Rocks and Hard Places

 These rocks were a short walk from the King's Cross District in Sydney. Fighting the   strong undertow to get back to them was a real "rock/hard place" dilemma.

         
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We’re all familiar with that place between a rock and a hard place. We’ve all been there or thought we’ve been there, only to discover the rock wasn’t that big nor the place that hard.

Matters turned out to be not that serious. Stakes were found to be not that high. Consequences we realized were not that consequential.

This got me to thinking about a real “between a rock and a hard place” moment. One that might be experienced by God, the ultimate judge, as individuals stand before Him awaiting judgement.

In the case of most people, He can probably perform this task with His eyes closed, conceding for the moment that He can probably perform every task with His eyes closed, or might not even have any eyes. Nevertheless, it is His job to put everyone somewhere and it can’t always be easy.

Ordinarily, you’d think He’d take this “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” decision in stride. The Bible is dog-gone specific in terms of what we can and cannot do. After all, He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just and as far as we know, up all night. So nothing is getting past him.

My personal feeling is that unless someone does something horrendously bad, they get an “E” for effort, because simply getting through life, even in the best of times, takes a lot of effort.

Hell should be reserved for the truly evil, those whose souls are so dark they couldn’t make lemonade out of a lemon if you stuck them in the middle of a lemon orchard, cut the lemon yourself, and gave them an assistant to do the squeezing. The people sent to hell should be so happy in hell, they wouldn’t even miss heaven, or suspect for a moment that it existed.

I don’t even think these people would be surprised to wake up in hell, because as my boss used to infer at stand-ups, “They know who they are.”

We also know who they are. They are Hitler and Stalin, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun, and Caligula, who may or may not have, but probably did kill his mother. Also, Ramsey II and, for that matter, all of the Ramsey boys, Lizzie Borden and last but not least, Liberty Valance. He was the evilest of them all.  

Sending these jokers to hell ordinarily would be an easy call, a no-brainer and I would understand if God didn’t waste a minute of his valuable time—and I say this knowing He has all the time in the world to kill, but I still can’t see Him wasting a minute on these misfits.

This is where it got complicated though, in a rock and a hard place sort of way.

As far as we know, Hitler’s mother, Klara, was a good woman and when she died, long before her son became the man we’ve all come to know and hate, God probably welcomed her into heaven. She knew young Adolf as a shy boy who didn’t mix in with the other kids, but loved to paint beautiful pastoral scenes of the Bavarian countryside.

Ramsey II’s mom remembers him as a playful kid, wiling away the day and catching fireflies at night along the beautiful banks of the fertile Nile River valley, gazing at the endless horizon, obstructed not by manmade pyramids, but rather by nature’s majestic sand dunes and an occasional palm tree.

Caligula banished his mother into exile. If he didn’t kill her—and no one seems to know for sure—he certainly killed, enough other people to fill the swamp that would one day become the Colosseum. Historians tell us he probably did, but might not have done the dirty deed—putting historian’s in their own rock and hard place quagmire.

In any case, she probably died mouthing these motherly words of encouragement. “I know. I know. You didn’t mean to hurt me. It was just an accident. Mommy forgives you.”

 The point is all these woman are in heaven where they belong. Like everyone in heaven, they deserve to be happy. Yet how can they be? How can they be happy knowing their sweet little boys are in hell, poking each other with sticks and telling dirty jokes?

How can God comfort their hopeless souls? Were He to grant these degenerate ne’er-do-wells a free pass, award them a get-out-of-hell free card, or look the other way pretending not to see them sneaking out, how could their millions of victims feel safe in heaven knowing their tormentors are up there too? How could they sleep at night?

How anyone, on any night, sleeps in heaven is another question for another time.

Nevertheless, you can see God’s dilemma. How does He make everyone—moms being moms and victims playing the victim—happy?

He has no one to blame but Himself.  He created both rocks and hard places, and everything in between for that matter, back on the second day when no one was paying attention. He called it firmament but we know it was rocks and hard places.

Just thinking about His predicament was making my head spin and for a moment, I almost understood why everything in the universe, is either spinning or rotating.

Thankfully, nothing on earth rises to this degree of difficulty.

We can simply sit back and enjoy the world He gave us. Let the good times roll. Leave the big stuff to Him.

Instead, we can keep making mountains out of molehills by continually imagining ourselves between rocks and hard places.