This morning on the way to work I was pondering on the Bryn Haworth song "What kind of love is this?".
What kind of love is this? That gave itself for me
I am the guilty one yet I go free
What kind of love is this, a love I'd never known
I didn't even know his name, what kind of love is this?"
Words like "guilty" caused me to start thinking about sin. What is sin? An action that affects others or ourselves or God in a negative way. Falling short of the standard. Falling short of the standard evokes the sense of being in the wrong place, failing, not reaching the mark. Just imagine then that there are two shaded areas on a piece of paper, one shaded say red for sin, one gold for righteousness. The areas are adjacent. Now lets consider the part that divides the two: Is it a gradual fade from one colour to the next, is it a line, or is it an area of blankness? I think the fundamentalists would say "It's a line, you are either in one thing or the other". The liberals would say "well it's a fade in, a bit of one colour and a bit of the next". I don't know who would opt for a blank space - moderates maybe. In the book of Revelation it talks about the lukewarm ones, neither cold or hot. Did they, do they inhabit the space in between, being neither sinful nor righteous, playing safe and yet being spewed out of God's mouth?
This is what I think, it may be heretical but it's honest. The two shaded areas and the space exist within all of our lives. I believe that those whom have taken advantage of the free gift of God through Jesus Christ have been gifted, not with the anihilation of the sinful area but the ability to choose not to inhabit it, but rather to live in the Golden area of righteousness. I guess that involves a bit of training of our will. We live in the space between when because of ambivalence or passivity we do not settle for either of the other two. It's an expanse of nothingness. The more we inhabit it the bigger it becomes until disenterested and unmotivated it sucks us fully in and we become nothing. Is that Hell?
