I Prayed Some Heresy Today...

Today our West Blocton HS teens bury their friend, school mate and family member...

Pamela and I lay in bed last night after our Emerge Twenty-Something Bible study looking at our phones (Facebook, of course) in the dark, just reading and not saying a word to each other.  Neither of us told the other what we were doing, but we were both doing the same thing.  We were reading our teens' Facebook pages.  Not that Pamela and I have teens ourselves, per se, but we have a whole gaggle of them from our youth group REVOLVE!Student Ministry. We were reading their comments about their friend.

I finally broke the silence, "It's not fair, is it?"
"No, it's not," she sort of whispered back into the darkness of our room.

Both of us were hurting for our teens so we posted a couple of statements onto their walls to let them know we were praying for them and thinking of them.  It seemed small.  The prayers seemed small. 

I half feared that the tragic events would turn these guys -- not necessarily our students but the school friends, though I worry for our students as well -- away from God instead of to Him. (I half worry that confessing my thoughts of this here in this blog will spark the idea itself as if it hadn't been conceived in their minds already.)  If I, in my theological prowess, struggle with the fairness of it all, how would they not be struggling with it already too?

So I got up this morning and prayed some heresy...

Rob Bell's book, "Love Wins" has taken a lot of rightful hits and largely negative critique because of it's promotion of universalism -- the idea that all roads lead to God regardless.  Its heresy is seen as so dangerously influential that my far away hero, Francis Chan, wrote a response to it called, "Erasing Hell". 

The premise of Bell's book is to say that no matter how people lived their lives, or how they believed spiritually, that God's love is so strong, and so irresistible, that, even if He is rejected in this life, He will ultimately be accepted in the life to come.  The implications -- dangerous as they are mind you -- are that no one ultimately misses Heaven. (Notice here how I can't even bring myself to type the phrase "goes to Hell". "Misses Heaven" is such more more palatable and acceptable to our sensibilities.) 

So this morning, I prayed that this young guy who lost his life this weekend gets a pass.  Here's my prayer in a nutshell:

God I know the rules.  There's only one way to You.  I don't know what was in his heart, but I'm asking You to bend Your rules for Him if he didn't know You.  Please bend the rules... or let there be rules that we don't know about on earth; and that because of those unknown rules he gets to know you regardless.  Let Your love ultimately win out.

 I don't know this guy's heart, so this isn't a judgment on his eternal state of being.  The fact that I don't know, however, is what unnerves me.  I pray that he knew Christ, and now knows Him in peace and comfort and in eternal rest.  The thing, too, that bothers me is that he came to our youth service a couple of times.  My blood runs cold when I wonder what we did on the nights he visited.  Did I do my normal, stupid youth pastor junk that makes kids like me and coming to church?  Did we goof off and not get through our service because of other stuff?  Was the Word that night a side note to all that was going on? Or was there anything of substance that the Holy Spirit could use moments before impact in the back seat of a teen driven car? 

God help me?!

It's sobering to think that at any moment we're meeting people for the last time.  So I prayed a bit of heresy, and I don't think that God minds, because He knows how we're struggling to make sense of what seems so unfair.  I prayed a bit of heresy because I'm afraid ...my hands are actually trembling and my eyes are starting to sting at the corners because of tears that want to come at the next statement... I'm afraid that I didn't do my job very well the night he visited our group.  I don't know that for sure, but it scares me nonetheless.

God, you grant heretical requests, right?  For once, please, I hope you do... if this heretical prayer of mine is actually needed.  In the future, I can't hang my hopes on heretical praying.