The sun was hot on us there on the patio off the side of the hospital, high up on the sixth floor. We had our backs against the building, looking out past the tables and through the tall glass wall to the brown hills and valley that was Kamloops. We both had big tubs of water softly clinking with small ice squares, compliments of the ward. We’d stopped talking, our efforts having dwindled down to nothing, when my daughter turned to me and said, “When I was six years old, you told me that if I didn’t love God, I would go to hell.”
Reader, I did not.
Or.
I don’t think I did. I hope I didn’t.
But she clearly thought I did which meant that, really, I may as well have.
I slumped, turned so I could looked her in the eye, and said, “Oh, Ellyanne, that’s terrible. I am SO sorry!”
I wish now that I could remember her response.
I wish a lot of things.
I wish neither of us had ever spent any time on that patio off GT6 – the pysch ward – instead of the hours and hours that we did.
And I was just the visitor, she lived in the ward for weeks and months at a time.
I wish she hadn’t been haunted by the fear of hell. I wish God had answered our prayers by giving her an experience of his love – one that lasted. I wish she hadn’t publicly called herself a ‘former Christian’.
I wish I knew for sure, now, that she is with him.
There doesn’t seem to be much to say, in the Christian circles I know, to parents whose kids die while resisting God. Oh, people will say, “Well, she had mental illness. God knows where her heart really was. We can’t know.” And it’s true. Or they’ll say, “We don’t know what happened in the last seconds before death – remember the thief on the cross.” Also true.
But if the fear is that this person who you lost, who you love so much, if this person might, perhaps, possibly, go to hell…
I’m just saying it’s hard to find books or sermons or even blogs about that. And unless you really love someone who fights God, who refuses him, you may not have noticed how singular, how self-oriented, many worship songs are. Yes, Jesus is my hiding place, but my daughter is getting shot at. Yes, Jesus is in the boat with me, but she’s out in the waves drowning.
Yes, he’s my comfort but she is sobbing in an isolation room in the psych ward.
Honestly, I didn’t want him to be hiding me, or in the boat with me, or comforting me. I wanted him to GO GET HER! Take care of her.
And then he let her die.
More, he let her kill herself.
And I’m here now trying to make sense of what makes no sense: how a smart, funny, loveable, pretty, young woman, who knew herself to be deeply loved, is let to kill herself.
And how those of us who are left have to navigate the ending of a story which, in the churches I’ve known, is potentially horrific.
It’s made me think about what comes after death, a lot. Hardly surprising.
So, if I continue to be as brave as today, I want to write a few posts about what I’m learning. I don’t pretend to be an expert. But I’ve faithfully read scripture (the whole thing) all my life – that’s gotta count for something. And yes, I know, “the human heart is desperately wicked, and deceitful above all things”. I know it’s easy to make scripture say what we want, especially when we REALLY want it.
But we all read this book through filters – all of us. And lately I’ve noticed one filter in particular that I’ve used my whole life and didn’t realize.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.“
Whenever I would read that verse, I’d lay over the word ‘perish’ a filter of “go to hell”; and over ‘eternal life’, “go to heaven”. But that’s not what it says.
That’s not what Jesus said.
So yeah. I’m starting to think I’m allowed to question the doctrine of hell as “eternal, conscious, torment,” since we are not – despite C.S. Lewis – eternal beings by default. Only God is immortal.
If you’re interested, stay with me.
If not, no hard feelings.
Lorrie Spinney 
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