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"[Go to] Heaven for the climate, and Hell for [the] society." -- Mark Twain
My mom was a Christian. She was also born in 1918, and she was decidedly 'Old School'. Old School as in she had her suspicions that even Paul was a bit too nouveau and upstart for her taste.
Somehow mom reconciled her instinct for things ancient with her membership in a relatively new church. God's Own Christian Church, the Presbyterian Congregation of America, Scotland, and Heaven. And she was particularly enamored of the comfortably old fashioned Presbyterian Doctrine that only adults -- and never children -- were intellectually and emotionally mature enough to make a personally valid and binding decision to become Christians.
Hence, she forbade me and my two brothers from arriving at any firm conclusions about whether God existed, whether Jesus was his son and humanity's savior, whether we wanted to become Christians, etc. -- she forbade us from making those decisions until we had -- to paraphrase her -- "arrived at a state of intellectual and emotional development when such decisions will no longer be meaningless."
In short, children were just too immature to make binding commitments. Period. Full Stop.
I was a rather dutiful lad in some ways, and I never, ever, even once challenged my mother's authority nor her rule against my arriving at any firm convictions and/or commitments. I always took care to think in purely provisional terms about religion through-out the whole of my childhood. Always. Except for that one time.
The time I became a Christian.
It happened in middle school. Two young, twenty-something missionaries from Tennessee arrived in our small Illinois town to save as many of us as possible. They decided to focus their efforts on saving the young people, and they rented a hall above a hardware store, decorated it, furbished it with tables and chairs, installed a concessions counter, and named the hall, "The Upper Room".
A kid magnet if there ever was one, since the town was too small for there to be many other places for middle school and high school kids to go in the evenings. The Upper Room was packed evening after evening from the week it opened onward.
One night, I got into a conversation with Lindsey. Lindsey was a year older than me, a pastor's son, and widely known to be a brilliant student who had never earned less than an A for any course he'd taken since first grade. He had studied C. S. Lewis and he knew well how to present the case for Christianity. It only took me three hours to forget all about mom and begin seriously entertaining the notion of converting.
I took his arguments home with me and thought about them for days. I even elaborated upon them to make them as tough as possible -- just to be sure they could stand up no matter how they were assailed. In the end, I decided Lindsey's conclusion that Christianity was the sole true religion simply could not be defeated.
Almost immediately after my conversion, I discovered that Judy -- the Judy -- was already a Christian! She was brainy, beautiful, and artistic. Three things I have always found irresistible in women. Three things almost ranking up there with a propensity to dance naked. I'd had a crush on Judy since third grade, and the moment I learned she was a fervent Christian, I set myself upon becoming just as fervent as she.
It all of it came tumbling down a month later. All of it. And in the course of a single night.
By then, my family knew of my conversion. None of them -- not even my mother -- tried to oppose me. I suppose she must have harbored secret reservations about my making such a youthful decision, but if she did, she kept them to herself.
Then one night, I decided I would proselytize my family at our dinner table. After all, I thought I knew what was best for them.
The episode came to an end when my younger brother posed the question, "What if you get to heaven only to discover the rest of us are in hell?"
That stopped me in my tracks. I had no answer for him. None. And I didn't get to sleep that night until just before dawn. Instead, I lay awake running his point through my head, trying to frame it in the toughest way possible, and slamming into one wall after the other. I could find no way around his thought that did not smack to me of BS, of kidding myself.
In the end, I felt forced to this conclusion: If it was true that my family would end up in hell and I in heaven, then I must refuse heaven in order to be with them in hell -- for I would be incapable of tolerating heaven if they were suffering in hell. To be sure, I still believed in Christianity. I wholly believed it was true. It was just that I wanted nothing to do with it, if having anything to do with it would lead to my family in hell and me in heaven.
Naturally, I prayed to God, sincerely thanked him for his grace and offer of salvation, told him of my thoughts on the matter, and wished him a fond adieu (if it was true my family might end up in hell with me in heaven). Or something very much along those lines. It's been ages since that night, and I have no doubt forgotten the details. The next day, I apologized to my mom and told her I would suspend judgment until I was properly mature enough to make a genuinely meaningful decision. She asked me what had changed my mind.
"Stuff", I said. "Nothing worth talking about." Terse. But what can you expect from a 13 year-old.
Would you want to be in heaven if people you loved were in hell?
Would you want to be in heaven if all the dancing girls were in hell? That is to say, would you want to be in heaven if anyone -- anyone at all, regardless of your relationship to them -- were in hell?
