Hell

A few church on the street bible studies ago I ran into an old aquaintance. I'll call him Jami and he had no legs. He was quite intoxicated and foul mouthed so naturally he fit right in. Just short of a year ago Jami had witnessed a murder and was now being summoned by the courts to testify. He told us there was no way in hell he would actually testify because on the streets that would make him a snitch. And you just don't do that.



I watched Jami talk and I watched the others try and comfort this stumpy, cursing human. Silently, I tried to to picture what he had actually gone through. He held a dying a man, propped up against a dresser, he listened as this man fought for breath until oxygen was no longer enough. He watched him grow still. Jami talked about how this man was a good man, wrong house, wrong time. The man was simply looking for a rock and a prostitute, not his vastly unnoticed death.

Jami swore up and down that this man was good, just fallen on hard times. He also mentioned that his friend, at the present time, was probably burning in hell.

Oh the tales of a drunk man, but that night I believed Jami. I believed him because it made him cry, because somewhere lost inside of this man was a child who wished that people didn't have to die. There was a sober man that recognized the value to life; and a darkness inside of him that led him to believe that he had outgrown love.

I don't want to believe in hell. I think of things in the world, atrocities, genocides, war. I think of women who feel they have to sell themselves and all the men that are killed on the streets. I think of justice and the voidance of justice in the dark places and I wonder,
how life like this could be so different than hell.