GUEST POST - Hell Trauma and Eternal Life

This week’s guest post is from my friend Brandon Rice. Brandon is a cinematographer and has his own podcast at The Lone Microphone. Go check him out!

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I was driving in my car down the beautiful Tennessee freeway, the fall weather had arrived and it was a crisp cool morning, a good day for all intents and purposes, and all of a sudden this random thought popped into my head... and it was something like this... 

"Brandon, one day you'll die and what if on the other side of that hell is real and you're wrong, and you basically burn forever?" 

As I sat there, the road passing by, I looked in my rearview mirror and felt that familiar feeling of anxiety in my stomach I had remembered feeling as a child when I thought my parents were mad at me or I was "in trouble" for something, but then another feeling hit me as I took a deep breath that brought me back into the present, and it went something like this.

"Brandon, it really doesn't matter, because if you sit in the fear of a possibility in the future that you can't even know will or won't happen, it makes the now hell itself." 

I took another deep breath, and let the feelings pass through me... focused back on the road and smiled.

What I experienced in that moment is something many of us experience daily or semi-daily. It was something I call “Hell Trauma.”

If you’re anything like me, you grew up hearing a lot about hell, sin, and separation from God. I remember as a child being terrified of burning forever for my sins, and I would spend many nights in the fetal position begging God not to let me go to hell. As I got older, I began coping with this fear in many ways, one of them being the “superChristian” way where I did my best to learn as much as I could and externally be the “best Christian ever.” I made my parents so proud of me and in time I felt OKAY for awhile and that I wouldn’t burn forever. Though sometimes, when I relaxed and the “Christian Brandon” came off, I would start to feel that “pit of my stomach” anxiety I remembered as a child. It was horrible. I could barely sit still in a silent room, because almost every time it would hit me. 

It was only after many years of processing this trauma that I’ve some to realize that hell isn’t some distant “next life” but it’s whenever that anxiety creeps in, the fear of the future. That is hell, that is torture, pain. Eternal life is the present, the moment, the coming back to myself sitting in my car and watching the cloud go by and feeling the pedals on my feet. That is eternal, that is life.