Today, some of the hottest temperatures are being recorded on Earth, people are being admitted to the hospital for heat related illnesses, record breaking heat waves are being recorded, and some people have died from the heat. Yet, I am literally freezing. Instead of having a regular body temperature, my body temperature is two degrees lower than it should be. I am wearing winter clothes and shaking because I feel cold.
It really drives me crazy that every single Christian believes that Hell is a place that is very hot with fire and brimstone. It just can’t be since for me hell is ice cold. I remember when I was young, I would get overheated, and it was horrible. No doubt. Yet, this feels different somehow. Being overheated felt like a condition that could be treated, where this just feels painful. It’s like a wave that goes over my entire body; a horrible feeling like an electric shock wave except the electric feel is cold.
No one knows why. The best answer I have is hormones and aura of headaches. Everyone around me is feeling the sense of global warming and I feel like I am freezing. It reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where a girl thinks she is in a world where the earth is hurtling towards the sun, but she is just in a fever dream because the earth is actually hurtling away from the sun. Wouldn’t that be ironic? If I felt cold because I was dreaming and it really is cold?
I don’t know. I just know that in my life, I’m never doing what everyone else is doing. If everyone is hot, then I am cold. If everyone is dancing, I am standing still. I’ve wondered about that my entire life because I’ve kept wanting to be like all the other human beings and yet no matter what I do, I’m not. Maybe my path isn’t to be like those around me.
I’m one of the few people I’ve ever known who can understand that everything around me is in a sense an illusion of time and space. It gives me comfort to know that when God looks down on my from Heaven, He’s not really looking down at me, He knows me in a way that I can’t begin to describe and all I can hope is that sometime in my lifetime I can be the person that He wants me to be and I can know God some of the way He knows me. And maybe having that faith and commune with God is more important than doing the wave with all the other humans at a football game. It might even be worth feeling warm on a hot July day.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
