Cute little five-year-old me was nearly trembling from concern in my railroad train pajamas. It was hours after my bedtime, but I couldn’t sleep. Not when I had been promised eternity.
That sounded like a scam of some sort to me. How could a person live forever? The people at the Kingdom Hall insisted that we all would. That is, of course, only after Jehovah kills all of the unworthy. That has to come first. That’s in the Bible.
I spread my little arms from side to side, trying to measure the length of forever with my skinny appendages—obviously inadequate for the job I was tackling.
“Its forever! That means it never ends,” I wailed, trying to make my fearful point, “That can’t really happen!”
“Yes, that’s what forever means, Sammy,” My mom responded in confusion. “You need to go back to bed, honey.”
Didn’t she get it? Forever never ends. That kind of thing just doesn’t sit well, even in a five-year-old’s mind. Especially in a five-year-old’s mind.
Yet here I was, a little blonde meatball, barely out of preschool and trying to calculate the limit of life as it approaches infinity. Not just my life, but the lives of everyone I had yet known in my miniscule existence.
That sounded like a scam of some sort to me. How could a person live forever? The people at the Kingdom Hall insisted that we all would. That is, of course, only after Jehovah kills all of the unworthy. That has to come first. That’s in the Bible.
I spread my little arms from side to side, trying to measure the length of forever with my skinny appendages—obviously inadequate for the job I was tackling.
“Its forever! That means it never ends,” I wailed, trying to make my fearful point, “That can’t really happen!”
“Yes, that’s what forever means, Sammy,” My mom responded in confusion. “You need to go back to bed, honey.”
Didn’t she get it? Forever never ends. That kind of thing just doesn’t sit well, even in a five-year-old’s mind. Especially in a five-year-old’s mind.
Yet here I was, a little blonde meatball, barely out of preschool and trying to calculate the limit of life as it approaches infinity. Not just my life, but the lives of everyone I had yet known in my miniscule existence.
If only I had been a little smarter at this point. If I had just gotten to the earliest bit of calculus by the time I reached my fifth year, I would have realized what the brothers at the Kingdom Hall were suggesting; Life—for the faithful—was an unchanging, continuous, horizontal line. Something like
y = 1
You, your life, and God’s intentions, are all the same, no matter how far forward you go on the timeline. As you approach infinity, y always equals 1.
It never changes, and life is a bland straight line.
God actually seems to be the boring one. That’s why he can’t get enough of stalking us and judging us right now, I suppose. He’s worse than Santa Claus, for Christ’s sake. But really, he and Christ both know: Eternity is going to be boring, so they better get their kicks now.
However, like I said, I hadn’t taken calculus yet. I was still too stupid of a five-year-old to make those kinds of observations. So my mind kept circling and circling until I started crying and breathing in tiny, hasty, gasps of air in the throws of an adorable little five-year-old anxiety attack.
“I can’t,” I mustered between sputtering breaths, “I’m scared!” Wheeze. “What if Jehovah kills us when he gets bored?”
“No sweet thing,” my mom said as she knelt next to me. “No, that would never happen.”
I tried to calm myself and push the poor, hurried, five-year-old attempts at differential equations and philosophy from my head. My breathing slowed in my mommy’s loving, pillowy embrace. I slowly looked up into her warm, brown eyes. A look of concern in her cheeky face was slightly hidden under a mess of curly brown locks. I was calmed by it.
She was the best at hugs. Plus, Mommy knew everything. She was a teacher. She taught something called Algebra to the big, bad middle schoolers. Daddy may have worked at a giant library, but Mommy was definitely smarter—she won all the arguments, after all. She knew more about Jehovah and the Bible too. Daddy worked a lot more. He was always gone. He was always missing the meetings at the Kingdom Hall. And, unlike Mommy, he didn’t seem to know when I was doing something Jehovah hated. Mommy always let me know. And the best part was, no matter what, even if she was mad, and I was being punished for disobeying Jehovah, she was always there when I needed that hug.
The hug always helped the medicine go down, as it would now. The pathetic mewing stopped. My breathing became less erratic, and after some time, I found my voice again.
I asked her solemnly, “How do you know, Mommy?”
“Because Jehovah is not like us. He doesn’t have a beginning. We can’t understand that."
There was no pause. That is the first hint in knowing someone is not thinking things trough. Again, I was too stupid to catch it, or maybe it’s just that I trusted my mom implicitly at the time. It’s hard to put my finger on.
