Part I-The Grave Digger Who Visited Heaven

Everybody was horrified of Paul's scruffy looks with dirt and mud smeared all over his wrinkled face, and his long nose with dark spots on its tip; and a grave digger matched that image, but he was the nicest person on planet earth: hard-working, estimable, amicable and honest. After the day's work was done, Paul stared at the empty lots and whispered to himself, " Soon I'll be in one of them...I feel it coming! " One unlucky afternoon he was standing on the edge of a newly dug-up grave and accidently slipped and fell into the twenty-feet excavation; no screams for help were heard...he was dead! That same afternoon, there was a burial and as the corpse's coffin was lowered into the grave, Father Michael spotted a body lying on the bottom of it, and it resembled that of Paul....suddenly police were notified and minutes later a fire truck arrived to the dreary scene. Then two young firefighters lowered themselves into the pitch-dark grave by holding onto sturdy ropes, and without much effort, they pulled his bruised and broken body: he was pronounced dead at two-thirty. Paul had a near-death experience, one of the most incredible ones: he visited heaven, the place of bliss! And as he climbed the gold stairway, he heard many voices of those he knew in the previous life...they chanted glorifying God, who was seated on an ivory throne surrounded by Archangels, Saints and the Prophets whom he remembered from his Bible readings.