So here I am, on a day where gray clouds fill the sky releasing occasional bone-soaking downpours of rain, blogging about death and dying on a blog purposed to encourage and support my GLBTQ brothers and sisters in their journey of faith.  But this is where I am. Life on this earth and the life that follows occupies center stage in my thoughts these days with everything else fading into the background. I care what’s happening in the world to my GLBTQ family but for today I care even more about the impermanence and preciousness of being human and being alive.

I suppose it makes sense that after telling you in recent days what I don’t believe about the next life, I should tell you what it is that I do believe. After all my notions on the non-existence of hell indulge me one more time while I share a little about the vague imaginations I have about heaven.

As a young girl I’d look up into the black night sky and catch glimpses of heaven’s brilliant light breaking through tiny holes in heaven’s floor. The stars proved heaven’s existence to me because with my own eyes I could see the light of God bursting through the darkness. There it is. Heaven. Up there!  A few decades have passed since then and I no longer cast my eyes to the sky as I did then as though heaven was a place beyond the clouds somewhere “up there.” I’ve shed my childish notions of a physical locale where wings and cloud jumping are the standard forms of transportation and choir rehearsal and harp lessons comprise the better part of every day in eternity.

I’ve let go of fluffy clouds and streets of gold but I haven’t shed by belief that heaven is reality; an un-mappable destination in the spiritual realm and that one day we will stand face to face before the Lamb. I don’t know the details of what heaven will be like nor do I care about the nuts and bolts and set design. All I know is that one day we will be there, all those who have loved us and that we have loved will be there, all those who have despised us and those we’ve despised will be there, and the One we worship and adore above all others will be there illuminating our souls and clearing away the blindness from our eyes and that, my dear friend, is heaven.

I want you to understand I don’t believe in heaven because it sounds like a nice idea. It’s not fear of death or fear of nothingness after death that makes heaven a “must have” in my heart and mind, but rather this: just as I’m no longer able to believe in hell because of the eternal love, boundless mercy, and extravagant grace of God, I’m led with equal resolve to believe in heaven for the same reasons. We are God’s creation, born out of the love of the Godhead. We were given life to be loved by God and to love God, and as there is no end to the eternal love of God, so  there will be no end to those whom God loves. This is nothing more than common sense if you believe in a God of love.

There is no end to our relationship with God. No fierce or gentle parting of the way. God loved us while we were in our mother’s womb, has loved us every moment since and will continue to love us forever. Think on that. We will be loved forever and in a way we can’t begin to comprehend in the here and now because in the there and then all doubt will be erased. No longer will we struggle with our worth to be loved. No longer will we judge ourselves as too flawed or too fallen. We won’t shuffle our feet or shrug our shoulders at the very mention that God is crazy in love with us. No. Standing on the other side; standing where our spirits will be set free from their fleshy imprisonment; standing where we will see clearly with new vision; standing where we will be made completely, perfectly whole; we will know beyond a shred of a doubt that we are loved for we will be standing on the other side of hearing God said, “You are mine. You have always been mine. Enter in to all I have in store for you, for the mysteries and abundance I have prepared for you. I invite you in. My Son welcomes you in. My child, come.”

This is where my faith takes me when I consider the impermanence of life. It takes me to the foreverness of life in the presence of God even as it reminds me of the precious treasure of this one day. No matter what is happening today; no matter how painful the journey, how difficult the challenges, how great the losses, we are alive. We have this day. Yesterday is over. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. So it is today that matters. Eternal life is coming but abundant life has already begun.

This morning I woke to another day and I am so deeply grateful to be alive to see it and for the next 24 hours I want to come into the day with all of me, holding nothing back. I will take the heartache just as I will the heart’s delight. Until the sun falls tonight I want to take full advantage of this day and use it up to the last drop in the best way I know to do. I want to take note of what’s beautiful around me and seek ways to bring change to what is broken and in need of repair. I want to give God glory and praise, give love to those around me, ease someone’s suffering, celebrate someone’s joy, and say “thank you” as often as I can.

This life may not be our final home, but this life matters none the less and even while my heart is heavy over the thought of future losses and sorrows that are to come, I take joy in knowing that all suffering will one day end, all that is lost will be restored, and all that we mourn will be turned to joy. If not on this side, then on the other. This is where the love of God and faith in that love takes me. May your own heart say “Amen.”

