Thoughts while waiting in an airport...

I'm sitting in the airport at Dallas/Ft. Worth waiting for a plane to New Orleans that is (at this point) two hours overdue. Rather than turn this into a rant about American Airlines (ugh!) I thought I'd blog about some random thoughts that have been running through my brain while I wait for my plane.

I took a long walk through the airport -- just to stretch my legs -- and began to wonder about the vast number of people that are in this particular airport at this particular moment in time. I wondered, is there anyone in this airport right now who I've met before? Perhaps there is someone here who I've known sometime in the past 45 years of my life. I could bump into a former comrade, friend, lover or brother-in-arms (aka bandmate) -- but we would probably look each other in the eye and not even recognize one-another. Maybe that's already happened. How would I know?

My friend Bill says that humans are unable to comprehend the true scale of things -- such as how big the earth really is or how many people there really are on it. I think he's right. Perhaps this inability to grasp scale keeps us from going insane.

This reminds me of something I read earlier today in an excellent self-published book (why can't books like this get picked up by Christian publishers, he asked rhetorically and sarcastically) called "Hope Beyond Hell" by Gerry Beauchemin. You can read it online or order your own copy here.

The book draws together various arguments in favor of the doctrine of Universal Reconciliation through Christ. Just before deplaning at DFW I had read in Hope Beyond Hell this quote from another UR apologist, Thomas Allin:

"If [the doctrine of Eternal Torment is] true, can this strange fact be explained -- that nobody acts as if he believed it? I say this, for any man who so believed, and who possessed but a spark of common humanity -- to say nothing of charity -- could not rest, day or night so long as one sinner remained who might be saved. To this all would give place -- pleasure, learning, business, art, literature; nay, life itself would be too short for the terrible warnings, the burning entreaties, the earnest pleadings, that would be needed. No society, no individual, can possibly act, or has in fact acted, on such a creed, in the real business of life. It is simply impossible: who would dare so much as to smile, if he really believed endless torments were certain to be the portion of some member of his household -- it may be of himself? Marraige would be a crime, and each birth the occasion of an awful dread. The shadow of a possible hell would darken every home, sadden every family hearth... 'The world would be one vast madhouse,' says the American scholar Hallsted."

If Christians who believe in the Eternal Torment version of Hell could really grasp the scale of suffering that such a doctrine implies, I think it would drive them insane. Actually, I think it has done exactly that to some poor souls. Andrea Yates, for example, drowned her five children in order to save them from an eternity in Hell, which her "pastor", Michael Woroniecki, preached they would be in dire danger of as they grew up. Yates told her jail psychiatrist, "It was the seventh deadly sin. My children weren't righteous. They stumbled because I was evil. The way I was raising them, they could never be saved. They were doomed to perish in the fires of Hell." Can you imagine the torment that that poor, misguided woman went through as she systematically killed her children in hopes of saving them from a far worse fate?

As I walked through the crowded airport, and if my theology dictated that most of the throngs I passed through were destined to be Hell's kindling, I would either have had to commandeer the public address system and preach an urgent message of repentance or I would have had to metaphorically close my eyes and ignore the magnitude of impending suffering all around me.

Fortunately, that's not what my theology dictates. I was able to move through the crowds -- still unable to grasp their numbers -- but confident that we are all bound for the same destination: Home.