Personal Blogs

“Stranger, why do you not speak?
Speak — that I may see thee.”
— Walter Savage Lander

The Island of Arran from the North Ayrshire Coast

Speak — That I May See Thee

Like many early mornings, the coast summoned me. Five degrees below zero, the air thin and bracing, the beach washed gold by a reluctant winter sun. I stood at the shore and looked across to The Island of Arran on Scotland’s west coast, its mountain crowned with snow, steady and austere. Something about that view loosens memory. Faces return. Voices follow.

On that mountain, some years ago, I climbed beside a family from Israel. They were making for the summit to camp beneath the wide, indifferent sky. We fell into step together. It did not begin with theology or history, only with courtesy. A shared breath. A careful footing. Yet as the path steepened, so did our conversation. I had read the Bible most of my life and often wondered what a modern family from Israel would be like in the plainness of daily life. I found no abstraction that day. I found a kind, considerate and generous family; that is if generosity of time is a gift and I am sure it is. They made space for this stranger. They asked about Scotland and about the rhythm of my days which I reciprocated. I listened. I answered. We parted close to the top as I returned for the Ferry home. I returned with smiles warmed by more than the climb. That is how life ought to be.

Another ascent brought a Norwegian family into my story. I had once lived briefly in Stavanger, and hearing their accent felt like opening an old letter. Familiar cadences. Quiet warmth. We spoke of fjords and long winters, of the sea’s mood and the discipline of light in northern lands. In their company, nostalgia became a companion rather than a burden. Yet even as I admired their homeland, my heart settled again on Scotland’s west coast, the place where I am most at ease and most awed. Home sharpens when contrasted with another’s home. Conversation does that. It teaches us what we love without diminishing what others cherish.

Still, we do not need summits to meet good people. This morning by the shore, as Arran held its silent vigil, I found myself speaking with a family from Birmingham. A mother, a father, two daughters bright with curiosity and a father returning to his homeland on this west coast for a time. We spoke of the view, of reading, of their daughter who loved to read and write creatively. There was nothing monumental in my exchange with this family, no shared pilgrimage, yet it was rich. I walked away wishing I had known them longer. I wished not to intrude upon their time spent as a family. Some meetings are gifts precisely because they are brief.

But what draws people to the sea in winter. It depends who we are I suppose. I was brought up in the Maritime city of Glasgow where I always looked out to faraway lands. That’s why I was gifted a Grundig Satellite World band Radio in the seventies. A gift that helped me explore the world albeit unilaterally.  I guess Robert Louis Stevenson was drawn to the coast due to his father’s business of designing light houses which marked the writer’s career and destiny in many ways. But I digressed.

There is a peculiar virtue in these encounters, any encounter. A stranger speaks, and suddenly you see them. Not as a headline or a stereotype. Not as a theory. You see patience in the way someone ties a bootlace or offers their last caramel wafer or get all passionate when you ask them their favourite book. Words open the door, but presence lets you step inside.

When we remain silent, we remain unseen. Suspicion fills the space where speech might have been. Yet when we risk a greeting, when we ask and answer with simple honesty, something shifts. We discover that beneath accents, flags, and histories, there is a shared longing to be understood and welcomed. It does not require grand speeches. Often it begins with a remark about the weather, the climb, the cold. Now, my wife and I keep in touch with these chance encounters we have met in life's highway.

So, if you will indulge me, I shall lift the book resting at my side. In its pages I have come to know many people whose conversations have shaped centuries. There is one meeting in particular, unplanned it seemed, that changed grief into recognition and despair into burning hope. Two travellers on a road, joined by a stranger who listened before He spoke. You can read along with me if you wish,

Luke 24:13-35 VOICE - Picture this: That same day, two other - Bible Gateway

“Where, O death, is your victory

Where, O death, is your sting”

I Corinthians 15:55

BSB Bible

Cancer, Where Is Your Victory

It is a strange set of affairs.

Like a tearful old man who refuses to surrender to the years, I love to walk—to wander the glens and shorelines of Scotland, to breathe in the salt of the sea and the clean bite of Highland wind. The hills keep me young. The paths call to me. Though I carry a little extra weight these days, I am healthy in spirit and full of delight. There are still so many places I have not seen. I have never stood beneath the wide skies of the Outer Hebrides, nor travelled far north beyond Inverness where the land grows lonely and magnificent.

I once visited the Island of Islay on Scotland’s western edge, a place of peat and prayerful silence. Yet recent discoveries in my family’s DNA have tied me more deeply to that soil. I must go back—walk it again, this time with the eyes of belonging.

And yet, quietly, I feel the doors beginning to close.

