The Great Divorce

With everything going on with Stephanie I decided to read a bit lighter book and have decided to tackle "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis again.  If you've never read it than you are really missing out.  Lewis has a bus full of people leave hell and take a trip to heaven, or really the beginning of heaven to be more accurate.  They appear as ghosts and the world around them appears to solid for them to really walk on, much less live in.  That's a pretty shoddy description but you get the idea.  The interesting part of the book comes when each of the ghost-like people from hell have a conversation with one of the "solid" people sent to take them across the mountains and help them become solid themselves.  Nearly every one of the ghosts, usually after an argument, gives up the idea of going on to heaven and chooses instead to go back to their little part of hell.  They all have excuses-

A self-righteous man refuses to let a forgiven murderer help him go through the mountains. 

A bereaved mother is angry that she must first see and desire God before she can see her lost child (the hardest one to read)

A controlling woman will go but only if she can continue to help her husband fix all the things that only she can fix. 

Lewis himself is even chastised by his solid person (author George MacDonald) and warned that some people are more concerned with proving Christ than loving Him.  "As if all the good Lord ever had to do was exist." 

Certainly not all of these are temptations to hold onto for me, but I'm sure I have some things of my own.  Jonathan quoted author Cynthia Heimel in his blog and I will shamelessly steal it from him “I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants your deepest wish.”  All the people that went back to hell went back there because their deepest desire was not for Christ.  What a challenge. 

^" Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it."- Matthew 10:39