Separated from Jesus.
No light or music or joy.
Everyone dying, nobody ever released into final death.
Bodies covered with burning sores.
Ears tormented by profanity unimaginable.
Each word landing hard.
Tearing. Breaking. Smashing.
Because with out Jesus...
Every.
Word.
Is.
True.
Someone I love cleans a toilet there.
For some reason it is full of solids.
The enemy screams in her ear that the excrement in the toilet.
Is worth more than her life.
She scrubs, but feces keeps rising and filling the bowl.
Until it rolls over the top and covers her pretty feet with human waste.
All she can hear is that she is shit.
An eternal sort of building filled with emaciated, dying but never dead souls.
While Jesus Christ dwells in fullness, right across the street.
His house with many rooms.
Flooded by His living light.
LOVE.
The warmth of home.
His eye always on them.
The walking dead on this earth.
His heart for them.
The all powerful God sits in a white rocking chair on His front porch.
Because...
"IT IS FINISHED."
He prays.
While they continue to carry all the weight that He died to shoulder.
Dreams can be strange.
In an undustrial laundry room where behemoth fans circulate the stench of rotting bodies.
And blow snow-like pillow feathers that float down.
Getting caught in oozing sores.
They lie on endless rows of filthy, sand-paper pallets that torment compromised flesh.
Soft, white, billowing sheets hang on lines of deepest mockery above them.
Silent, torturous agony.
Separated from Christ.
And.
Alone.
Standing on the precipice.
I scream over and over fit to burst my lungs.
"PLEASE!"
"You just need to get to Jesus!"
They lay there soundlessly writhing by the billions.
A beloved one on the floor at my feet.
Oh, BELOVED!
Death seems to swallow my voice.
Swallow me.
I...
Turn my back on them.
Run.
To escape hell.
To live all the way alive.
To get to JESUS.
To be home.
Race all the way to His house.
Tears of terror whipping cheeks and filling ears.
His arms open wide to catch me as I fly on up into His lap.
Bury my face in the folds of His soft cloak.
And cry until I think my heart will break.
While He rocks and softly sings.
Bernadette
Wow. This one is heavy. What struck me most was the end of the first stanza--this idea that without Jesus, all our worst fears about ourselves are true. I hadn't thought about it in that way but I think you're right on. I've spent a lifetime figuring out how to trust in God's love, to believe that I am *not* all the hurtful things I've been named (by myself and by others). You've made an important point here that those hurtful things aren't true *because* of Jesus. And without Him? Oh, heaven help us! Thank you for this.
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