Does the Very Idea of Hell Offend You?

Good! It should! Because it's an offensive place.

But that is putting it mildly, so if you mind being offended, just consider how much you will mind when you end up there!

Oh, you don't want to go there? Great! I don't either, and that is exactly why I serve our Lord and Savior, Jesus, the Christ.

But it was not always so. Why? Because I didn't know any better. I was an outspoken agnostic at best since the time I first began questioning things at the age of eight.

What triggered me to question the veracity of what was being forced upon me at such a tender age? The catechism of Catholicism. The question that I just could not get past was "How do we know that it (Christianity in the form of Catholicism) is so?" The answer proffered was "Because God said it is so."

Naturally, I asked my nun teacher "How do we know God said that?" She told me I'd have to ask the priest, which I subsequently did, and he told me that I'd just have to accept that on faith.

Faith? Faith in what? The guy who wrote the answer to the question? I just could not swallow that, any more tha
I could conjure up any kind of belief that this wonderfully and marvelously made world and its contents eventually emerged from some prehistoric slime!

And so I lived in a sort of spiritual limbo from that day so long ago, a kind of female Paul, criticizing and ridiculing the Bible, until one fateful day in 1987 when a Christian friend asked me if I'd ever read the Bible. And, of course, having been brought up Catholic, I had not even been exposed to it.

We, in fact, have a big, fancy Catholic Bible that sat on the corner of our raised fireplace hearth for years, right next to the phone. I remember as a teenager talking on the phone and absently flipping the gold edged pages of it and remember that most of them were stuck together, because no one had ever read it!

Well, Steve followed up and asked me this question: "Don't you think it would be a good idea to read what you've been condemning most of your life?" He had me there!

So I bought an N.I.V. version that he told me would be easier to read than the standard King James. I began reading in Proverbs and Psalms and then in the gospel of John, and it got so that I couldn't wait to get home at night to delve deeper into it! Wow! What a treasure trove!

About that time Steve also introduced me to my (now) husband, who had grown up in a Bible-believing family (lucky him!). And very shortly we were sitting up into the wee hours studying the Book.

It was frustrating at first, because he had a hard time relating to someone at my level who was absolutely ignorant about the Bible. And it was frustrating on my end as well, because he talked over my head most of the time. But we finally got it together . . . but that gets into yet another story . . .

Anyway, it was a good life lesson for me not to pooh-pooh something of which I had only a cursory knowledge. And when my mind and heart finally did open, I was blessed beyond measure, and it just keeps getting better and better each and every day.

Try it, you'll like it! ;-)