"And," she went on, "the Bible says he does not tell a lie.”
“But Mommy, he could get bored. Everybody gets bored.”
That’s reasonable to think. This whole thought process started because I had been bored. It happens sometimes.
“Not Jehovah.”
And that didn’t sound very natural to me. My tummy lurched and began to tighten again.
“How do you know? You said we were made to be like him.”
“That’s what the Bible says. You have to trust in him.”
“But what if he’s only saying that?” I mean, we are going to be perfect, with no problems. What is he going to do with his time? He’ll be bored.
“Don’t say that. You can’t say that, Sammy. That’s wrong. This is what it means to have faith. You’ll understand when you are older. You just need to believe, honey.”
If the suds of the brainwashing were personified next to an anthropomorphic version of my brain, they’d be holding my poor five-year-old cerebrum down, trying to bind its flailing arms, and shouting, “She’s rejecting the conditioning! Prepare a sedative! Wheel her to the lobotomy ward!”
“Now get back to bed, Sam, its late,” my mother urged.
I don’t remember the walk back down the hallway to my room. Not on that night. Typically I would have run as quickly as possible through that shadowy corridor, to get back to my cozy night-lit room, but there were other things worrying me worse than the darkness that night.
As I lay there in my bed, covered by my heavy dark blue comforter and tightly hugging my brown stuffed monkey, Sniffy, to keep me company, I felt so nauseated. I had no idea why I felt so horribly worried over the idea of forever.
It’s so far away. And I’m only five.
But the thought of death also scared me. My best friend, Jehovah—I had already been taught well—had a history of killing people who didn’t agree with him. And he’d made a lot of threats throughout the ages too. It was important to stay on his good side. I didn’t want to die.
He goes back to the ground. In that day his thoughts do perish.
Stanza four of Psalm number 146. I actually didn’t remember where in the Bible that scripture was from at the time. But I remember hearing those words often enough from my parents and at the Kingdom Hall. I knew I didn’t want my thoughts to perish. I didn’t want everlasting punishment.
Whoever was not found written in the book of life was hurled into the lake fire.
I definitely didn’t want to be thrown into the lake of fire either.
“You see Sammy,” I remember my father telling me, during our family Bible study earlier that night. “We love you. We want your name to be written in the book of life. Like in the picture.”
The picture in the book showed a disembodied hand writing on a giant scroll. I couldn’t see my name on the scroll, but then again, none of the names on it were in English. Jehovah looked like he was pretty busy with a long list of Hebrew names he had to get through first, before coming to mine. But if that’s what it took to keep me from being one of the people burning up as they fall into the pit of hot lava on the next page, I knew I really wanted my name on that scroll. I wrote it in for Jehovah.
Hopefully he wouldn’t mind. He is awfully temperamental though.
“It’s not a real lake of fire,” my mom assured me, “The Bible says that it means the second death.”
"What’s that? What’s the first death?”
“It just means those people will die, and won’t ever come back,” my mother explained, “We love you. We want you to live forever in Jehovah’s paradise.”
Trust in Jehovah with all your heart, and do not lean upon your own understanding.
That one was a scripture I knew by heart—Proverbs chapter three, verse five. That was the latest in a long line of scriptures my mother had me repeat to her over and over throughout the day, like she was going to forget it. But only at that moment I thought I understood why. My own understanding just made me feel weird and sick. The less I thought about things, the better I felt. And the easier it was to sleep at night.
It never changes, and life is a bland straight line.
God actually seems to be the boring one. That’s why he can’t get enough of stalking us and judging us right now, I suppose. He’s worse than Santa Claus, for Christ’s sake. But really, he and Christ both know: Eternity is going to be boring, so they better get their kicks now.
However, like I said, I hadn’t taken calculus yet. I was still too stupid of a five-year-old to make those kinds of observations. So my mind kept circling and circling until I started crying and breathing in tiny, hasty, gasps of air in the throws of an adorable little five-year-old anxiety attack.
“I can’t,” I mustered between sputtering breaths, “I’m scared!” Wheeze. “What if Jehovah kills us when he gets bored?”
“No sweet thing,” my mom said as she knelt next to me. “No, that would never happen.”
I tried to calm myself and push the poor, hurried, five-year-old attempts at differential equations and philosophy from my head. My breathing slowed in my mommy’s loving, pillowy embrace. I slowly looked up into her warm, brown eyes. A look of concern in her cheeky face was slightly hidden under a mess of curly brown locks. I was calmed by it.