Just over two  year ago, I underwent a battery of medical tests. When the consultant called me in for the results, the air in the room felt unusually heavy. The verdict was unwelcome: cells that had served me faithfully all my life had turned rogue. There was rebellion in my prostate, my pancreas, my liver. A quiet uprising in the citadel of my own flesh.

The consultant studied my face.

     “You seem very bravado about this,” he said, almost puzzled.

     “Oh, I understand what you’re telling me,” I replied gently. “But there is a young man inside me who has walked with me all my life. And I will still return one day after I close my eyes.”

It was not denial. It was not stoicism. It was something deeper.

I ask you, reader—though perhaps you do not need to be asked—do you sense that younger self within you? That companion who has moved with you through childhood, through love, through loss? The body alters, the mirror shifts, but something remains curiously unchanged. The inner life grows richer even as the outer frame declines.

As we age, that inner presence becomes more vivid. It presses forward in quiet moments. It whispers of continuity.

May I share what I believe about this?

Long ago, a wise king wrote words that have echoed through centuries:

“He has made everything beautiful in its time.
He has also set eternity in the hearts of men.”
— Ecclesiastes 3:11 (Berean Standard Bible)

King Solomon spoke of a wisdom given to him in youth—a gift from God. And in that line lies a mystery that science has never solved. There are many clever explanations offered for consciousness, for longing, for the depth of the human soul. Scholars have opened skulls, mapped neural pathways, dissected grey matter into slides and specimens. Theories are proposed, revised, discarded.

But no theory explains why eternity hums within us.

No scalpel has ever located the place where hope resides.

We have rich inner lives because we were fashioned for more than decay. We were built for eternity.

On the morning of my appointment, before stepping into that consulting room, my wife and I read a verse together:

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”
— Psalm 91:1

After reading it, I turned to her and said quietly, “We are going to receive bad news today.”

It was not dread. It was recognition. A sense of being gently prepared. There are moments in life when scripture does more than inspire—it speaks. With over 31,000 verses in the Bible, what are the odds of opening the pages and finding the precise words needed for that exact morning? Some may call it coincidence.

I do not.

God has always spoken, but sometimes His voice is unmistakably intimate.

Cancer may tighten its grip. It may close doors. It may shorten horizons. But it cannot extinguish the eternity placed within the human heart. It cannot silence the young man who still walks the Scottish hills inside me. It cannot erase the promise of something beyond the final breath.

When Jesus told the thief beside Him, “You will be with Me in Paradise,” I often wonder what that landscape will be like. Will it surpass the heather-covered slopes of Scotland? The long light over Islay’s shores? The wild northern skies?

Surely—without question—it will.

Cancer, where is your sting?

You may trouble the body.
You may summon tears.
You may alter the calendar.

But you cannot defeat the promise.

The hills still call. And beyond them, something greater awaits.

“That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Lessons from the Clydeside

Let me set the record straight. I was born on the Clydeside in the late fifties, where I woke each morning to the sound of angry hammers and neurotic welding torches; sounds that helped build massive vessels destined to sail the seven seas.

I left school at St Gerard’s Senior Secondary in Govan, Glasgow, at fourteen—probably—but I poked my nose back in occasionally, just to make sure I got my Leaving Certificate, because as far as I knew you didn’t get a job without one. To my knowledge, no one in my class ever went on to win a Nobel Prize for literature, peace, science or anything else. I suppose in today’s world we’d be called losers.

It wasn’t that we weren’t bright. It was that high school was chaotic. One year we broke for summer and returned for third year only to discover, after the holidays, that every teacher had been replaced. It was traumatic, like losing a family overnight.

I missed Mr A… , who taught us how to make fishing rods and took us fishing in the Clydebank canal, where the goldfish were enormous thanks to the warm water from the local Singer factories. And by the way, every man and his dog owned a Singer sewing machine back then, we weren’t a holy nation.

There was also the music teacher who made me feel Scandinavian while he played and explained The Hall of the Mountain King. And the English teacher who never really taught us English at all, but read to us Rob Roy, Treasure Island and Ivanhoe.

But I digress. What I’m trying to say is this: we yearned for learning—just not in the way it was meant to be delivered.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

I was standing in the supermarket tonight, surrounded by the ordinary music of daily life—the hum of refrigerators, the soft thud of items dropped onto the packing area, the polite impatience of a queue inching forward. It was the kind of moment no one remembers, because nothing remarkable is supposed to happen there.

Then it was my turn to pay.

I reached for my card and felt the sudden, sinking realization that it wasn’t there. I had left it in the car. A small mistake, harmless in theory, yet heavy in feeling. Embarrassment crept in first. Am I getting old? I asked myself, followed by the quiet pressure of holding up strangers who had their own lives to get back to. I apologized, already preparing to step aside and make the walk back, returning my item to where I’d found it.

That was when the first lady spoke.

