For musicians, the heavenly story ends pretty nicely. The band never breaks up, the gig is eternal, and there’s no fighting over who is the leader of the group. The alternative hell story, on the other hand, is quite different. You end up going solo and due to a lack of popularity end up driving a dilapidated van from show to show, 365 days a year. You have to load and unload your own equipment, and play in front of disinterested crowds that persistently chant, “Stairway to Heaven! Stairway to Heaven!” as you strum your way through an endless series of cover songs. Dejected, you clean the tomato stains off your guitar, look into the tip jar, and find you have barely enough gas money to make it to the next gig. You pack up your van and head off into the stormy, gray night, unaware that the torrential rain hitting your windshield is in fact the tears of a God who had desperately wanted to hear every note of your original material.

Hell is a place we choose for ourselves, so before you get all bent out of shape about a cruel, malevolent God sending people somewhere to suffer, remember that Christ did everything in His power to help you avoid that fate, except the one thing He was incapable of doing, forcing you to say, “I believe.” I suspect that hell is an uncomfortable place to live because without a healthy slathering of Jesus Sin Block 1000, your sin will be like baby oil, burning your skin under the heat of the holy Son. Your foolish desire to be like God will be exposed by the absolute Holiness of God, and without the cabana of Jesus’ atonement, your deistic posturing will be revealed like a third-degree burn. Sadly, your divine pretension brought on by the Original Sin of trying to be like God will be a mote in your eye, blinding you to the larger God reality around you. Unless you remove that log, you have no other choice but to spend an extended miserable vacation at the Mote-Hell California, where you can “check out but never leave.”