Though at first glance it might seem so, a post on hell isn’t so far off-topic for SisterFriends, not as long as there are GLBTQ Christians in the process of reconciling their faith and sexuality who continue to wonder “Will I go to hell because I’m gay?” Normally when someone poses this question in an email I avoid the topic of hell altogether realizing that the belief in hell and in retribution theology (punishment for bad, reward for good) runs deep through many raised in conservative Christianity. Instead I tend to address the fear that underlays such questioning and center my response on those passages that dispel the idea that God would ever be at the heart of such anguished fear.

For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. — 2 Timothy 1: 7

Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. — John 14: 27

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. — 1 John 4: 18

But as long as people believe there’s a chance at the end of their lives that they will have messed things up so bad or fallen so short of where God would have them to be that they risk damnation there will always be fear and so it seemed as good a time as any to expose the ledge I’m standing on and to give a more complete and honest response to the question for the next one who would ask it of me.

So here we go.

I’m not about to say that hell doesn’t exist, neither am I saying I believe it does. The fact is that hell, as a locale, can no more be denied than it can be proven since despite all the theological arguments made for or against such a place, certitude on the matter is outside the grasp of all of us until the moment of our death. Until then  all we can do is abandon ourselves to our faith and in what we believe…whether it’s traditional church teaching on the matter or personal belief.

There were far too many years when I believed that while God loved me God could and would condemn me to hell if I had sinned too much or strayed too far outside God’s will. Should I die “in sin” my parting glimpse of God wouldn’t be of his love but of his wrath, but fortunately, as it happened, I believed the right truth and was living the right life (Self-Righteous, party of one, your table is waiting!) so I didn’t fear hell but looked ahead confidently to heaven.

But in recent years I’ve had a change of heart and mind and I no longer believe God would or will ever condemn anyone to a permanent state of punishment and torment. The change has come about not because I’ve spent years locked in academic research and study on the Christian doctrine of hell. The change has come simply, though not easily, through my changing understanding and experiences with the love of God. I’ve reflected on what it really means when we say the love of God is unconditional and infinite, and that God is the giver of undeserved mercy and extravagant grace. After 53 years of being in love with God I’m only now beginning to understand what it means when we declare with assurance that “nothing will ever separate us from the love of God.”

I don’t believe in eternal punishment because I believe in the unconditional, infinite love of God.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails (I Corinthians 13:4-8).

At this point in my faith journey, to believe in the unconditional eternal love of God and to believe in eternal punishment as the will of God is, in my opinion, irrational. It simply makes no sense to propose that these two teachings stand harmoniously beside one another when the truth is that no two beliefs could be more oppositional to one another than these. I’m all for a God who works in mysteriously ways but I reject the idea of a God who acts irrationally and contradictory to his own nature. God may be full of surprises but when it comes to His steadfast love and unwavering grace, God is more predictable than that the earth will keep spinning.

I’m baffled that we’ve somehow managed to justify in Christian theology a Heavenly Father/Mother/Parent who behaves in a way that would appall us were we to witness the same behavior in an earthly parent directed toward their child and I said as much in my last post. God’s love is unconditional, immeasurable, limitless and forever. God loves you. God loves me. God loves them. For that reason if so much as one single person in all God’s creation falls outside the covering of God’s love, even the most vile and depraved among us, then God’s love is diminished for all, even for the most righteous and pure among us.

I don’t believe in eternal punishment because I believe that the perfect will and desire of God will be fulfilled.

In other words I believe God will ultimately get what God wants, and what God wants is that through Jesus He would be able to “reconcile to Himself all things” (Colossians 1:19-20); what God desires is that “all will be saved and come to the knowledge of truth” (I Timothy 2:3-4); what God wills is to bring “all things in heaven and earth together under one head, even Christ” (Ephesians 1:9-10), and what God does not want is that “any should perish but that everyone would come to repentance” (2 Peter 2:9). God wants, desires, and wills that all would be brought back to him and so the question is whether God will get what God wills or if for all eternity God’s will be left unfulfilled. If God wills that all would be returned onto him then it is impossible that even one person will be cast out of God’s presence. Even one soul separated from God would leave God discontent, like the Good Shepherd who wouldn’t rest until his entire flock was restored (Matthew 18:10-14) and like the poor woman who wouldn’t stop searching until she found her lost coin. (Luke 15:8-10). Neither the good shepherd or the poor woman were able or willing to celebrate until all that had been lost were found. And so it is with God. God is not willing that any would be lost and so, if we believe the perfect will of God will be fulfilled then we also believe that all will be found.