“I’ll pay for it,” she said simply, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I refused right away—instinct, pride, surprise, maybe all three at once. I told her no, no, it was fine; I’d go and get my card. I didn’t want to be a burden.

Then a second lady stepped forward. Her voice was gentle but firm—not demanding, not dramatic.

“Give me it.”

There was kindness in the way she said it—not pity, not impatience, just a quiet certainty that this was what she was going to do. In that moment, the awkwardness dissolved. The tension I hadn’t realized I was holding slipped away. I accepted, not because I needed to, but because refusing would have meant rejecting something human and sincere.

It was a small act. A package of rice. A few moments in a checkout line. And yet it stayed with me.

We live in a time when it is easy to catalogue what is broken. The noise of division is loud, constant, and exhausting. Every day we are reminded of cruelty, selfishness, and indifference. It can begin to feel as though kindness is fragile, rare, or naïve—a thing that belongs to a softer past.

But there, between the shelves and the scanner’s beep, kindness appeared without hesitation. No speeches. No cameras. No expectation of reward. Just two women who saw another person in an uncomfortable moment and chose generosity.

These are the better angels of our nature; not grand heroes or famous names, but ordinary people who carry kindness quietly and offer it when the world gives them the chance. They remind us that beneath the fractures of society, there are still good hearts beating steadily, ready to act.

I left the supermarket with my package, yes, but more importantly, I left with proof. Proof that despite everything, decency has not vanished. That compassion still finds its way into everyday life. And that sometimes, the smallest moments restore our faith far more powerfully than the loudest arguments ever could.

Bless you, dear ladies.

Words That Deserve Our Attention—Ubuntu

There is a word from Nigeria and other parts of Africa  that names something we are close to forgetting. Ubuntu.
It means, I am because we are.

Not as an idea, but as a fact. A recognition that the self does not stand alone. That our lives are shaped, steadied, and sustained by others.

And yet, it feels absent now.

Look around. Families are strained. Friendships feel thinner. Nations are locked into suspicion. The bonds that once held us together did not snap overnight. They loosened slowly, almost politely, until we woke up in a quieter, lonelier world. Something essential has slipped from our hands.

Once, life was built around community. People belonged to one another without explanation. Neighbours showed up. Needs were shared. Joy multiplied because it was witnessed. Today, life feels more like a private contest. “Take care of yourself” has replaced “How can I help?” We have traded we for me, and the cost is beginning to show.

Individual freedom has given us real gifts. Choice. Agency. Dignity. These matter. But when independence becomes the highest value, something deeper erodes. We forget how dependent we truly are. Self-sufficiency hardens into isolation. Strength begins to resemble withdrawal.

Technology was meant to draw us closer. In one sense, it has. Distance collapses. Messages travel instantly. Faces appear on screens across continents. And still, loneliness grows.

A screen cannot carry presence. A notification cannot sit beside you in grief. Digital applause dissolves the moment it appears. We are surrounded by noise, yet starved for nearness. Connection becomes simulated, not shared.

Work and money widen the distance further. People scatter for opportunity, leaving behind the slow work of relationship. Parents become voices on the phone. Friends become updates once a year. Life moves forward, but roots loosen.

Pressure does the rest. When survival consumes our days, relationships shrink. Exhaustion turns inward. Financial stress strains marriages, families, communities. People stop reaching out and start enduring alone.

The old gathering places fade. Extended families thin out. Neighbourhoods grow anonymous. Churches and civic spaces empty. Belonging becomes conditional, temporary, fragile.

Politics sharpens the divide. Listening is replaced by shouting. Disagreement becomes moral failure. We are taught to see enemies instead of neighbours, tribes instead of people. The public square turns hostile, then hollow.

On a global scale, the pattern repeats. Borders tighten. Compassion narrows. Faced with shared crises, we retreat. We protect what is ours and call it wisdom. Unity feels risky. Division feels safer.

So where does that leave us?

Rebuilding will not begin with grand gestures. It will start small. A call made instead of delayed. A neighbour noticed. A meal shared. Presence chosen. These acts seem minor, but they carry weight. They mend what abstraction breaks.

We may need to slow down. Relationships cannot be rushed or optimized. They demand time, patience, attention. The very things modern life trains us to avoid.

Technology does not need to disappear. It needs to serve. Not replace life, but point us back to it. Toward faces, voices, shared rooms.

Ubuntu reminds us of a truth we resist but need. No one thrives alone. We rise together or not at all. We are held by one another, whether we admit it or not.

The world feels fractured. But fracture is not the end. What has been loosened can still be bound again, if we choose to live as though others truly matter.

It is not too late to reconnect.

The question remains whether we will.

Scripture puts it plainly:

Two are better than one,
because they have a good return for their labor.
If one falls, the other can lift him up.
But pity the one who falls alone.

