Today is April 12, one month on from the passing of our little Willow. I am sitting in the floor of Willow's bedroom on the exact spot where I found her lifeless body on that horrific day. I think I am trying to create something. I am having one of those "in between" days. I spoke with my aunt Vicki today about Willow. I told her all about that night, about the CPR and the medi-flight, about all of the details. I have done everything I can today to make it all about remembering Willow and yet, no tears. I have had a boring, regular day. I haven't written in a few days because our last power cord for our computers finally broke and I was waiting on a new one to come so there is certainly a lot of ground to cover to make up for lost time. A lot has happened, good and bad. I have no idea where to start so I will just let this entry be totally random and not at all thought out. Here I go.
I was listening to a song today called "Only God Knows Why." It struck me because there is a baby buried near Willow and the inscription on her bench says "Only God Knows Why." My prevailing thought has been the same, only God knows why. There is a lyric in that song that says something like "they say every man bleeds just like me." That rather random lyric struck me pretty hard today. My family is not specially equipped to deal with this. We don't have anything that you don't have. The greatest imaginable tragedy has struck our family, only God knows why, and we have no way of knowing what to do or any special powers of healing to get through this. We are messed up. I have heard the phrase "God never gives you more than you can handle" more times than I can stand and I firmly disagree. People are driven mad every day by the circumstances in their lives. If handling it simply means that I don't drop dead under the pressure then yes I suppose I am handling it. However, there are those in between days and there are those happy days. It is a strange ting to be a witness to your own loss of sanity. Some days I just sit and look back at my emotional break downs and think to myself, "Wow, that must have been really hard." It is as if it were someone else going through it. That leads me to one of the major highlights of the last few days. The way that we deal with it. I am a very different person from the rest of my family in one peculiar way. I am not afraid to unabashedly weep over this pain. When it comes on I don't try to hide it. I don't care who is there, although I do try to find a quiet, hidden spot where I can not put others through it with me. I want to talk about it. I want to get it out. Alice, Carpenter and Shelby on the other hand are quite stoic. Alice has her moments of crying, but they are private moments when no one else is around. Shelby, I have only seen cry once since we left the hospital, although she says she cries in the shower. Carpenter waits until he is in bed, the TV is off and he thinks everyone else is asleep, and that is his time to cry. Otherwise you would not know there was anything wrong by just watching them throughout the day. They internalize, and they think on the good things and the hope that one day they will see Willow again. There we find another major difference. I was born and raised in church. Three times a week I was in services. I was taught the independent, fundamental Baptist way of thinking and I never fell in line with it. I came to believe in God very easily. I studied darwinism, i studied scientific creationism, I studied the King James bible, I studied the NIV, I met with pastors of Baptist churches, Pentacostal, Catholic, Mormon. I attended church at all of these denominations and more and some could answer some questions and some could not. I learned a lot and I came to terms with a lot but there are a few things that I never did or have come to terms with. Thats the thing about the Bible. The more you learn the more questions you have. I have found peace with most questions but there is one prevailing thing that I cannot get peace about. If God is never surprised, is all knowing and all seeing, then when He created Hell for lucifer and his angels then He must have known that some of us, His children, would end up there. He had to know that His children whom He loves with a perfect love, a love greater than anything I am capable of, would spend eternity burning in torments. My sweet Willow, it broke my heart when she got a boo boo. The thought that I would create a scenario where if she didn't get it right then she would be condemned to an eternity in flames in unconscionable. I would never and I would absorb her death ten thousand times over if it would spare her from it. If God loves us as He says He does, why did he create a scenario such as this? I have yet to come to terms with this and if I die before I do, do I burn for eternity? This is a question asked in all seriousness. I don't understand why even if I spend a lifetime trying to get it straight and just not quite being able to get there then I will be subjected to such a punishment. My pastor has helped me with some of the other questions that I have been afraid to ask, he really has given me quite a bit of peace about some things, but this one still weighs on me. I need to get it figured out. I need understanding. The Bible says, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not." I am not quite sure what upbraideth means but it seems God doesn't do it. EVER. So now I ask of Him. God, I am lacking in wisdom. I do not know why you have allowed a way for us to end up in Hell's flames and I need to understand why it is right. As a father, it boggles my mind. Perhaps, only you know why.
Stephen, please forgive the crudity of my poor attempt to answer your question about hell. (see below). It really requires a book length treatment. I think Francis Chan wrote a book recently I have not read, but heard was good, "Erasing Hell". Anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts and struggles. I do appreciate it. Actually I'm sure anyone who reads it will appreciate it. We continue to lift you guys up in prayer. Don't despair, and stay strong my friend!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, here's my 2 cents on hell from what I have studied:
Atheists accuse our God of cruelty and of being sadistic. They say that how could God create a punishment that is eternal? To our minds we think that the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
Other people think that only the really really bad people like Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin deserve hell. We reason that they murdered millions of people so that they are the ones that really deserve it.
The truth is that hell is an expression of the wrath of God towards sin/evil. I think we have to get a better grasp of God's holiness for wrath to make sense. If we can truly appreciate God's holiness, then we can perhaps glimpse God's wrath.
There are things about God that we can't really relate to or understand. I think wrath falls into one of these categories. We relate more to love than wrath. I think we only have dim analogies of it. One theologian (Barth I think) first described God as "wholly other". I take it to mean that God is completely unlike us in many respects.
I think one good earthly way to think about it is when Jesus drove out the money changers out of the temple. That wasn't just simple anger, but it was a holy anger. Jesus accuses the Jewish leaders and the sellers of doves etc. of making his Father's house into a house of theives. That's why he took action against them.
While we can't see the human heart and its love of sin and its hatred towards God, God does see it. He sees how much all of us hated him (either actively or at one time or another).
(Actually I think that any sin we commit is an act of rejection of God. Yet God forgives us as believers because of the death of Christ that covers our sins. That's a whole other discussion...)
Romans 1:18 tells us that people are actively suppressing the truth about God in unrighteousness. That suppression results I think from people's hatred of God and their love of sin.
Paul goes on to say that all men are without excuse. See Romans 1:19-20.
So is hell necessary? According to scripture yes it is. Again it is a function of God's hatred for evil. Since those who have not taken refuge in Christ still remain under God's anger, then he justly punishes them.
Hell is very difficult to come to terms with. I have a hard time with it. Yet there it is taught by Jesus himself! The same Jesus who loved us enough to die on a cross, also taught about the reality of hell. I guess for me it's one of those doctrines I accept but that is very hard to understand why or for me to relate to.
Hope this helped in some small way.
Adam
I see what you are saying, but still don't understand it. The best I gather is that Hell was created for a place to banish Lucifer and his angels and because God is pure and holy He cannot exist in the presence of sin and so must separate Himself from sin. Hell is where sin is banished to. I get all of that, but I still don't understand why He would allow us such a consequence. My other question is this. Can I call myself a christian if I believe God is real, Jesus is real, but disagree with the idea that an eternity in Hell is a just punishment?
ReplyDelete"Can I call myself a christian if I believe God is real, Jesus is real, but disagree with the idea that an eternity in Hell is a just punishment?"
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I feel the same way and yes, I consider myself a Christian.
--with love