I don’t believe in eternal punishment because I believe Jesus is the Son of God and Savior of the World.

Jesus was God revealed in human flesh. In his life and his words Jesus was the greatest manifestation of God’s love that we have ever witnessed and there’s nothing I can see in the witness of his life or in the content of his teaching that would lead me to accept that Jesus’ ultimate purpose was to be the determining factor in who would go to heaven and who would be cast into hell based on individual acceptance or rejection of his identity. Instead I believe that the love, forgiveness, compassion, and full welcome Jesus showered on everyone he encountered will be the very love, forgiveness, compassion, and welcome that God extends to all.

I also believe that had Jesus not come, had he not preached and lived out the Good News of the Gospel, had he not died on the cross and been brought forth into newness of life, this world would be different in a way we can’t begin to imagine, for in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection salvation came into the world and through him the world was saved. “I did not come to judge the world, but to save it” (John 12:47) and that’s what Jesus did. Through Jesus the world and all of creation was redeemed by the glory of God that spilled upon the earth through the work of Christ and salvation was given to all.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came through Christ Jesus. (Romans 3:23).

God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on all men (Romans 11:32).

For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive (I Corinthians 15:22).

We put our hope in a living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe (I Timothy 4:9-10).

I know what I believe on paper echoes a theology of universal salvation but for me it’s not about labeling my beliefs or aligning them with what others profes. I only know that I can’t reconcile the idea that some will go to heaven and some will go to hell when I keep bumping into “all” and “every” in the Scriptures. Receiving the grace of God isn’t dependent on whether I believe the right things, attend the right church, pray the right prayers, or do the right things. Grace doesn’t depend on me being right. As Philip Gulley said in “If Grace Is True” grace is a gift, not a trophy. Grace gives no thought to whether I’m Protestant or Jewish or Agnostic. Grace isn’t determined by my sexual orientation. Grace depends fully on God. The grace I’ve been given. The grace you’ve been given. The grace they’ve been given. We’re all under God’s grace because the love of God would have it no other way.

Of course, coming to this place has meant I’ve done a whole lot of soul-searching and spiritual reflection on a wider circle of  Christian doctrines. Redemption, salvation, the cross, sin, and atonement are all concepts of the Christian faith (my faith) that I continue to grapple with as my understanding of God’s love and grace for all evolves. But given my upbringing within a conservative Christian tradition do you know what the hardest part has been for me in moving from hell for some to hell for none?

It was overcoming my need for eternal punishment to exist.

The more I found my theology defaulting to the love and grace of God, the more troubled I was that there was a chance that those I thought deserved an eternity in hell for all the hurt they had brought into the world, the more I had to deal with the possibility that in eternity they’d be standing in the same brilliant light of God’s glory as would I. As a human being, I have an innate need for good to be rewarded and evil to be punished. I want those who have damaged or taken the lives of others to be held accountable and made to pay for it, whether the life of one child was harmed or it was the murder of six million. This is why I haven’t fully given up the idea that hell exists since a consequence for wrongdoing doesn’t seem completely contradictory to a God of grace; not if the punishment leads in time to them being restored to wholeness and reconciled back into the presence of God. Even though in my flesh I want those who cause suffering to suffer, given what I know to be true about the grace of God that’s been extended to me, I’m working to come to terms with the idea that even the most vile and depraved along with the most righteous and pure will all return to God. Shoulder to shoulder we will stand. Equal. Made clean.

So this is my excessively long answer to “Will I go to hell because I’m gay?”

No. You won’t go to hell for being gay because being gay isn’t a sin.

No. You won’t got to hell because God’s love and grace would never allow it. God’s love will never fail you even when you wonder if you’ve failed God.

And for any who need this disclaimer I want you to understand that what I’ve written here is what I believe, not what I think you should believe. I’m just one Christian expressing my beliefs and in stating them I’m not saying this is the only way to believe. I’m only being honest to what rings most true for me as I continue to work out my own faith which in the end rests firmly in Christ and in the God who sent Him.

