remember me as a time of day

I'm sitting in the car, on the passenger side. We're talking, the driver and I and the guy sitting on the back seat. We get off the highway into a side road, and this driver does not see that his lights are red, so he does not see the oncoming pickup truck, also partly because it's oncoming from my side (him he's turned right so he's looking ahead not to the left - which apparently they do teach at driving school. I see it, too  late. I hold my hand up to the window, almost as though I can myself prevent the crash. "Oh. My. God!" Time stops. The car starts honking, from afar, getting closer and closer, now accompanied by screeching tires as he tries to brake. My guy now turns to his left, sees it also, tries to swerve, but does not help. He screams. A loud pop. Escalates into a crash. A sharp searing pain from my shoulder to my head. Broken glass. Crumbling metal. I'm thrown to the right. The pain is now in my lower ribcage - which I later gather was me hitting the gear lever. I lose all feeling. My elbow knocks the steering wheel, followed rapidly by the rest of me. Then I fee myself pushed back by the driver's airbag. My head now on the driver's window. Needless to say, the car I'm in was not a Volvo, does not have side impact bars, or passenger airbags. The pickup comes to a screeching halt, stopped cold by the force of the collision. I start to see white, my head whirls round and round. A warm stream starts to flow steadily down my forehead, my hands, my neck. It's all happened in five seconds, but at slow motion they feel like two hours. And then it starts to get dark...

So we ran a red light some time last week in town, and that accident almost did happen, but the pick up stopped in time in the real-world(TM) version. I've been having this nightmare on and off since, and every time I wake up just as the crowd starts converging. It's almost as though I have one of those out-of-body experiences, where it's me in the action, but it's also me looking at it from above. Like the way on TV when people are having flashbacks they can see themselves as though from a third-person point of view. As I have learned, now and from past experience, death is like a thief in the night. It happens in an instant. There really won't be time to repent and all that stuff we tell ourselves we'll do just before we die. But like they say, you tend to survive if it wasn't your appointed time.

So anyway, here's my question: what age are you when you're in heaven? The age you were just before you died? The time you remember as being the happiest in your life? Or do we, like, get application forms filled where we pick? What if you were in the army and you died in combat - do you hobble around heaven sans the foot you lost to a land mine? What if you die by hanging - will you forever walk around all gross and blue with your tongue sticking out? And what if we can choose, and you die at 15, and you pick 35, how will anyone ever be able to find you then? Mark Shultz is playing (by design more than coincidence... :) "...Coz I believe that He never lets you go/I believe that He's wanting you to know/I believe that He'll lead you till/You're back in His arms again..."

END