A Central Tragedy

This is one portion of a paper I had to write for a class this semester.  It has to do with a tragedy in my life.  It's about a 5 minute read.  Would love to hear your thoughts.

             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.