Would you deny Christ?

This is my last blog post of 2010…where has the time gone, it seems like I just started this thing.  I’ve been thinking about New Year’s Resolutions; I’ve already committed to reading 100 books in 2011.  Another resolution I’ve toyed with is finishing the novel I’ve been working on for about 7 years.  Reading Silence by Shusako Endo has really motivated me to dig back in and finish the story.  The novel is about an inner city pastor who ministers to prostitutes and drug dealers.  He is so successful at getting them to transform their lives that his home is invaded by one of the kingpins of the city and his henchmen who is furious at the loss of revenue and bodies.  The kingpin ties up the pastor and his wife and two children.  The pastor is asked to deny Christ or else his wife and children will be tortured and killed.  He refuses several times throughout the ordeal and the kingpin follows through on his threat leaving the pastor that only one left alive.  The Christian fundamentalist media types hail the pastor as a hero for not denying Christ; however the pastor begins to think the heroic thing to do would have been to suffer eternal hell if it meant his family would not have been brutalized.  He begins to see a spiritual director who leads him on a journey of discovery into the land of a God who looks to love rather than judge. 

That is it in a nutshell.  I find it sad to believe that some really believe God would send someone who has served God most of his life to hell for all eternity for denying Christ under such horrible circumstances.  I am thankful on the eve of a New Year that God has way more grace and mercy than we allow at times.