PARENTS ASK COURT TO NOT ALLOW
DAUGHTER TO CHOOSE DEATH

Of course, her name would be “Grace.”

She has had the grace to place before the human race, once again, the question of What God Wants.

SungEun Grace Lee, who is known by everyone as Grace, is 28 years old. She cannot move from the neck down, the result of an incurable tumor in her brain stem. She cannot even breathe on her own, and is hooked up to a machine to receive oxygen. She cannot eat on her own and is on a feeding tube.

In other words, Grace Lee, 28, is lying in a bed at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., fully conscious and completely alert, with all of her cognitive skills, but with none of her bodily functions under her control. She is not even able to speak clearly. This, for a person who was a financial manager for Bank of America, and was in training for the New York City Marathon last year.

Grace Lee does not choose to live this way. And she knows, she has been told, that the tumor destroying her brain is going to kill her. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.

Should Grace be able to ask that all life support systems be turned off, so that she might end, if and when she wishes to, what she feels is a living hell?

Her parents feel that the answer should be no.

Grace asked the doctors at the hospital to turn off her life support. After determining that the woman was completely mentally competent, the medical staff prepared to do so.

They were stopped last week.

Her father, whose name is Man Ho Lee, is pastor of Antioch Missionary Church in Flushing, N.Y.  He and his wife, Jin Ah Lee, are devastated by Grace’s decision. And not just on a personal level, which would be understandable enough, but on a spiritual level as well—which to them may be equally, if not more, important.

The Lee’s believe that if their daughter ends her own life at will, she will be condemned by God to everlasting torture in hell.

They raced to court to halt the doctors at the hospital from removing Grace from life support. They begged the court to declare Grace incompetent and to appoint Rev. Lee as her guardian—with the authority to make all medical decisions for her. The court declined to do so. The Lee’s then rushed to an appeals court to ask for a reversal.

The story about all of this, first reported this week in the New York Daily News, then repeated on Internet blogs around the world, has captured the attention of thousands, many of whom grapple with the question: What does God want in cases such as this?

As a legal matter, the case has now been closed. The Daily News reported that a state appeals court ruled on Friday, Oct 6 that Grace’s parents cannot stop her from making her own decision about her life and death.

(To read more of the news report, click on these words: New York Daily News.)

The key theological point in this situation was clearly laid out in the court documents filed by Grace’s parents. “The removal of the respirator and/or the feeding tube is considered suicide,” the New York Daily News reported that their motion said. “A person who commits suicide is condemned in the next life to burn in Hell forever. Obviously, this could not be (Lee’s) intention.”

Yet while the legal matter has now apparently been settled, the theological question remains in the minds and hearts of many. The Lees are not the only ones who feel that suicide is against the will of God, punishable by unmitigated torment, agony, and suffering inflicted by Divine Mandate and administered in hell by Satan. But is this true?

Conversations with God says no. Its message is, in fact, just the opposite. It says that nothing could be further from the truth. God is, CWG says, the ultimate in Understanding, Compassion, and Love, and would never condemn or punish anyone—for anything.

First, God has no need to, because God cannot be hurt or damaged, angered or injured, in any way. Second, there is no such place as hell, so there is no “location” in the Afterlife where endless sadistic persecution and torture takes place. Third, God’s understanding of how and why a person would chose to terminate their own life is far too vast, too comprehensive, too completely “aware,” to allow God to determine that somehow a soul deserves an eternity of suffering in response to its simple wish to have interminable suffering end.

God has given every sentient being in the Multiverse (science is now telling us that there is more than one universe) the gift of Free Will. This is not the freedom to do what God says “or else” (which would, obviously, not be Free Will at all)—but is, in fact, a true Free Will…to do whatever one chooses—for whatever reasons one uses to justify one’s choice.

CWG offers the observation that “nobody does anything inappropriate, given their model of the world.” Even those people who have been judged to be mentally unstable (perhaps especially those human beings) fall within this parameter.

It is completely and compassionately understandable that Mr. and Mrs. Lee would or could feel their own fear that God will punish Grace mercilessly, ruthlessly, pitilessly, heartlessly, brutally, and unendingly if she tells her doctors to turn off life support and allow her to die naturally, the result of her own physical illness. This is, after all, what they have been taught. It is what they believe deep within their hearts. But God will not do this.

I would give anything to help Mr. and Mrs. Lee know that God will not do this.

When I appeared on The Today Show a number of years ago, Matt Lauer asked me, if I truly feel that I’ve talked to God, what God’s Message to the World is. He asked me if I could put it in one paragraph. “We’ve got just 30 seconds left” in the interview, he explained.

I told him that I didn’t need even one paragraph, that I could put it in five words. He blinked and said, “Okay, ladies and gentlemen, from Neale Donald Walsch…God’s message to the world in five words.” The red light on the camera trained on me lit. And I delivered that message…

You’ve got me all wrong.