—Ecclesiastes 4:9

Image by Copilot

“Every happy ending is a hint of home.”

Longing for the Ending We Were Made For

While searching for a film free of sex, violence, and the occult, we unexpectedly encountered something far rarer: goodness. The Indian film Bajrangi Bhaijaan offered not merely clean entertainment, but a deeply humane story—one that lingers long after the screen goes dark. It tells the story of Pawan, a simple, devout Indian man whose life is upended when he discovers Shahida, a mute Pakistani child, lost and separated from her family. What follows is not a tale of ideology or nationalism, but of costly compassion. Pawan’s journey to reunite Shahida with her parents is perilous, humiliating, and socially dangerous, yet he presses on, guided by conscience rather than fear.

The film’s emotional power culminates in a moment that feels almost sacramental. As Shahida crosses the border and realizes she may never see Pawan again, the impossible happens: she finds her voice. Her cry—his name—breaks through barbed wire, politics, and silence itself. It is a moment of pure joy, a vindication of love, and a reminder that some endings feel “right” in a way that transcends plot. We leave the film satisfied, even grateful. And then the question quietly arrives: why?

Why do such happy endings move us so deeply? Why do we crave them—not only in films like Bajrangi Bhaijaan, but in novels, myths, fairy tales, and the stories we tell our children? Are these endings merely sentimental escapes from a harsh world, or do they reveal something essential about us?

From the very beginning of life, human beings reach for joy. An infant cries until it is held, fed, and comforted. That instinct never disappears; it matures. As adults, we pursue happiness through love, work, creativity, justice, beauty, and faith. Even our appetite for stories reflects this longing. We identify with characters who endure suffering and yearn for resolution because we recognize ourselves in them. Their joy reassures us that happiness—somewhere, somehow—is possible.

Yet lived experience rarely mirrors the structure of a satisfying story. Life often resists resolution. Loss remains unresolved. Justice goes unmet. Illness, betrayal, and grief arrive without warning. If happiness is so fragile and fleeting, why does our longing for it remain so stubbornly persistent?

This tension lies at the heart of the human condition. We are creatures who ache for permanence in a world defined by decay. We desire fulfilment, yet everything we grasp slips through our fingers. C.S. Lewis observed that this mismatch is not accidental. He argued that when we find within ourselves desires that no earthly experience can satisfy, the most reasonable explanation is not that those desires are illusions, but that they were never meant to be fulfilled here. We were made, he suggested, for another world.

This insight resonates deeply across religious traditions, particularly within Christianity. Scripture speaks of a future in which tears are wiped away, death is defeated, and sorrow is no more. In this vision, our longing for happiness is not a weakness or a naïve denial of suffering. It is evidence—a clue embedded in the soul—that we are oriented toward eternity. We want joy because we were designed for it.

Stories like Bajrangi Bhaijaan echo this deeper truth. They remind us, however briefly, of a moral shape to the universe—a sense that love should triumph over hatred, that sacrifice should be rewarded, that brokenness is not the final word. Such stories awaken what Lewis called the longing for the “far-off country,” a place where goodness is not fragile and joy cannot be taken away.

Even stories that end in tragedy participate in this longing. When injustice remains unresolved or suffering goes unanswered, we feel not indifference but protest. We want wrongs to be made right. That dissatisfaction itself points beyond the world as it is toward a world as it ought to be.

Many explanations have been offered for our relentless pursuit of happiness. Evolutionary psychology suggests it aids survival. Classical philosophy elevates happiness as the highest human good. These accounts explain part of the story, but not its depth. They cannot fully account for the aching, almost homesick quality of human longing—the sense that joy is not merely pleasurable, but proper, as though it belongs to us by design.

That longing appears spiritual at its core. It is bound up with love, beauty, creativity, and transcendence—with the sense that we are meant for more than endurance. As Augustine famously wrote, our hearts remain restless until they rest in God. The restlessness itself is revelatory.

Real life seldom offers the tidy resolutions we encounter in films. Yet this does not render our longing foolish. On the contrary, it invites us to view life as a story still unfolding. Just as the darkest chapter in a novel often precedes its resolution, our present suffering may not be meaningless. It may be preparatory.

Whether one accepts the promise of eternity or not, the human hunger for happiness remains undeniable. It shapes our stories, animates our choices, and gives direction to our hope. If Lewis was right, then every truly happy ending is a signpost—pointing beyond itself toward a joy that is not imagined, but promised.

And so we keep searching for happiness; not because we are blind to suffering, but because joy is written into the fabric of our being. Perhaps what we are really seeking is not happiness itself, but its source. For every story, in the end, gestures toward a greater one: a journey from longing to fulfilment, from brokenness to redemption, and from time into eternity.

