“Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.” Eph. 5:1

We’ve been watching this comedy on Netflix called “The Good Place”. The premise is a well-known folk version of Christianity that has our deeds weighed out upon death, and if we’ve committed more good, we go to heaven, if more bad, we go to hell.
The first season has two of the four characters being wrongly assigned to the good place, and then trying to hide that fact from the angel in charge. The lead in particular involves her ‘soulmate’ in the deception, and their collective worry about getting caught and sent to the bad place is the setup for the gags. At the end of the first season, the lead figures out that they haven’t been accidentally sent to the good place, they are in fact, in the bad place, and are being tortured. The second season, involves the lead demon, resetting their memories and trying to start over to see how long he can torture them, but after a while, he starts to admire them, and notice that they actually getting better as things progress. (If you’ve seen the show… yeah, I know I’m leaving a bunch of stuff out) The third season has the lead demon convincing ‘the judge’ to let him save their lives, because he is sure they can do better if just nudged in the right direction.

This made me think of a little story I remember reading from John Bradshaw’s Homecoming, called ‘The double tragedy of Rudy Revolvin’.
The book is about healing the inner child and co-dependence. It was for some reading done years ago… and mean early 90’s… but I digress, the gist of the story is:
A man lives a tragic, unfulfilled life and when he dies, he is confronted with hell. Satan, offers him a chance to go back and relive his life. The man intuitively feels it’s a trick, and knowing he won’t have any knowledge of the previous life, realizes he’d most likely just live the same tragic, unfulfilled life all over again. Satan, however promises him that he will be fully cognizant of his past life. This, the man feels, is enough to allow him to get it right, so he accepts. The tragedy is that even knowing the mistakes, he commits the same errors, but this time, with foresight and full awareness that every disaster he had previously created, he is seemingly unable to stop creating again. He not only repeated the same mistakes, it was much worse this time, which is why Satan gave him the opportunity in the first place.

I keep thinking: maybe if the writers of ‘the good place’ knew about this story, they wouldn’t have bothered sending the humans back to try again, but that’s a pretty dumb place for me to go, because… well, it’s a tv show and ya gotta write about something, amirite?

But the double tragedy story has always caught my attention because, as the bible notes, we are unable to break the power of our sin. There is something that rings deeply true about this story- which is really just a thought experiment- a hypothetical… but I intuitively feel it’s probably accurate. Even in my own life as a believer, I have watched episodes of my life in disgust as I marched into things that I KNEW the end of, and yet carried on as if there was nothing that could be done. Then I kick myself (figuratively, of course) wondering why I did such and such even when I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

Cue today’s Bible reading- Eph 5-6, and I am told to be an imitator of God, and walk in love as Christ loved us and sacrificed for us.I’m a relatively simple guy (lots of women would say ALL guys are relatively simple) so I’m just going to take the verse at face value and treat it like this is something within reach. Sure, not in the flesh, but we have been given the Spirit and all things that pertain to life and godliness. So walk in love. I’m blessed to know that my deeds aren’t actually being weighed on a scale, but I also know that’s not how entrance into heaven works anyway.