It is interesting to me that I woke up early this morning contemplating Hell. This afternoon, after skimming through FB, I saw that our teaching minister blogged about Hell. I have not read his blog because I want to neither plagiarize nor seem that I am somehow passively aggressively disagreeing with him. So, I will wait to read it until I am finished. There is one thing I know for sure, and that is whatever he has written, it will be much more intellectual and well thought-out than this little blurb.
There was a time in my life when I was often reassessing what hell would be. I once was convinced that it would be the late Saturday night show at the Grand Ole Opry with Hank Snow on stage. If you have experienced that event, you know exactly of that which I speak. Once on a tour someone asked me if Hank Snow was dead. My less-than-gracious reply was, "yes, but no one has told him so you will be seeing him at the Opry tonight."
One evening years ago, I was fairly certain that hell was the tiny nursery at church filled with babies of all ages on a hot summer night during a thunderstorm with no power. I still get the shudders and consider how seriously I need to straighten out my wicked ways in order to avoid such an eternal fate.
When I was twelve years old, about six months after my baptism, our preacher offered up a sermon on hell. He was very graphic as he told us to go home, turn the burner on the stove and set our hands on it. He described the gradual heating up of the burner, how the flesh would begin to smoke and how the blood in our veins would begin to boil. He had a way with words as he described the smell of burning flesh and the complete agony that accompanied such a deed. Then, his denouement...he said that was only a fraction of what hell would be like. Holy cow, I could not get out of my pew and down that aisle to ask for the prayers of the church so I could be "restored" fast enough. I did not want to go there, and if staying out of there meant being "restored" every church service, then I was prepared to comply.
Frankly, I think there are very few of us, no matter what heinous acts we have committed, who would ever think we deserved such a hideous eternity. If sent there, we would not be contrite and broken hearted, we would be furious and self-righteous and looking for someone to blame for this terrible injustice we were suffering.
I think all church goers have heard the story about the people in hell starving to death at a table laden with food because the spoons they were given had handles too long for them to feed themselves. Heaven had the same circumstance except the people were happy and well-fed because they fed each other. Perhaps, this is getting a little closer than a horned, long-tailed, pitch-fork carrying demon to whom God, the Father has sent all of us who have more black marks than stars in the Lamb's Book of Life.
Perhaps, this last view is a bit closer to what hell is. I have come to think of hell as where God is not....in our need to be angry at our fellow man, in our addictions, in our hatefulness, in our selfishness, in our need to exact revenge on those whom we perceive have slighted us, in our lack of sympathy and empathy, in our sense of entitlement, in our looking for a fight, in our enjoyment of the base and obscene, in our prejudice. These things are not of God. These things lead to a burning hell in our hearts in our minds and in our relationships. And, when, in honesty we look at ourselves, and know we are guilty of such behavior, our hearts are broken, we understand our culpability, and then we are ready to accept the saving grace of Jesus, not as something to which we are entitled, but rather as the gift that it is.
So, hell...is it a place? I do not think so. It is so much more than that. Is its landlord a despicable red man? I do not think so. I am the landlord of my hell. I do not profess to know where a spirit or soul goes after the body has died in this realm. It is all too wonderous and mysterious for my feeble mind. So, I choose to trust God, to accept Jesus's sacrifice, to try and fail and try again to live my life in a way that reflects those choices.
For today, I wish you blessings
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