The Thousand Roads through Hell

I think a follow-up to the I’m Christian Unless You’re Gay post is definitely due. I promise I’ll get to that as soon as I can do it properly.

I’ll be moving Noah and all our stuff over to our new bachelor pad over the next few days, so I thought I’d post a few reruns of some popular posts from the past. Enjoy, and wish me luck. Right about now, I’m probably dragging a mattress down the stairs. Either that or it’s tumbling down after me. If I never emerge, tell them to look under the bed.

The Thousand Roads through Hell

Hell. We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid it.

For some, hell might be losing somebody. To death, to break-up, to mental illness… does it really matter how the person is lost? They’re absent. They’re gone. They’re no longer there, and it leaves a cannonball-size hole in the middle of your barely beating chest.

To others, hell is financial. It’s staring at a glowing light bulb, knowing that tomorrow the power company will be taking that glow away from you. It’s knowing that your next paycheck won’t be enough to buy food for your children. It’s praying that your car can make it just a few more months before permanently giving out on you. It’s a pile of past-due notices and credit card statements, stained with tears and permanently unopened.

For others, hell is physical sickness, injury, or ailment. It’s the worry and stress of unknown or untreatable disease that constantly haunts you. It’s painful treatments taking the place of the fun and amusing things you used to do. It’s the inability to use parts of your body that you always took for granted. It’s wanting to stay in bed because remaining prostrate is much more alluring than getting up and feeling whatever has attacked or crippled your body.

The personal hell for many is abuse. It’s being dishonest with your mother about the bruises that cover your once pretty face. It’s lying helpless, pinned to the ground as a man rapes you. It’s hating yourself because the person you once loved most in life unleashes a verbal assault of name-calling and filth in your direction.

For some, it’s never finding a person to love at all. It’s watching the minutes, years, and decades of your life tick by and never having a partner, a best friend, or a spouse to stand beside you. It’s being alone at every birthday, holiday, and special day. It’s finally giving up the hope and the search, believing that you are destined to spend eternity alone.

For some, it’s being bullied. For some, it’s being demoted or fired from work. For some, it’s witnessing a great trauma or disaster happen.

For a great many it’s depression. It’s the inability to be happy, even when the heart-pounding want is there. It’s feeling worthless and insignificant. It’s wondering if death might be a sweet replacement for the refuse life frequently dishes out.

For some, it’s being in the minority. It’s being hated, loathed, and feared. It’s being forced from your home, trampled on, and ridiculed. It’s being hated for your beliefs or for your religion. It’s being despised for any reason.

Hell is different for everyone, and everyone must walk through it from time to time. Thank God for that.

Hell for me was infertility. How many times did I stand outside of the bathroom while my wife locked herself in with a pregnancy test? Dozens, at least. How many times did I have to hold my sobbing wife against my chest and let her weep as long as she needed because there was only one damned line on the stick? How many days did I have to take off of work to be poked and prodded by doctors? How many embarrassing moments did I have, trying to do what they required of me, while a nurse waited outside the door? How many needles did I have to plunge into my wife’s derriere in hopes that it would result in two stripes on the next test? How many doctors did I want to drop kick in the face? How many times did our relationship have to survive through the anger, tears, frustration, miscarriages, or failed procedures? Hundreds.

And, how many times have I been overwhelmed with gratitude for the desperation that resulted from it all? Thousands. Maybe tens of thousands…

Why? Because it was that very hell of infertility that made us feel that desperation. And it was that desperation that brought us the most beautiful boy this planet has witnessed. Had we never been through every painful and provoking moment of it, my son would be on someone else’s carpet playing with his Tinker Toys right now. He would be calling some other man Daddy right now, and I never would have felt his warm tiny cheek pressed against mine as he asks for five more minutes of snuggling before bed. I never would have heard him say that he loves me or that I’m his best buddy. And, I never would have known him to love him at all. The very thought breaks me.

I thank God every day for that infertility. I thank God for every bit of hell I’ve had to wade through to put my life together exactly as it is right now.

It was the hell of being tortured and bullied at school that brought me the determination to make something of my life and to be a loved, admired, and respected human being. Had I never been spat on, pushed, shoved, or rammed into lockers, I never would have understood the darkness that comes from feeling like worthless bunkum. Had I never been called fatso, tubby, or lard-ass, I would never have hated myself enough to eat my way to 350 lbs. Had I never hated myself enough to truly fatten myself, I would never have experienced the healing that would only come from overcoming it. Had I never overcome it, I would never have done anything really significant or major in my life.

You see, every single noteworthy or remarkable thing I have achieved or done as an adult has been directly related to the moments when I was finally able to let go of that dark past and heal myself. Without all of it, I would be a weak excuse for a man.

Hell has come to me in many forms. I have had my share of health problems. I have sat through tests and more tests for a certain problem I was experiencing, only to have the doctor come back each time and tell me the results were negative. Hell for me was never knowing what was wrong. If I at least knew what it was, I could then deal with it. Other physical hell has come through painful surgeries, poorly-forming joints as a teenager, excruciatingly painful abscesses, allergies to penicillin, and a constant assault of kidney stones (which is a hell I admittedly bring upon myself because I refuse to give up chocolate).

Looking back, I would never trade those physical experiences in for better or more pleasant ones. How incredible each of those has been in helping me understand and appreciate the beautiful blessing that my body is! How miraculous that my body has been able to overcome such things. And, had I never experienced my body falling apart, I wouldn’t feel a great need to now keep it together. And because I’ve kept it together, I’ve had many opportunities in business and in my ambitions that were made so much easier for me, if not altogether possible.

Of course, the worst hell I’ve been through was divorce. I’d only wish it on my worst enemy. To give yourself to another… to dedicate yourself to one person for life and all eternity… to plan your entire existence around another human being, and then to have it taken away from you in the snap of a finger… It was a feeling worse than death for me, and one that left me longing for my own expiry. I suppose one truly knows it’s hell when ceasing to exist seems like a viable option for surviving it.

But that was only the beginning of that hell. The real hell for me was seeing that person to whom I’d given my life stop seeing me as anything but a business transaction. I became less than a human being, and they did to me as well. It was sitting through endless contention and debate with somebody I had so recently been sitting in professional counseling with trying to make things work. It was the loss of all dignity and respect. More than anything, hell was suddenly having no idea who I was anymore. It was feeling lost. It was feeling worthless.

And lucky me. I got to experience that hell twice.

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