By Father Joseph Chan Wing-chiu
I passed by a children’s recreation park on a sunny and breezy afternoon. I observed the innocent children full of joy playing when a little girl, aged four to five, suddenly fell down and sat by the slide.
Seeing no caregiver around the child, I rushed to check on her condition. Upon approaching her, I heard her murmur something like, “You’re going to hell!” It made me curious. So after greeting her and checking her condition, I asked her what she meant by what she had said. She replied, “The teacher had asked us to line up for heaven. Those kids who did not line up would go to hell.” Perhaps, those children were not following the instructions and were scrambling to go down the slide, so they pushed her, and she fell. She was upset and came up with an excuse for her fall—out of her teacher’s words.
It was a bit of a shock and a worry for this young child to have such reasoning. But when I ponder her thoughts, I cannot help but thank the Holy Spirit for his work.
Queuing up actually comes from the need for law and order. In the beginning, God spoke the Word, and out of the chaos came the light, the sky, the sea, the earth, the flowers, the trees, the fish, the birds and the beasts, and a thousand wonders that God had ordained. All these things exist according to God’s will, but at the same time, they decay according to the established laws and keep changing. However, when we examine the changes, we find that they still follow certain rules. God created the laws of nature for us to discover the mysteries and recognise his footprints in them.
Living by the laws helps us to feel at peace, but when chaos occurs we feel anxious, and perhaps this is what the children meant by hell.
Thankfully, Christ was born to save us from the chaos of life. Through the teachings of Christ, we find the focus of the commandments, which is God’s love for mankind. We also find the practice of love on those around us in response, which give us hope that in Him, we can find a stable and orderly rhythm of life again so that we can peacefully follow him in a changing world, build up a heaven on earth and move towards the eternal kingdom together.
