I sat uncomfortably on a hard metal folding chair in a musty room at the mountain conference center.\u00a0 I was fourteen, away from my family for the first time.\u00a0 The previous night was a blizzard of skits, games, flirting, and practical jokes.\u00a0 I was exhausted, still a bit shy, but having fun on my first \u201csnow camp\u201d youth group retreat.\u00a0 Now it was time for the devotional.<\/p>\n
The speaker was a middle-aged emergency medical technician from a big city.\u00a0 I was transfixed as he described the pathos of accident victims who had died despite his best efforts to give aid.\u00a0 There was the young man who was impaled on the steering column of his car, desperately trying to push his way off as his last breaths escaped.\u00a0 \u201cI pleaded with him to receive Christ,\u201d the speaker said, \u201cbut he just kept fighting for his life with fear in his eyes.\u201d\u00a0 Then there was the boy who laying dying of his injuries in an emergency room.\u00a0 The speaker reported the boy\u2019s last cries :\u00a0 \u201c \u2018oh, the pain, the pain!\u2019\u201d\u00a0 The speaker was certain that the boy felt the flames of hell licking about him in those last moments.<\/p>\n
The speaker paused as the flames of hell seemed to simmer under my chair.\u00a0 \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve learned as an EMT, it\u2019s that life is fragile, life is short.\u00a0 You all think you\u2019re immortal, but you\u2019re not.\u00a0 Death will come like a thief in the night.\u201d\u00a0 The room grew warmer.\u00a0 \u201cWhat would it feel like to be burned alive for eternity?\u00a0 Eternity never ends.\u00a0 No relief.\u201d\u00a0 My vision was tunneled onto the speaker as he moved towards the close.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of you think you\u2019re safe because of your parents, or because you said a prayer when you were young,\u201d he continued, \u201cbut you aren\u2019t living for Christ, and you\u2019re lost.\u00a0 You need to be sure<\/em>.\u00a0 You need to know <\/em>you\u2019re saved from the horrible fire of hell.\u201d\u00a0 I listened as he cataloged my sins:\u00a0 listening to rock music, playing games that involved sorcery like Dungeons and Dragons, lusting in my heart after girls.\u00a0 He was speaking to me, alone, the only person in the room.\u00a0 \u201cThe question is, do you have the guts to stand up in full view of all these people and proclaim your allegiance to Christ?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0I did.\u00a0 I stood up.\u00a0 I begged God to save me.\u00a0 And I felt . . . the same.\u00a0 I tried to feel relieved, joyous, clean.\u00a0 But I wondered \u2013 did I really repent unto salvation this time?\u00a0 I\u2019d prayed and expressed faith when I was younger, after all, but that wasn\u2019t good enough to keep me from rock music and other sinful pursuits.\u00a0 Did I really know<\/em> now, was I really sure<\/em>?<\/p>\n When I got home I threw away my expensive collection of Dungeons and Dragons books.\u00a0 I stacked all my rock albums in a pile and demolished them with a sledgehammer so that no one else could become corrupted by them.\u00a0 And I paid very careful attention in church.\u00a0 What I heard was as intoxicating as it was frightening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I sat uncomfortably on a hard metal folding chair in a musty room at the mountain conference center.\u00a0 I was fourteen, away from my family for the first time.\u00a0 The previous night was a blizzard of skits, games, flirting, and practical jokes.\u00a0 I was exhausted, still a bit shy, but having fun on my first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-uL","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}