I’m definitely not resting in or on anyone’s bosom, Abraham or otherwise.

Dear Trevor,

I wish I had a Bible here, so I could look up some of those passages you mentioned. You’d think if I was in Heaven or someplace near it that there’d be Bibles all over the place. Clearly, the Gideons haven’t passed through yet.

I’m definitely not resting in or on anyone’s bosom, Abraham or otherwise. That said, my neighbor, Martin, has got quite a bosom. If he were a woman, he’d probably wear about a D cup. On Martin, his bosom just looks like a high-riding roll of fat. I don’t know how he stays so fat when we all eat so little. The only woman I know up here is Sung-hee, the waitress, and she is so manly she has no bosom at all. Even if she did, I think it’s pretty unlikely she’d let me rest anywhere near it.

I don’t know of any gullies around here, but to be honest, I haven’t explored much past the immediate neighborhood. There certainly might be a gully in the woods.

Drew said that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. I don’t know how that applies here. Like you said, I haven’t seen God. No old men with white beards. No floating bright lights. No one surrounded by angels or sitting on a throne. Then again, I don’t seem to be absent from my body. My body is not much to speak of, but it doesn’t hurt all the time like it did when I was there at home, all run through with cancer.

The one verse that you wrote of that jumped out at me was that one that said something like, “you die and after that, the judgment.” Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe I get a mediocre eternity because I lived a mediocre life. My hands shake as I write such a thing.

I asked Carl, my neighbor on the opposite side from Martin, why he thought he was here.

“We’re in hell,” he said, plainly. “We brought this on ourselves.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said to Carl, because we’re all sick of him going on and on about how this place is hell. “But what did you do to end up here?”

“It’s not what I did,” said Carl. “It’s what I didn’t do. I clearly didn’t do enough.” Then Carl told me that he was a Presbyterian elder back in the old place. Turns out he knows quite a bit about the Bible, as he attended church most of his life. I read your letter to him, and he kept interrupting me to give more color.

That sheep and goats bit? Carl explained that Jesus was saying that sheep are those who helped those less fortunate. They make it into heaven because they looked after the poor, it seems. The goats are those who turned their backs on those in need, so they went to hell.

That one makes my hands shake, too.

Dad

Filed under Dad Letters | Tags: adolescence, afterlife, bible, death, fatherhood, judgment, junior high school, sheep and the goats | Comment (1)