A Short Stay in Hell

by Steven L. Peck

Hell is for your edification and wisdom. Punishment? Yes. But not forever.”

“That felt good. I hate those unthinking, unreflexive types. That Hell ought to humble him a bit … eternal Hell! What an imagination.”

How do you pray if you don’t know what God is like? Maybe God was a demon – that would explain much of the misery of earth life. Would prayer do any good? I could not tell.

Do not get discouraged. Remember nothing lasts forever. Someday this will be a distant memory.

Lastly, you are here to learn something. Don’t try to figure out what it is. This can be frustrating and unproductive.

finished the cup, but I felt like I had betrayed something deep within me. Only a little over a week in Hell and I had abandoned a lifelong belief. What if this was just some sort of trial God had arranged to test my backbone? What

What kind of God lets demons choose such a bizarre Hell? Why put conscious beings through this? What purpose could it serve him or us? Was he/she/it worthy of worship? I honestly didn’t know.

How do you stay with someone when there are no dreams to build? No purpose to accomplish? No meaning? No meaning – that was the monster that drove us away from one another in the end. Always.

But somehow I feared the defining point of this Hell was its unrelenting uniformity, its lack of variation from type. If there was a heaven at the end of this, it must be filled with great variety, perhaps a multiplicity of intelligent species spread across universes. Yes, heaven would be as full of difference as Hell was of sameness.

Finite does not mean much if you can’t tell any practical difference between it and infinite.