I am a night owl by nature.

Ever since I was a child I’ve always tried to stay up as late as I can. I think it’s some childish dream to stay awake as long as I can so I don’t miss anything, I want to experience it all. Some times that’s a good thing, sometimes it’s bad but one thing is for certain:

Everybody uses you tube. Even God.

It’s not as blasphemous as it sounds; rest assured there is rhyme to my reason. At any rate, the story goes like this…

It was late, I was bored and I had a grande caramel macchiato just hours before. I could sense the caffeine surging through my system. In other words, I wasn’t going to bed anytime soon but I needed to take a break from the game I was playing. It had gotten to the point where I was making obvious and bad mistakes, costing my team the wins we were working so hard for. My eyes needed a rest, as well as my hands and my mind.

After a short intermission and the consumption of the last oatmeal cream pie (the little Debbie ones, those are the best), I headed over to you tube to check out a video a friend of mine recommended.

An hour or so later and far, far from the familiar shores of internet sanity, I realized that I had gotten lost in the dark and foreboding caverns of youtube. It can be a desolate land when you’re looking for very specific things. Not everything is there believe it or not. But that’s how they get you, they start recommending things to you that “they” think you might have interest in. It’s like they have enslaved Cerebro somewhere deep down in the depths of the Pentagon hooked up to the Google machine. Reading our minds, guiding us down ever winding paths of lunacy until we reach the bottom of the great nothing and wonder to ourselves in alone in the dark:

“How the hell did I get here?”

Just when I was about to close the browser and call it a night, I saw a link to a video that featured a man who had a near death experience but instead of going to heaven, he went to hell. He was a college professor and I believe a former atheist and it had a lot of likes so I decided to check it out. That small investment of time lead to another hour or so of videos until I came across this video. It’s long but it’s worth listening to.

You don’t have to believe him but if you’re a believer, think about what he’s saying.

It doesn’t matter if you believe his account or not. What got me thinking was his description of God’s wrath. We’ve read about this in scripture as well, and as I was thinking about this I asked myself “What are you going to say to God when you stand before him?”

I am saved, and I know I can’t lose my salvation but still, when we stand before God and have to give an account, I wonder if there is a keep your mouth shut-prostrated on the ground option for those of us on the pup tent plan.

Well one thing lead to another and after much time deep in thought, my train came slowly to its final destination. The light came on, the door opened; all passengers exit. Standing there alone in the station with nothing but the ends of my delusions as baggage, that’s when I realized that the point wasn’t to feel guilty about things I have done: as long as I have repented in earnest and moved forward, but to realize that every sin you commit goes directly against Christ and his actions on the cross. Especially now that I know better-and I’ve been a Christian for well long well enough to know better-that is especially offensive to God. It’s like slapping him in the face and that’s not a very advisable course of action considering he is omnipotent. I might as well have taken the whip myself or helped the guards to pierce his flesh. I knew that but I had never felt it before. Maybe God hid me from fully understanding until the time was right, I don’t know. Having that realization now though really helped to put things in perspective to be more on guard against my thoughts and actions. The less explaining I have to do in front of the throne, the better.

It’s like an old classmate and friend of mine used to say to me: “It’s not that you’re bad, you just have made bad decisions in the past, but God doesn‘t hate you.”

The mental picture of my contribution to his stripes is more than I can bear, and I’d rather put energies into more constructive things. Truly having a grasp on it understanding this makes you physically ill; it’s that potent an emotion, at least for me it is.

Lord give me strength…

It is wiser to bare good fruit then none at all. For the plant that does not provide will be pulled at the harvest and burned in the flames.

No more you tube for me.