red with her blood. The paramedics did their best, but she couldn’t be saved. Since I was on the other side of the car, I walked away with only a few minor cuts and contusions.

In the aftermath, my mind ran wild, thinking of all the things that went wrong and how—if I had done something, anything differently—she would be alive now. But after a few months of wallowing in my grief, a friend invited me to church. I was like a zombie at that point, and I just went with the flow. I had no idea how drastically that one church visit would change my life.

Since it was close to Easter, the sermon was about a man named Jesus. The pastor talked about how He died to pay the penalty of the sins of the entire world but was raised again after three days to give us eternal life. This piqued my interest—how could someone have eternal life?

I talked to the pastor after church that day, and I told him all about Janet. “Dave,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear about that. Death and loss are always hard, especially for people who have no hope in life after death.”

“You said that someone who believes on Jesus as the Son of God Who paid for his sins can have eternal life, but you’re still talking about death. How can someone have eternal life and never die?”

“Dave, there are two types of life and death. Physical life and spiritual life. In the beginning, God created all men to be perfect. There was no lying, stealing, sickness, or death. But that was before Adam, the first man, sinned. He broke the one rule God had given him—not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We refer to that instance as the Fall of Man.

“God had told Adam and his wife Eve that the day they ate the fruit from that tree, they would die. However, this was not referring to immediate physical death; it was referring to immediate spiritual death. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had enjoyed a wonderful, personal relationship with God. But sin always separates, and the relationship between God and man was broken. Were you ever caught lying to one of your parents?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And didn’t that strain the relationship you had with your parent?”

“It did. Huh, I never thought about it that way.”

“The reason why we sin is because the curse of sin was also passed down from generation to generation. That is why we see things like lying, stealing, sickness, and death today. But despite everything, God still loved mankind and desired to have true fellowship with him again. The only way for man to be forgiven was if a single man could live a perfect life on this earth and then die a sinless death. Now, God also knew that this would be an impossible task for man to pull off. That’s why He chose to become a man to live and die for us.”

“What?! Why would He do that?”

“Because that’s how much He loves us, how much He loves you.”

“I don’t understand how someone could love me that much.”

“I know. There are some things that are beyond our comprehension, and that is what makes God’s love so precious. It is a free gift we could never deserve.”

“So, if I believe that Jesus, who is also God, came to earth to die for me, I can have eternal spiritual life? What does that mean?”

“Well, on earth, it is the opportunity to have a deep relationship with God. And after death, your spirit—something that every man has—will go to live with Him forever in heaven. For those who don’t believe, they die a second spiritual death, and their spirits go to live in hell where they are eternally separated from God because of their sins.”

“Then does that mean my wife—“

“Do you know if she ever made this decision herself?”

“No, I’m not sure.”

“Then there is a chance that she is in hell now. I can’t know for certain. Only God knows the inside of a person’s heart. But there is still time for you to be saved from that spiritual death, if you are willing.”

I was saved that day, saved from eternal death. The pastor, Pastor Taylor, was willing to host sessions with me where he helped me to come to terms with my grief through insights from the Bible. I still miss my wife—I always will—but I see now that God used her death to help save me. I don’t know where I would be now if it were not for God.

Looking down at my hands, I finally remembered the dress and, after inspecting it, I placed it into a box to be sold. Just like me, this dress would get to have a second chance in life.