As I said after church, I’m surprised by the pride I felt seeing my brother taken by the spirit. At the rock show that is new Christianity, Joey was in the mosh pit. Front and center. Fearless. I was awestruck by his belief.

But there’s just one little problem with that belief. If you read the small print, part and parcel in that belief is that non-believers go to a rather unpleasant place called Hell. Jesus has yet to give me the tap, and I’m not about to fake it. So my brother could safely say, at this point, Hell awaits.

I came down here with the expressed purpose of talking to my brother about this most surreal belief: one of your closest relatives imagines the most horrific afterlife awaiting you. Burning in a fiery pit. For eternity. It’s unimaginable. The more I mull it over, it might be the very idea of Hell that most alienates me from his belief.

It’s a harder subject for me to broach than I imagined. Joey, regional sales manager of Patterson Dental, has 24 employees and twin babies. Not much free time to worry about our souls hanging out ad infinitum. So I broach it with his wife Monica. That’s easier for a number of reasons. One, Monica’s Alabama charm can make anything, even the torments suffered by sinners in Hell, sound somewhat inviting. Two, by bringing this up with Joey, I will finally be admitting to someone on my father’s side of the family that I’m not a believer. As far as I know, I’ll be the first non-believing Blalock in our two hundred year history in the Bible Belt. It feels almost arrogant to turn your back on the family tradition. Can’t I have serious doubts, and believe it when I see it?

Monica confirms my fears. I can’t. I ask when she began believing, and she tells me her “testimony”—the born-again term for telling the story of when Jesus establishes a “personal relationship” with you. On that day, she says, the whole world looked different. The sky. The street. Billboards. I explain my dilemma—that Jesus hasn’t spoken to me, as he did with her when she was a struggling mother in her teens.

“Why don’t you just try talking to him?” she suggests, “and see what happens.”

I consider it. “But what about talking to Buddha?” I ask. “Or Mohammed? Vishnu?”

She takes a minute. “That’s a good question. I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”

As hard as it is for me to understand actually speaking to Jesus, I think it is jut as hard for Christians to imagine believing in other things. Or in nothing at all. It’s fine with me that they pour energy into Jesus every day. It grounds them. Gives life purpose. I see the same fate for both of us, whatever that may be, in the future.

But the fate of my unsaved soul, for my family, is a different story.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under My Brother The Christian posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.