If Heaven only knew

Heaven....
The place we all hope we go
Hell....
The place where bad people go

I just returned from a retreat to Hell's Gate with our group. You can see see the picture below.

As you can see it was very Hellish. In fact we themed our entire retreat off of this site. "To Hell & Back" We discussed Hell and how it fits into our view of God and Christianity. We took surveys and had discussions but there were some comments that were very interesting in regards to how our group views eternity. Everyone was in firm agreement that regardless of whether or not Hell had actual fire that it was definately a place we wanted to avoid at all costs. Heaven on the other hand was talked about as something we had to do. The phrase was "I'm not sure an eternity of worshipping God sounds all that appealing of a reward to me." Wow! I was shocked at how many heads nodded in agreement. This was definately not the direction we were heading. What I heard from them was yeah I dont want to go to Hell but Heaven just sounds kind of boring. Some one else piped in, "Yeah, if Heaven is like our church service I'm just not interested." Ouch! As I thought about it later that night they were dead right. We tell everyone that you want to go to Heaven so you can worship God for all of eternity. If our church services are any mirror of that there is no wonder no one wants to put thier life on the line for that. No wonder we don't see selfless living in our churches. Instead we see people selfishly saying they want it this way or that way. We see disatisfied customers rather than servants of Christ. Were to blame; we've sold a bag of goods to a desperate people that we can't produce. We tell them how glorious it will be when we get there, how wonderful, and all they can see in thier minds is that couple that only sings the songs they like or that guy that shows up just to check out the hot babes or that lady lady who is obviously faking and just putting on a show so other people will notice how holy she is. What a sad view of eternity with our Lord.

Later on that night we were having a discussion as a group about our stories, the times in our lives when we felt like we were in Hell. The moments we felt the furthest from God. We heard some amazing stories (that are staying in the vault you nosy gossip) about struggles and trials that challenged and tested us as Christians. The funny thing was that no one mentioned a lesson, a sermon or a song that delivered them from those situations or that had encouraged them to live differently. Almost every person that shared that night talked about another person that reached out to them or just asked them to lunch. I'm not saying lets stop having Sunday worship (I'm not that eager to be a martyr just yet...), or that our ministers are not doing their job because they do an amazing job and work hard. I am saying we ought to think about what and where our focus is as a body. It's not as if our worship gatherings are not important to our faith and community but if it's all we are narrowed in on accomplishing that week we are way off base. Instead of stroking ourselves and saying what a wonderful program we can cram in in an hour and a half we ought to be trying to love on enough people so we have to cram in our places of worship with people. Our faith can't be about us achieving eternal worship in Heaven only. If people can't see God a work through you, showing love, mercy, grace and giving hope to those who have none, they'll have no reason to worship in the first place, let alone seek it for an eternity. Who knows, one day you could be the story told at Hell's Gate that helped save a soul.

Let me know what you think...