She was the best at hugs. Plus, Mommy knew everything. She was a teacher. She taught something called Algebra to the big, bad middle schoolers. Daddy may have worked at a giant library, but Mommy was definitely smarter—she won all the arguments, after all. She knew more about Jehovah and the Bible too. Daddy worked a lot more. He was always gone. He was always missing the meetings at the Kingdom Hall. And, unlike Mommy, he didn’t seem to know when I was doing something Jehovah hated. Mommy always let me know. And the best part was, no matter what, even if she was mad, and I was being punished for disobeying Jehovah, she was always there when I needed that hug.
The hug always helped the medicine go down, as it would now. The pathetic mewing stopped. My breathing became less erratic, and after some time, I found my voice again.
I asked her solemnly, “How do you know, Mommy?”
“Because Jehovah is not like us. He doesn’t have a beginning. We can’t understand that."
There was no pause. That is the first hint in knowing someone is not thinking things trough. Again, I was too stupid to catch it, or maybe it’s just that I trusted my mom implicitly at the time. It’s hard to put my finger on.
"And," she went on, "the Bible says he does not tell a lie.”
“But Mommy, he could get bored. Everybody gets bored.”
That’s reasonable to think. This whole thought process started because I had been bored. It happens sometimes.
“Not Jehovah.”
And that didn’t sound very natural to me. My tummy lurched and began to tighten again.
“How do you know? You said we were made to be like him.”
“That’s what the Bible says. You have to trust in him.”
“But what if he’s only saying that?” I mean, we are going to be perfect, with no problems. What is he going to do with his time? He’ll be bored.
“Don’t say that. You can’t say that, Sammy. That’s wrong. This is what it means to have faith. You’ll understand when you are older. You just need to believe, honey.”
If the suds of the brainwashing were personified next to an anthropomorphic version of my brain, they’d be holding my poor five-year-old cerebrum down, trying to bind its flailing arms, and shouting, “She’s rejecting the conditioning! Prepare a sedative! Wheel her to the lobotomy ward!”
“Now get back to bed, Sam, its late,” my mother urged.
I don’t remember the walk back down the hallway to my room. Not on that night. Typically I would have run as quickly as possible through that shadowy corridor, to get back to my cozy night-lit room, but there were other things worrying me worse than the darkness that night.
As I lay there in my bed, covered by my heavy dark blue comforter and tightly hugging my brown stuffed monkey, Sniffy, to keep me company, I felt so nauseated. I had no idea why I felt so horribly worried over the idea of forever.
It’s so far away. And I’m only five.
But the thought of death also scared me. My best friend, Jehovah—I had already been taught well—had a history of killing people who didn’t agree with him. And he’d made a lot of threats throughout the ages too. It was important to stay on his good side. I didn’t want to die.
He goes back to the ground. In that day his thoughts do perish.
Stanza four of Psalm number 146. I actually didn’t remember where in the Bible that scripture was from at the time. But I remember hearing those words often enough from my parents and at the Kingdom Hall. I knew I didn’t want my thoughts to perish. I didn’t want everlasting punishment.
Whoever was not found written in the book of life was hurled into the lake fire.
I definitely didn’t want to be thrown into the lake of fire either.
“You see Sammy,” I remember my father telling me, during our family Bible study earlier that night. “We love you. We want your name to be written in the book of life. Like in the picture.”
The picture in the book showed a disembodied hand writing on a giant scroll. I couldn’t see my name on the scroll, but then again, none of the names on it were in English. Jehovah looked like he was pretty busy with a long list of Hebrew names he had to get through first, before coming to mine. But if that’s what it took to keep me from being one of the people burning up as they fall into the pit of hot lava on the next page, I knew I really wanted my name on that scroll. I wrote it in for Jehovah.
Hopefully he wouldn’t mind. He is awfully temperamental though.
“It’s not a real lake of fire,” my mom assured me, “The Bible says that it means the second death.”
"What’s that? What’s the first death?”
“It just means those people will die, and won’t ever come back,” my mother explained, “We love you. We want you to live forever in Jehovah’s paradise.”
Trust in Jehovah with all your heart, and do not lean upon your own understanding.
That one was a scripture I knew by heart—Proverbs chapter three, verse five. That was the latest in a long line of scriptures my mother had me repeat to her over and over throughout the day, like she was going to forget it. But only at that moment I thought I understood why. My own understanding just made me feel weird and sick. The less I thought about things, the better I felt. And the easier it was to sleep at night.