I was talking to the chaplain about bad platitudes people use around death and he quickly got very mad as he recalled something from very early on in his career.
“Caleb,” he said. “I remember the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
“At the time, I was a new chaplain at Caln Hospital and I was also a new pastor of a small, local church. A lot going on all at once. Which is often what happens when you’re fresh out of seminary as a new pastor.”
“I got a phone call late one night and it was a member of our church calling me. She was just hysterical.”
“I was trying to get her to calm down so I could understand what she was saying. And finally, she caught her breath and she told me her son had just shot himself in the attic. He shot himself in the head. Dead.”
He continued, “I’d seen a number of suicides and suicide attempts at Caln Hospital, but I knew this boy.”
“About 10 minutes before the service started, the boy’s mother came to me crying. She said, ‘Gerry, I’ve been doing so good during the viewing and visitation’. Gerry specified that it was a huge viewing, full of “on-lookers” as he called them. “But,” she said, “someone just came up to me and told me that she’ll be praying for me because she can’t imagine what it must feel like to know he not only killed himself but now he’s in hell.”
“Is that true?” she pleaded with Gerry. “Is my boy really in hell?”
Gerry stopped telling the story momentarily to let it all sink in. “I gave her a huge hug, and I told her as confidently as I could, ‘He’s not in hell.’ But I was so pissed.”
We commend his soul to the mercy of God.
AND?