As Jesus said to the dying thief, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” That promise—quiet, undeserved, and final—may be the truest happy ending of all.

“I will place my law on their hearts and scribe them on their minds.”

Jeremiah 31:33

The Garden, the Warning, and the Way Home

Almost every story we encounter in childhood seems to follow a familiar rhythm. There is a warning, a choice, a mistake, and then—if the story is kind—a return home. Think of Peter Rabbit. He is told quite clearly not to enter Mr. McGregor’s Garden. The boundary is drawn, the danger named. Yet curiosity, defiance, or simple hunger pushes him forward. What follows is chaos: frantic chases, close calls, genuine fear. Peter pays for his disobedience with stress and suffering. Still, the story does not end with his ruin. He escapes, returns home, and recovers over a cup of camomile tea. Order is restored. The world, shaken, feels right again.

This pattern is everywhere. From fairy tales to modern films, stories tend to introduce conflict and then resolve it in a way that reassures us. Even when the journey is frightening or costly, we are usually led back to safety, justice, or understanding. That raises an important question: why do we expect stories to end this way? Why do happy endings—or at least morally coherent endings—feel so natural to us?

Part of the answer lies in the human instinct for right and wrong. We are not neutral creatures wandering through an indifferent moral universe. We hunger for meaning, justice, and resolution. The biblical verse Jeremiah 31:33 captures this instinct beautifully: “I will place my law on their hearts and scribe them on their minds.” This suggests that morality is not merely a social invention or a lesson drilled into us from the outside, but something written into us—something we recognize almost before we can explain it. When a story restores balance, it resonates with something already alive within us.

This inner moral compass is especially important when we consider how stories shape the young. When parents, teachers, or storytellers offer warnings—like the warning Peter Rabbit receives—they are doing more than issuing rules. They are preparing children for reality. Stories become rehearsal spaces for life. The garden is temptation. Mr. McGregor is consequence. The escape is mercy. Through narrative, children learn that choices matter, that actions have weight, and that the world responds to what we do. In this sense, stories gently introduce them to life’s dangers without exposing them fully to harm.

Yet not all stories offer such clean resolutions. The rise of the anti-hero reflects a growing awareness that life is complicated. Anti-heroes do not always make the right choices, and they do not always return home unscathed. Their victories are partial; their failures linger. These stories are valuable too, perhaps increasingly so, because they mirror the moral ambiguity of real life. They teach that good intentions can coexist with bad actions, and that consequences are not always easily undone. If heroic tales show us the ideal moral arc, anti-hero stories show us the struggle of living within it.

Together, these narratives serve a larger purpose. Stories are not just distractions or diversions; they are moral instruments. They shape conscience, imagination, and expectation. They help young minds—and older ones, too—grapple with temptation, responsibility, guilt, and hope. Whether through the frightened escape of a rabbit or the troubled path of an anti-hero, stories warn us, guide us, and remind us that choices carve paths.

In the end, perhaps that is why we keep telling these stories. We want to believe that wandering into the wrong garden is not the end of the world, that fear can teach us, and that home is still possible. And if we are careful, if we listen to the warnings woven into the tales, we may yet shape lives—and endings—that feel, if not perfect, at least meaningful.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

So Much Depends on Red 

I watched a drama yesterday. They did it without ceremony: two boys, a brush dipped too deeply and an old home made  go-cart.

The red wasn’t careful. It was the red of warning lights and scraped knees, of things you’re not supposed to touch but do anyway.

When they rolled the paint on, it felt less like decoration than a small act of defiance: look, we’ve made this ordinary thing impossible to ignore.

It startled me how much depended on that colour.

How quickly the world narrowed to an object made brighter by human hands.

I thought about how meaning doesn’t always arrive through speeches or explanations—it often slips in sideways, through something humble that’s been altered just enough to make us stop.

And then the poem came back, as it always does, simple and unguarded, like it’s been waiting.

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

*****

The boys didn’t know the poem.

They didn’t need to.

The red did the work.

The seeing did the work.

For a moment, everything depended—not on history or explanation—but on a colour held against the world, asking us, gently, to pay attention.

“The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams (1923) — public domain.

Image by Copilot

Many years ago, I was in a European country.  In the early evening, we went to visit the ancient Jewish graveyard in the Jewish Quarter. As we approached, the rabbi came out and apologised that it was closed. Then, with a hint of humour, he remarked, “But they will be coming out one day,” or words to that effect.

I replied by quoting Ecclesiastes 9:5:
“For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing...”

I found myself thinking about this again today, particularly in light of the belief held by many that some are being tortured in hell, despite these words and God’s statement in Genesis: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.

