7 - Mrs S

I don't know if it's because of my spiritual questioning, sexual questioning, both, or neither, but as we moved toward the end of high school, I spent less and less time with my best friend Ryan. To be honest, I was fairly freaked out by my questioning, so I wouldn't be surprised if he was freaked out by it too.

I remember one of the last times that I stayed overnight at his house, during the spring of our Junior year. He was on his waterbed, and I was on a mattress on the floor, and we just stared at the ceiling and talked until going to sleep. Ryan had glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling, even in high school.

We talked about Christianity that night, which was typical. We were always talking about predestination or assurance or some other complicated aspect of our faith, but this night was different.

On this night, I asked Ryan if he ever questioned all of it, the whole thing; I asked if he ever questioned Christianity itself.

He said sometimes he did.

I told him that recently, I’d been questioning all of it pretty seriously.

And instead of backing away, Ryan gave me something else to think about. Ryan can be that way in conversations. He said that he wondered about people like Knema or Rouzheen or Mrs S, people we knew weren't Christians. He said that he wondered if a good God would really send them to hell (or allow them to choose hell for eternity).

“Whoa,” I said. “Yeah.” I couldn't believe it. Until that point, I hadn’t really questioned heaven and hell, or thought about specific people going there. I guess I had it in the back of my mind somewhere, but mostly, I’d just wondered about spiritual identity, and whether or not Christians were really different than anybody else.

Ryan said that he hadn’t made any conclusions about whether they could really go to hell. He said that he wasn’t going to let it get in the way of thinking about other things, though. Pretty soon after that, he rolled over in his bed, with the water sloshing under him.

My mind was reeling.

We were more than halfway through the school year, and Mrs S had really made me curious. Rouzheen and Knema too, but especially Mrs S. She was going through a divorce at the time, and we all knew about it. I heard about it through my friend Eric Perez. Mrs S never talked about it, though. She just kept teaching biology, without missing a beat.

She would come to class prepared every day, with a 90 minute lesson that never slowed down. She had lecture slides, videos, lab exercises, and activities that really forced us to get involved: 90 minutes a day, 5 days a week. Also, she had music playing at the beginning of every class, and an honor system where we signed a slip of paper promising not to cheat. She said she would trust us, because we were adults. A few of the students cheated and she found out, and she almost started crying while she told the class about it.

When Mrs S taught, she focused on the students, not just the biology, and it always made us focus on the biology. It was impossible not to learn, just from sitting in her class. But we knew that she wasn't a Christian, we just knew it. And I wondered how she could have so much life without Jesus in her heart... and even in the face of divorce.

And now, on top of all of this, I had to consider that she might go to hell when she died... There was just no way. There was just no way. Every time I saw her, after that conversation with Ryan, I would think about how there was just no way she could possibly go to hell.

I recently sent an email to Mrs S, telling her about that conversation with Ryan, and how it affected my life. I then asked her, basically, "Do you consider yourself a Christian?" because she and I had never actually talked about religion before. I had always just assumed.

Her response finished like this:

I have never doubted that there is a higher power, that there is a right and wrong, good and evil, and that we should all strive to be on the right and good side, and that Jesus was a miraculous soul who has made many in the world reevaluate their principals and choose the light. I believe Plato said "The life unexamined is the life unlived," and so I refuse to go blindly along, just traveling the conventional and expected path. If hell is the price to pay for that, then I expect I will be in some very good company.

Her email made me wish that we'd talked about religion earlier, but I wonder if the "Christian me" would have really understood her words... there's a chance that I would have heard her saying, "No, I'm not a Christian." There's a chance that I wouldn't have looked for any more meaning beyond that.

...But I knew, even in high school, that I wouldn't mind being with Mrs S after dying, that wherever it was that she was going, I wouldn't mind going there too.