Thy Will Be Done
One of my favorite movies of all time is O’ Brother Where Art Thou?. In it, there is a scene where the main character, Ulysses, explains that “the great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.” See, in our culture and in our own minds, we lie to ourselves about what the Devil looks like. And really, about what Hell looks like. Satan and Hell, at times, have become trivialized into childish contexts or reasoned out to be a place where only those really really really evil people go.
I think for most of my life and I bet yours too, we’ve said things like; “Well, I haven’t killed anybody,” “I only stole that one time in high school,” “I’m mostly a pretty good person,” or maybe “‘I’m trying to make right what I’ve done.” Like Kyle said, at some point, we tend to serve ourselves. We puff ourselves up into being these “mostly good” people and try to achieve some moral code of goodness.
In C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, he imagines what it must look like to be in Hell--a lot like Earth. He supposes that there could be a bus that travels from Hell to Heaven to show what Heaven is like and the residents of Hell mostly see it as a change of scenery. There is too much that makes them uncomfortable. They are content in Hell. They have their favorite coffee shops, restaurants, and even Bible studies. They have no intention to leave even if begged by an angel or heavenly relatives or even Jesus himself. In Hell, they live how they’re used to - joyless, passionless, friendless, and miserable. I remember Kyle talking about Hell being a place where only those who want to be there are there. C.S. Lewis even backs Kyle up on this idea. One of his final conclusions in the novel is, “‘There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.”
We so easily fall into traps about what Hell is. We believe it is only the naked red guy with a fork poking at people for all eternity. We think that Hell is a fiery place where people hate their decisions. At some point, we lose sense of what we are capable of and live complacently - comfortable. But, if we look at some of what Kyle and C.S. Lewis has to say, we all end up with what our hearts long for. We just have different longings. At the end of days, will you be comfortable saying to the Father “Thy will be done?” Or would you prefer the Father to say that same phrase to you, “Thy will be done?”
-Tim
Tim Nowery lives in Cortland with his wife Christen. They have 2 dogs. Tim teaches high school English at Bristol High school.
