Can Heaven Really Co-Exist With Hell?

Walter Cronkite, then Peter Jennings, then Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, these were the anchors that reported news during our dinner hour most evenings of my youth. My Dad cared and thought deeply about national and world news, so dinner began with saying grace, then watching the news while we ate. By desert, the news would be over and often my family would be in passionate discussion about some aspect of it. Just as often, I would push my plate away when I was done, lay my head down in my arms, and fall sound asleep.

One of my propensities was to be more emotionally driven than intellectually driven. I didn’t listen to the news the same way as my family did, they listened with minds attuned to what the best ideas were and how to apply ideals to the practical. For me, the news was an emotional event, not something I was able to intellectually engage in as my emotions would completely take me over. What I felt night after night after night was the pain, the suffering, the constant conflict that was the way of life of so many on this planet. Falling asleep was one of the ways I coped.

Once I started developing into rational thinking myself, I began to ask myself what I could do to make this pain stop. I thought of Jesus, the most loving human being that had ever lived, I could never love more than Him and, “Look”, I thought, “Jesus didn’t even make a dent.” Mother Teresa was alive at the time, giving her whole life to serve to the poor, she wasn’t making a dent in the nightly news either, it was hopeless. No matter how "good" I was, it wasn't going to make a difference.

Around this time, my oldest brother was beginning the college application process, so there was much discussion about futures. I began to contemplate this as a way to live, since saving the world was obviously impossible. I imagined going to a good college, having a good career, wonderful husband and children, being a grandparent, retirement, death. "So I touch a few lives, those people will die too. We come, we live and die, and everyone we know does too, but the pain, the suffering, it stays." Even Jesus hadn’t changed that and the world news every night confirmed that for me, over and over again.

There was the hope of evolution, life had gotten better right? I remember my Mom telling me a story of how poorly handicap people were treated when she was a girl and how much better it had gotten for them now. So I could see that life had evolved, and yet, what I saw, felt, every night on the news, were not signs that life was better now than a hundred years ago, but still deeply conflicted with no real hope of the pain ever going away.

Once I landed on this awareness, it became the defining energy for the rest of my youth. I continued to function outwardly, school, activities, friends, but never did any of it make any real sense to me, and my heart was never fully engaged. I just never believed in the ideals, the values, the world put before me, but I also had nothing, absolutely nothing, to replace them with, so I followed the “rules” of life, but only half-heartedly.

I didn’t mull a lot over my lack of belief in the world, since I also felt there was no answer to this problem, there was no reason to ponder it. Jesus kept arising as my example, if He couldn’t heal the pain of the world, I wasn’t going to be able to either, so trying to fit into it, be successful at this world, was all I could do. And from that place, I lived my life, outwardly cheerful, inwardly constantly working in my head how I could care more about academics, sports, friends, trying to “fix” myself to be more successful outwardly. Underneath those motoring thoughts, was the real heartfelt belief, none of this mattered, I didn’t matter, and in this awareness, there was utter aloneness.

With all this conflict happening within me, I found my comfort zone was living on the edge of life, rather in the middle of it. Without conviction, I couldn't enter fully into school, activities, friends and even family, thus I showed up with the bare minimum needed, hopefully well enough not to call attention to myself, but not enough to ever be excellent either. I wanted to see and feel about the world the way most people did, it would've been much more fun, but the unanswered questions gnawed at my heart.

How do we live in Heaven consciousness when every day, every hour, every minute, even now, there are children being raped, tortured, beaten, sold in slavery, dying of starvation? And not only children, but adults, animals and the earthy itself? How do we live knowing that if we do everything we possibly can to heal the world of it's pain, we will barely make a dent, that the tortuous suffering will continue in some form, no matter what we do? How?