How long will grown men and women in this world keep drawing in their coloring books an image of God that makes them sad? – Meister Eckhart

I’m not a big fan of coloring books for children, the ones with the thick black outlines with the white space between them that all but demands where the child will color and what color they will use. There’s no room for the preschool artist to create and dream. A bold outline of a pony filling the page leaves no space for the child who imagines space ships and dragons to bring them to life on paper. The excited new owner of a freshly-opened green and yellow 64 count box of crayons is discouraged from taking all those amazing shades of purple and blue out for a test run when the perfectly shaped stemmed apple limits their choice to red and green. Give a kid a coloring book and you know what you’re going to get but give them a blank sheet of paper and a box of still-pointy crayons and anything is possible. The greatest treasures I’ve been given over the years have come from children, made of cheap recycled newsprint and adorned with drawings of a smiling Jesus with big buck teeth, a wax colored masterpiece of me holding the stick figure hand of the artist who drew it, and pile upon pile of papers covered in rainbows, floating hearts, and sun rays breaking through billowing clouds outlined in cotton candy pink or denim blue. Forget the Guggenheim in New York and the Uffizi in Florence. The most stunning works of art in all the world are hanging just down the street on your neighbor’s refrigerator.

For some of us our faith began as a coloring book we were given as children, pages already imprinted with lines that told us who God was and all that God wanted and expected and demanded of us. Sure, God is love but God also requires. Don’t forget that God loves you just as you are but don’t forget that God also wants you to change. Oh yes, God loves everyone equally but at the same time God consigns that a large number of these everyone’s will spend eternity in hell’s torment.

Leave this space blank. Fill in this space here. Stay inside the lines. Use this color because no other color will do; every other color is wrong. You might as well trade in your box of 64-count crayons for one black crayon and one white crayon; those two over-used crayon nubs at the bottom of the box. No other colors need apply.

When you go through life with a coloring book filled with bold simple static outlines of God there’s no reason to imagine a God beyond the lines. There’s no motivation to dream of something outside and beyond the cardstock cover, and even when we break free and dare to imagine a God who lives and breathes and loves outside the lines, the lines are still there, etched even deeper in our hearts than on the printed page. It would be easier to erase the permanent ink lines printed in a child’s coloring book than it would be to erase the images of God that have followed us, and often haunted us, through our lives. A God of conditions and expectations, a black-robed judge who swings a mean gavel, an unpredictable God of contradictions who demanded the full-scale annihilation of the heathen while providing a means of salvation for all creation.

There are few things more tragically poignant to me than when someone is haunted by their image of God; when the very thought of God passing through their mind causes them fear and sadness or to be hit with nauseating icy bouts of guilt and shame; when talk of God’s love makes them feel as though they are the sole exception from receiving such a thing. I hear it all the time. All the time. I want to believe what you’re saying. I want to believe God loves me. I want to believe God delights in me. I want to believe that who I am is who God has created me to be. But I can’t. I’m afraid God is judging me. I’m afraid of failing God. I’m afraid of what God will do. I’m afraid of going to hell.

That unidentified sound you just heard in the distance was God’s heart breaking accented by my gut wrenching.

All I can think to do is offer you one small suggestion to consider and it goes like this….if your image of God causes you to fear, if the idea of God looking on you makes you feel like a failure, or if there’s even the smallest hint of a doubt that you are being tenderly held this very minute in the love of God, then please, just consider trading in that old battered coloring book you’ve been carting around all your life for a blank canvas and a bottomless multi-tiered box of crayons. Close your eyes. Dream of how big love really is when conceived and held in the heart of God. Imagine a God who dances in delight at the sound of your name. Envision the God of Christ; a gentle shepherd, a compassionate father, a woman giddy at having found her one lost coin. Try to put a picture to unconditional love, unending mercy, and the wonder of divine grace.

And once you see the picture, every a blurry shadow of it, grab a crayon and draw….and draw….and draw.

Oh, in case I failed to mention, the black crayon and white crayon are missing from your box.  I took them and you can’t have them back. Ever.

I’m setting down two basic truths here. One, that the love of God is perfect love, and two, that I will never be able to comprehend such love.

By perfect love, I mean perrrrrrfect. A love that’s flawless, incomparable, and most excellent in all the world and all creation. A love that’s the fullest manifestation of any and all love that has ever and ever will be. A love that can never be matched, replicated, or surpassed. I appreciated that in one thesaurus it offered an alternate to the word perfect with the phrase something that is too good to be true. God’s perfect love is too good to be true but here’s the real kicker….it is true.

And still I struggle to understand it. Even with my heart and eyes wide open to receiving the truth of the perfect love of God I, like everyone else including you, see through a glass darkly, because I view the love of God through eyes filmed over by a lifetime of human experiences of love that even in their most awesome, breathless, magnificence, are merely a sliver of a shadow of all that is held within the perfect love of God. Barely a reflection. Less than a full bite.

