“I’d Rather Reign in Hell” and Related Thoughts

We all have good parts of our lives: fun events, good friends, adventures, trying new experiences. We all have bad parts too – deaths of people we love, arguments that end relationships, work disappointments.

In my life, I have had some amazing experiences and some really low lows.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that something seemed to be broken with how I experienced the good in my life. Even really great things, I didn’t enjoy. I didn’t really notice until I could experience them normally again, but it was like I went numb. I would notice that I couldn’t taste my favorite food, or a delicious cigar…and I would wonder, what is going on?

I realized, some good things are so Big Good that it’s actually hard for me to process them. I get scared…and then I hide from the good. This is super annoying actually, and double bad, because it prevents me from both enjoying the good and also being thankful for the good.

Processing the Big Good

When good things come into our lives, we sometimes block them out. Laine listed these reasons:

• we get scared they will go away
• we know are afraid that we don’t deserve them
• we didn’t expect them/we literally couldn’t imagine them
• we can’t control them or reproduce them

She called it the “Illogical Good” – blessings we receive that we don’t exactly understand how or why they got to us. Good that we didn’t expect, make, or deserve. And when we think it’s Illogical, when we feel like it’s so wildly good that losing it would be horrible, we hide from it. This kind of good is a big flashing neon sign of God in our lives, and…it scares us.

…and so we squish the good we allow in our lives, cutting it down to what we can accept, control, and think we deserve.

We limit ourselves to what we can stand to lose.

But walking with God calls us to know Him, and his blessings are literally more than we can imagine. And with a lot of unexpected pain running around, it’s hard to trust that the good can be enjoyed. That it can be trusted. Losing good hurts. And pain outside of our control, pain that’s unexpected, is the worst pain.

So we hide from the Big, Illogical Good.

Hiding – and Limiting

A very very old poem, Paradise Lost, has the quote, “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” Whoever said that has some God trust issues (spoiler alert: it was Satan, so…checks out). Ideally, we should trust that God will rule better than any of us. And Hell will suck, what with all the burning and stuff…

After some discussion, we realized that when we hide, we’re trying to allow only the good that we can accept, control, and prevent from going away. In hiding form the Big, Illogical Good, we were making the same decision as Satan in Paradise Lost – we were limiting ourselves to a more painful, lesser, by definition less good version of reality in order to maintain some semblance of control. Better to be in pain with some control than to allow God to drive our lives.

But…here’s the problem: there’s way more good out there than we can control. There’s way more good out there than we can even fathom. And hiding from it, ignoring it, pretending it doesn’t exist, cuts us off from so much. So much we could enjoy.

And worse yet – if we hide from good, we seem to hide from more good than is even really risk of going away. We effectively lose the good that we’re afraid of losing, because we blind ourselves to it – and we hide from the currently existing in this moment good, the Now Good, because we’re scared this is the last time we’ll ever experience it. It’s the last chocolate on Earth – we can’t enjoy it because we fear we’ll never enjoy it again.

We effectively lose the good that we’re afraid of losing, because we blind ourselves to it – and we hide from the currently existing in this moment good, the Now Good, because we’re scared this is the last time we’ll ever experience it.

Choosing to Trust, and Accept

We can just relax, and enjoy it. We can just accept that good happens that we can’t control. We can just accept the kindness, the grace, of God in our lives, and choose to trust in him.

Because that’s the real answer – believe that God is good, illogically good, wonderfully good, and that he is the answer to our fears.