Lost and Confused

We have been cleaning house more and more, and yesterday I was asked to go through a large box of books in our basement. It was full of books from my childhood - school books, notebooks, the children's versions of Tom Sawyer and Robin Hood - as well as Christian books from my teen years. I couldn't bring myself to throw out some of them. I kept the Bibles I owned as a kid, with my name doodled on the inside covers (which was probably a sin but hey, I was like nine years old). I also kept the Christian version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears entitled "The Three Bears Go Into The Ministry" (you think I'm making this up, don't you?).

This morning I was reading excerpts from one of the adult books on Christian living to Mother.

"The Word of God says, 'Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers, for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness?' God makes it perfectly clear that a believer is not to marry an unbeliever. If that's true, then why date an unbeliever? You don't share any common spiritual ground."

I guess you could say I'm guilty of being unequally yoked in my current relationship, along with plenty of other sins I commit daily. (I'm not even going to get into how offensive I find it that those of other religions or no religion are 'darkness' out to contaminate those of us in the 'light'.) I said to Mother, "This whole Christian life thing is really not feasible." She said, "Yeah, but some people do it. How do they do it?" I replied, "You don't know that they do; it just appears to others that they do. You never really know." She said, "Well, that's why the Bible says that the road is narrow. Broad is the road to destruction and most people enter there."

I said to her, "Suppose a teacher gives a test to a class. She tells the class, 'I have made this test extremely hard... unbelievably hard. Only about two of you will pass, and those of you who fail will burn in hell for all eternity.' Can you imagine such a thing?" She said the Holy Spirit gives us the answers.

I guess it's a bad analogy. Supposedly God doesn't make it hard for us, Adam did, or the Devil, or whatever. And the Holy Spirit doesn't take away the difficulty and struggle of getting the answer right simply by providing it.

On Thanksgiving we drove past a church, one of those big, beautiful ones that has been around for a hundred years, and I was filled with such a longing. I don't know why. Part of the religious life appeals to me so much. I used to be so pious, you know? Now it's like, to hell with everything, and I don't think that's me either. I need to figure out where 'me' lies.

I'm even craving C.S. Lewis. What's going on, folks?

On another note, I think the whole hell thing has been bothering me again. Last night I had a disturbing dream, something about me living the wrong way and going to be punished for it, but I don't remember the details. It's fuzzy.

Do I deserve to go to hell? Do any of us?