I lived most of my life with hell
living inside of me, like a mouse in the walls of an old house. It was an actual physical entity that dwelled
inside of me and to this day, I am angry about it. As long as I can remember, I was scared of
going to hell and I had this one burning question on the tip of my tongue that
I couldn’t ask any of the adults because I was scared of the answer, and I
thought they would all think the question was foolish. Until one day, I asked one of the adults who
I had decided was possibly the one adult who could give me the answer that
would take my fear away and confirm that, yes indeed, God was actually a nice
guy. His answer was a tragedy in my life
and it caused a rift between God and myself that is only recently being reimagined.
The
question was this: If I commit a sin, say, tell a small lie or something
trivial like that, and then were to go outside and be hit by a car and die
without having confessed that sin, would I go to hell? Perhaps the question seems simple, but its
existence in my life was anything but simple and how that question had been
formed at my core was a process of a very insidious nature. There was the repetition of instruction about
heaven and hell given to me every night at my bedside as a child and the conversations
about what paradise would be like after we die. There was also the insistence that
I remember every sin I had committed that day, each day, because we must
“confess with our mouths” our sins to be forgiven and “we all sin every day”,
so I would rack my brain trying to remember the sin I did that day and would
end up confessing things that weren’t sin because I had to confess
something. Like the old Robert Johnson
blues tune, “Hell Hound On My Trail”, hell was creeping up behind me and the devil
was a deceiver and my chances were not good because I wasn’t smart enough to
keep ahead of the game he had set up way back in the Garden of Eden.
After some time in
my life, the anxiety was palpable and I was conscious of it. I needed answers, so I turned to a friend of
my father’s who I had grown to love in my young life. I was 13 at this time. He was a black man and very tall and had a
low voice and he had always been kind and gentle towards me. He was a pastor in our church fellowship and
had been a missionary for many years in Indonesia, so he qualified, in my mind,
as a bona fied man of God. The felt experience I had when in his presence made
me think he knew God, so when he was assigned to be my counselor at summer
camp, I was excited, even relieved.
The last day of
camp, there was always a traditional campfire “come-to-Jesus” meeting that
typically ended with many tears and confessions and rededications and conversions
to Christianity. It was after this
event, when my dorm mates and I had returned to the dorm and there was more
prayer and confession being done with our two counselors, that I decided to
approach this giant man with my question.
I remember it very clearly: I phrased it simply, just as it had always
existed in my mind and heart. When I
uttered the final words, “will I go to hell”, he looked at me as if I had just
asked him what two plus two was. He
simply said, “Yes”.
I remember the
feeling very well. It was like in the
movies, when the reactor is about to meltdown and some character is shouting,
“SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT ALL DOWN!!!” In the movie, people begin toggling switches
down as fast as their hands will allow so as to prevent utter destruction. So it was with my heart. I felt a shut down happen almost instantly. My heart was retreating from the god I had
always feared existed, but never wanted to believe in. Since not believing wasn’t an option because
it was very clear I would go to hell if I didn’t believe, my soul underwent a
separation process. It was like there
was a part of me inside, perhaps the child-like side that Jesus referred to,
that knew what was true or not because of a pure creative energy that I was
born with. And now I felt that part of
me break off and fall by the wayside. I
don’t remember any words or conversation from the rest of that evening or that
week. I don’t remember feeling much
about God after that until in my early twenties when the depression was so
heavy that I began to search for a way out of my life, either by death or by
healing. Either would be fine. It turns out that I preferred healing.
Steve Zakuani with Kingdom Hope
Seth and Mbaraga Djuma (former street kid - now a Hero)
Training (with translator) on practice organization in 2010