Death on the cards

SHOCKING INVITE: Richard Lawson can’t believe a strange mailed invitation.

PICK A DATE: The ‘‘appointment card’’ asks people to predict their date of death.

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AN INVITATION to predict the "date of your death" freaked out a North Shore man.

Richard Lawson got a nasty shock after trying to find the sender of wrongly addressed mail to his Forrest Hill home.

Inside he found what he initially thought was a dentist's appointment card.

On closer inspection he found a request to "please fill in your date of your death" including the time.

"It's despicable. It could have come to somebody who is sick or had a death in the family," Mr Lawson says.

The card invites people to fill in their name and phone number and says: "Please don't forget to call me on the date you're going to die. Then we can discuss your eternity".

The back of the card contains a religious message admitting people won't know the date or hour of their death.

It urges people to read their bible and obey what they read to avoid an eternity in hell and refers them to a website.

Mr Lawson is a church-going man himself and is horrified at the fake appointment card.

Mr Lawson decided to bring it into the North Shore Times office to alert others to the material.

"It's something we don't need in New Zealand," he says.

The card refers to a website that is linked to a California evangelical ministry, Living Waters, set up by New Zealand-born Ray Comfort.

Mr Comfort replied to an emailed request for comment, apologising for any offence caused by the card that he published in the United States years ago.

"We have published over 100 million gospel tracts and very rarely are people shocked by them. My intention was simply to remind those who read it, that all of us are going to die, and that God offers us the gift of everlasting life," Mr Comfort says.

"Any doctor who has a cure to a disease has to confront his patient with the bad news of a diagnosis – so that he will see that he needs the cure.

"So may I respectfully ask the shocked resident to forgive me, and then look past the bad news, to the incredible good news of the Christian gospel."

- © Fairfax NZ News