Reforming (phase 1), Hell and Mercy (step 6), session 3

Yesterday I suggested a reflection idea I wanted to come back to, and now I'm going to revisit it even though I really don't want to. It is painful. It feels sad and lonely, and I have no control over it. But there are a number of people I love deeply who are at various stages of cutting me out of their lives, or at least of keeping me at a far greater distance than I wish for.

This feels different from when I was isolated by my own sin. In that case, I knew what I had done wrong warranted the rejection I was receiving. Most of those relationships have been healed over time, much to my surprise. These felt very different from what I imagine hell to be, as I suspect that life in hell includes a high degree of disdain for others' (and God's) opinions that was not a part of my emotional makeup back then. I knew I deserved the isolation I was experiencing, and viewed it as only just. I imagine that God meets even a belated humble recognition of this sort of truth with grace and mercy.

What I feel now for those who are separated from me by their choice is also probably not very like hell, as I believe it to be. I don't think that God condemns people to hell, with the result that people in hell feel as if God is depriving them of what they really want. I think it's more as if hell is like getting what we think we really want and it never satisfying us, because we really want the wrong thing. In fact, I think that God hurts for our sake when we choose to fix upon such objects of our desire, and I think that God feels the pain of our choices more than we have the sense to feel it for ourselves. But the agony of hell is going to be the realization of all of that pain and the insistence that it's still better than humbling ourselves and accepting God's will.

For the mountains may depart
and the hills be removed,
but my steadfast love shall not depart from you,
and my covenant of peace shall not be removed,
says the LORD, who has compassion on you. - Is 54, 10

I pray that God's mercy may indeed prove greater than hell, and that he would bring every one of us to the point that we would choose it.