I believe that many people inherit their religious beliefs without ever being encouraged to question them, in the same way some people in North Korea comply with the regime publicly while privately holding very different convictions. This is not a call to get up and leave; that's a personal decision. One must recognise that churches and other religious groups have considerable value. However, one must reflect on Jesus words to Nicodemus in John 3:10 when he said, “You are Israel’s teacher,” said Jesus, “and you do not understand these things?"

This reflection led me to put together a theological analysis of the subject.

Why There Is No Evidence for Hell

A Simple Re-Reading of What the Bible Says About Hell

Introduction

Many Christians grow up assuming that Hell means eternal conscious torture—a place where people are kept alive forever just to suffer. This idea is often treated as a core Christian belief. But when we slow down and actually read the Bible carefully—especially in its original languages—and look at how early Christians understood it, serious questions arise.

This study argues something straightforward:
the Bible itself does not clearly teach eternal conscious torment.
Instead, that idea developed later, largely from reading symbolic and metaphorical language as if it were literal descriptions of the afterlife.

We’ll look at this in three simple steps:

1. What the Bible’s original words actually mean

2. The strongest verses people use to argue for eternal torment—and how they can be understood differently

3. What respected early Christian thinkers believed

1. What the Bible’s Words Really Mean

Sheol (Old Testament)

In the Hebrew Bible, the main word translated as “hell” is Sheol. But Sheol does not mean a place of punishment.

Sheol simply means the grave or the realm of the dead. Everyone goes there—the righteous and the wicked alike. It’s described as a place of silence, rest, and unconsciousness, not pain or reward.

Verses like Ecclesiastes 9:10 and Psalm 6:5 describe Sheol as a place where people do not think, speak, or praise. That alone makes it impossible to see it as a place of torture.

Key point:
The Old Testament contains no developed belief in punishment after death.

Hades (New Testament)

In the New Testament, the Greek word Hades replaces Sheol. It means essentially the same thing: the place of the dead.

Importantly, Hades is described as temporary. In the book of Revelation, Hades is destroyed. If Hades were an eternal place of torment, destroying it would make no sense.

Key point:
Hades is not eternal Hell. It doesn’t last forever.

Jesus sometimes used the word Gehenna, which comes from a real place outside Jerusalem—the Valley of Hinnom. It was associated with judgment, destruction, and national disaster in Israel’s history.

When Jesus warned about Gehenna, he was using strong prophetic imagery, not giving a literal map of the afterlife. His language echoed Old Testament prophets who warned Israel about coming judgment—especially the destruction of Jerusalem.

Nothing about the word itself requires it to mean endless torture.

Key point:
Gehenna is symbolic language about judgment and destruction, not proof of eternal torment.

2. How Jesus Taught

Jesus taught almost entirely through parables, metaphors, and exaggeration. He used shocking images—fire, darkness, exclusion—to wake people up morally and spiritually.

Parables are not instruction manuals about the afterlife. They are stories meant to challenge the heart and provoke repentance.

If we turn metaphors into literal descriptions, we run into problems fast. We end up arguing that God maintains a torture chamber forever, something Scripture never clearly states.

Key point:
Jesus’ teaching style warns us against reading his imagery too literally.

3. Revelation and the End of Death

The book of Revelation uses symbolic, apocalyptic language. But one thing it says very clearly is this:

“Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”

That means death itself is destroyed.

Revelation ends not with evil lasting forever, but with a renewed world where death no longer exists. If Hell were eternal conscious suffering, then death wouldn’t truly be defeated—it would simply be repackaged.

Key point:
The Bible ends with death abolished, not preserved forever

4. Common Arguments for Eternal Torment—Reconsidered

“Eternal punishment” (Matthew 25:46)

The phrase often translated “eternal punishment” does not necessarily mean punishment that goes on forever. It can mean punishment with permanent results.

The Bible speaks the same way about “eternal redemption” or “eternal judgment”—not actions that go on endlessly, but decisions with lasting outcome “Unquenchable fire” and “the worm never dies” (Mark 9)

These phrases come from Isaiah 66, which describes dead bodies, not living souls. The fire doesn’t go out because it burns everything up. The worms don’t die because there is plenty to consume.

This imagery points to complete destruction, not endless pain.

The Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16)

This is clearly a parable, not a literal report of the afterlife. If taken literally, it would mean souls have fingers, tongues, and can be relieved by a single drop of water—something no one actually believes.

The point of the story is moral reversal and warning the wealthy, not teaching about Hell’s geography.

5. Early Christians Did Not Agree on Eternal Torment

Eternal conscious torment was not universally believed in the early church.

• Origen believed God’s punishment was corrective and would eventually lead to restoration.

• Gregory of Nyssa, a highly respected church father, taught that punishment was meant to heal, not torment forever.

• Isaac of Nineveh rejected eternal punishment as incompatible with God’s love.