I’m one of the fortunate ones. I’ve been extravagantly loved most of my life. My grandparents loved me. My parents loved me. My siblings loved me back when I was their annoying baby sister and continue to love me now that I’m their annoying middle-aged baby sister. I’ve had dear friends at every turn in my life who’ve loved me and the children I taught and learned from over the past 30 years have spoiled me with love. And then there’s my beautiful angel of a wife who loves me in a way I can barely believe after ten years of being drenched in it.

And the love I’ve been given has been more than a love of feelings expressed in gushy words but a love of commitment lived out in action. Even when our worlds collided over my sexual orientation my parents continued to demonstrate the deepest of love toward me. Even though my siblings and I have gone through the ringer with one another and our love has been laced with mutual irritation and frustration, love has carried us through so that even at our worst moments we could rest assured that the others had our back. The little kiddos who loved me decades ago when I was their Teacher Anita have continued to love me long into their adulthood, a love so kind and generous I’m rattled by it. And though I’m a high maintenance girl who at times can be as cantankerous and moody as a grizzly bear roused from sleep during mid-hibernation, my wife’s love continues without so much as a hiccup.

So here’s all I’m saying. I know what it is to love and be loved and yet despite the heaping mountain of love I’ve been graced to receive, all the love I’ve known, even the greatest of it, has been less than perfect love, and for no other reason than whenever people are in the equation so too is imperfection. We can’t help it. It’s the nature of the beast…or more precisely, it’s in the nature of our beings. Even in the purest expressions of human love our personality flaws and egos occasionally stumble onto the scene. We become irritable and impatient with someone we love because they dare to see things another way than we do. We can love someone with every fiber of our being and still get angry at them when they fail to see and acknowledge our way is always the best way. We hurt those we love without ever intending to but still we do because we’re human and fallible. Self-centeredness at times trumps selflessness. Pride takes humility to the mat and scores a point. I’ve been loved like crazy all my life and I’m as grateful as grateful can be and yet love has let me down time and again and I know just as certainly that everyone I’ve loved has been let down by me whether they be my family, my friends, or my wife. Certainly more than once. Probably more than twice.

So here I am, an imperfect being, loving and being loved imperfectly while at the same time longing to lay hold of a more full understanding of the perfect love of God. And it’s not such an easy thing to do because every time I try to comprehend God’s love I have to slog through the collective experiences of love, both radiant and tarnished that have filled my life and those experiences become a filter through which I catch a foggy glimpse of the love of God.

They say that acknowledging you have a problem is the first step toward finding the solution and that could never be more true than in acknowledging I view the perfect love of God through a glass darkly. I need to be aware of my limited vision of God’s love so that I’m always intent on looking to see beyond the windows murky shadows, to catching a vision of a love that defies my human experience, and that not only goes beyond the greatest love I’ve ever known but beyond all the combined human love that’s ever been lavished upon me.

God loves you and me with a perfect love, and yes, I know….it really is too good to be true. And yet, it is. How awesome is that?!

God is Love.

The love of God is at the forefront of God’s being. God doesn’t merely demonstrate love outward toward us, but the ground and substance of God’s being is Love. Love is more than an attribute of God. Love is the essence of God and all else that we know of God to be; that God is kind, forgiving, compassionate, faithful, just, patient, good, merciful, full of grace, long-suffering, powerful, and every other good, glorious, and life-affirming thing we could ever tag on God channels and flows through the love of God. How much God will forgive, how patient God will be, and how much mercy God will extend, is determined by one thing and that one thing is Divine Love.

I can never experience love in my life without there being a recipient of my love, be it a human or a thing to be loved, but the love of God as the essence of God isn’t dependent on an object to love. Should all living beings cease to be from bird to bug, from you to me, God would continue to love because God is Love.

But being Love wasn’t enough for God. Even the divine perfect love that flowed through the Godhead between Creator, Word, and Spirit wasn’t enough for the Source of All Love. Love always wants more; to feel more love; to express more love; to be more love. And so you and I were created so that God as Love could love more, and in like manner the Word of God was sent into the world to live among us; given not because we loved God but because God loved us.

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. 1 John 4:8-12

Knowing that God is not only loving but that God is Love is more than semantics. It’s a big deal. No longer does God’s love depend on me being or doing anything. No longer is there any chance that I can win or lose God’s love. In fact, the truth be told, while God knows me and sees me and loves me, God’s love for me has little to nothing to do with me but instead it has everything to do with who God is, and in case I haven’t mentioned it yet, God is Love.