Hell is where the Heart Is
You’re going to burn in Hell forever.
That’s the fear they sold us, isn’t it?
If you grew up in the church, you faced the same conflict I did, right? You sat there, listening to messages of certainty week after week. Where the righteous obey God, and the “world” lives in sin, destined for hell. It’s clean and simple. 1+1=2. Adam and Eve ate the fruit. Sin is introduced. You’re paying for it. But the good news is, all you have to do is accept Jesus as your lord and savior. And that message just didn’t feel right.
Maybe that nagging intuition never resolved for you. It hasn’t for me. So where did you land with it? Maybe you carried that crack in your faith for years, never naming it. Maybe you wondered if there was something wrong with you. Look around, there are people every where with these big smiles, talking about how good God is. And if you’re like me youre thinking, so God is going to punish me for not obeying a list of rules written down in a book 3000 years ago unless I say a prayer? That just doesn’t sound like good news.
You can’t say that out loud at a Bible study. So maybe you held it in. Letting the conflict inside of you grow. Eventually you start questioning Hell. Why does there need to be a hell anyway? God doesn’t need hell to exist in order to love us, so sending people there just seems cruel. Is God cruel? Wow, now you’re farther away from God. And how do you feel?
Like you’re broken?
Like you’re alone?
You’re not alone. You’re not broken. I’ve walked this path too. Same questions. Same pain and restlessness. I’ll tell you what I’ve found. When these cracks appear in your faith, that’s the beginning of something good. How? Because for you and me, certainty doesn’t work. Simple answers were never going to work for you, because you’re wired differently. When these deep questions pop up about how God works, they don’t just go away, they keep cracking. And it can seem like you’re at risk of falling, losing your foundation. That’s scary as hell. Scarier than hell even. But here’s the thing. You can let it happen. You can say yes. You can see where it leads.
For me it led to depth. It led to freedom. When I let go of my need for there to be certainty about God, I was able to exhale. The cracks opened up and when they did, I didn’t fall through in to nothingness. I found myself standing on honesty, integrity and peace. I discovered that a God of being was beyond labels, beyond certainty and beyond hell. The God I found wasn’t concerned with me being correct, or where I was obeying. Now I’ll be honest. I lost the God of certainty. And I found the God of depth and expansion. I found that God by letting go and by being ok with not knowing. So if you’re staring at the cracks, or your wandering through a desert of doubt. Know that you’re not alone, many have let the cracks break open. And what they found was good news. So stay in it.