One person’s self-made hell

Christians sometimes say that hell is locked from the inside. What they mean is that people put themselves in hell, and only they can let themselves out. I recently encountered something like this.

I was attending the trial of a woman accused of killing a college student in a hit-and-run accident seven years earlier. The young man she killed lived in the residential college I directed at the time. Her defense was that she didn’t do it, or if she did, she doesn’t remember it. She began by claiming she only hit a stop sign; when presented with evidence that it was a person, she said over and over that she “only” hit a homeless person. David, the student she killed, spent his summers serving homeless people. I was left wondering whether he would have been more terrified by the thought of her killing him or her excusing it by saying it was only a homeless person.

For seven years, she told herself and others she didn’t do it. She knew she didn’t do it, she said, because God told her so. God telling her that it was a stop sign allowed her to go on with her life. There was of course no going on for David’s family. The God they worship wasn’t going to let them go that easily, telling them, as they later related, “You can either do this with me or without me; it’s up to you.”