No ecumenical church council ever officially declared eternal conscious torment as required Christian belief.

Conclusion

When we read the Bible carefully—paying attention to language, symbolism, and historical context—the idea of Hell as eternal conscious torture becomes very hard to support.

• The Old Testament doesn’t teach it

• The New Testament words don’t require it

• Jesus’ teaching style warns against literalism

• Revelation shows death being destroyed

• Influential early Christians rejected it

The picture that emerges is not of God maintaining endless suffering, but of God finally ending evil, death, and corruption altogether.

In short:
Hell as eternal torture is not clearly taught in Scripture.
It appears to be a later theological idea imposed on symbolic language, rather than a belief grounded solidly in the Bible itself.

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version (KJV), which is in the public domain.

Where the Small Names Sleep

I walked through the Glasgow Necropolis as I often have. It was one of those bright Scottish mornings that softens even the hardest thoughts. The Necropolis, that city of the dead perched above Mother Glasgow; the city of the living, where space not only for memory but for quiet conversation with time itself exists. 

As I made my way among the gravestones, I found myself counting years, not just my own sixty plus but those etched into stone: the tiny, abbreviated lifespans of children lost long ago in a Dickensian age to epidemics like cholera, diphtheria, typhus. Names barely had time to settle and establish into the world before they were carved in stones suggesting they were here.

It’s a strange thing to be old in a place filled with the young who died. I felt not so much survivor’s guilt as survivor’s wonder. I’ve had decades of travel, of reading, of walking beaches at sundown, of writing, of grieving and healing, of faith evaluated and restored. What would any one of these children have become with even half of my years?

My cancer, in that moment, seemed less like an ending and more like a milestone. I don’t know how many more years are allotted to me, but I know now how many I’ve already been given, and I know what a privilege it is to reach an age where you look both forward and back.

The graves made me think of God’s purpose—not as a tidy doctrine, but as a question folded into every name worn smooth by wind, moss, and rain. What becomes of children who never had a chance to choose faith, to assess goodness, to wrestle with meaning? Where are they in the great scheme of things?

Jesus once said, “Let the little children come to me... for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” I must believe that children taken early are held in a mercy deeper than we can grasp. They are not forgotten; they are not lost to God . If anything, it is we who are still lost, walking among headstones trying to make sense of the living and the dead.

There’s a sobering democracy in cemeteries. All names are equal here, whether child or elder, rich, or poor, known, or unknown. We all close our eyes and rest with our forebears. And yet, those of us still walking have something the dead do not: time. Time to reflect, to forgive, to change. Time to be grateful. My cancer has made me aware of time—not just its scarcity, but its richness.

So, I keep walking, not just through the Necropolis, but through each day, carrying with me the invisible company of children who never saw their coming-of-age birthdays or perceived  the invisible grace of a God.

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“A faithful person will abound with blessings.”
— Proverbs 28:20

Dignifying Others and Ourselves With Trust

When I was young, my father used to tell me The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. What I recall was that Tom would constantly lie—sometimes playfully, sometimes selfishly—and yet his charm often would shield him from consequence. Quietly, the story teaches that attractiveness and wit can disguise moral weakness and failure.

Trust, however, is not handed out like spare change. It is minted over time. It is a quiet currency by which we weigh one another’s inner substance. When someone is trusted, it is not merely because they are pleasant or persuasive, but because they have shown emotional containment—the ability to carry another person’s truth without dropping it.

Sadly, even religious people can fail here.

I remember attending a religious convention in another country. I had been speaking with a woman who had converted to Christianity two years earlier. After I walked away, a man approached me and said, “That sister you were talking to, used to be a prostitute.”

I didn’t want to know that. No good came from it. Such disclosures do not enlighten—they wound. They stumble others and can quietly ruin lives.

Years earlier, while in East Germany, I noticed how guarded people were when asked even simple questions. Words caught in their throats. Someone explained that decades of surveillance had trained people to treat conversation as risk assessment. Trust had learned to walk with a limp. Though circumstances have changed, the psychology remains familiar: when betrayal becomes common, silence becomes self-defence. I have encountered the same dynamic in my own relationships.

Imagine asking those closest to you—a partner, a confidant, a spiritual leader, a family member—to rate you out of ten on trustworthiness. Not charm. Not generosity. Trust. Ask someone who gains nothing by flattering you. Their answer, whatever it is, would be a mirror worth lingering before. Discomfort here is not punishment; it is instruction. Growth often arrives disguised as a bruise. As the psalmist prays, “Set a guard over my mouth,” because maturity is revealed not only in what we say, but in what we restrain ourselves from saying.

Psychologically, betrayal cuts so deeply because it violates an unspoken contract. When we confide in someone, we are not merely sharing information—we are lending them temporary custody of our inner world. To misuse that access is a kind of ambush. The pain lies not only in what was said, but in the fact that we were not present to defend our truth.

These wounds appear everywhere: in families, workplaces, friendships that profess virtue but fail to practice it. Often the deepest harm comes when vulnerability is repackaged as gossip, when private pain is embellished for public consumption. The very need to say “please don’t tell anyone” Is evidence of something broken. Confidentiality should be assumed, not negotiated.

Over time, we learn caution. Some people never fully know us—not because we lack love, but because experience has taught us discernment. This is not hardness; it is wisdom shaped by consequence. Still, it remains a quiet tragedy, because we are made for connection. Betrayal is not only personal harm; it fractures something essential in our shared humanity.

The psalmist understood this well; enemies who whisper, visitors who gather slander and release it once the door is closed. These words endure because human psychology has not changed.

Here is the paradox: a trustworthy person has learned how not to use power. They resist the small thrill of sharing secrets, the social leverage of insider knowledge, the false intimacy of gossip. In doing so, they cross an invisible threshold. Others sense it. Respect gathers around them naturally. And something quieter—but deeper—happens as well: they gain self-respect. Dignity settles in.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Jeremiah 17:9 

(ESV)

The Uneasy Balance Between Artistic Brilliance and Moral Failure

Across the world this weekend that passed, people gathered in halls, hotels, homes and other locations to celebrate Burns Night. Observing this as a Christian gave me pause. Perhaps it is a weak conscience and the tendency in myself to have a deceitful heart that gives way to emotion, but I felt a genuine unease—not as a criticism of others; that never entered my heart, but as a personal question that needed balance. I was surprised that some Christians joined these celebrations so readily, and so I sought the counsel of a trusted friend feeling this was the right thing to do, not to criticise a case but to think it through. I am mindful of the Apostle Paul’s words about observing certain days and the importance of not judging, and I respect that freedom. Still, the question lingered.

That question touches a deeper difficulty I often encounter as a reader: the imbalance between a writer’s artistic brilliance and their moral life. I struggle with this not because it is unusual, but because it is so familiar. Again and again, writers whose words move me, challenge me, or sharpen my moral awareness turn out to be people whose lives reveal serious personal failures. Few figures illustrate this more clearly than Robert Burns.

As a poet, Burns remains compelling. His work is socially alert, emotionally intelligent, and profoundly humane. He writes with sympathy for ordinary people, with anger toward injustice, and with tenderness about love, friendship, and loss. His language feels grounded and alive, shaped by shared human experience rather than detached refinement. In his poetry, there is a strong sense of dignity, equality, and moral seriousness. Yet his life tells a different story; one marked by excess, instability, and harm to others, particularly in his relationships with women and family. The problem is not identifying this contrast, but discerning how to respond to it.

It would be far simpler if moral excellence and artistic greatness reliably accompanied one another. Admiration would then be clean and uncomplicated. Instead, literature repeatedly confronts us with writers who articulate moral insight while living without moral discipline. Burns is not admired despite his flaws, nor can his flaws be redeemed by his poetry. The two exist side by side, unresolved, and it is precisely this unresolved tension that makes the imbalance so troubling.

The difficulty deepens because the values expressed in the writing often stand in quiet judgment over the writer’s life. Burns celebrates sincerity, equality, and mutual respect, yet his actions frequently suggest self-indulgence and disregard for others. For the reader, this can feel like a subtle betrayal. The words promise one moral vision; the life contradicts it. Admiration then feels compromised, as though one must either excuse the behaviour or diminish the work, and neither response feels truthful.

At the same time, dismissing the work entirely also feels inadequate. The poems still matter. They still speak truthfully about love, suffering, injustice, and hope. Their insight does not vanish because the author was morally inconsistent. To deny their value would be to insist that truth can only emerge from virtue, something history clearly disproves. Yet to admire the writing without moral reflection risks allowing talent to become an excuse.

Perhaps the most honest response is not to resolve the discomfort, but to accept it. The imbalance may not be something to justify, but something to acknowledge. Writers like Burns remind us that moral insight does not guarantee moral character, and that beauty and wisdom can emerge from deeply flawed lives. This does not absolve the writer, but it places a responsibility on the reader to remain alert, discerning, and ethically awake.

In the end, my admiration for such writers is never uncomplicated. It is mingled with disappointment, caution, and sometimes sadness. Yet that very tension sharpens my reading. It reminds me not to confuse eloquence with goodness, nor insight with holiness. If anything, the imbalance deepens the lesson: that human beings are fractured creatures, capable of seeing clearly without living well; and that art can illuminate moral truths even when its creators could not fully live by them.

The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®)
© 2001 by Crossway,
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
All rights reserved.

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