Being disconnected from love as close to hell as we’ll find on Earth

By David McElroy · January 25, 2020

I haven’t had the nightmare for years, but it used to terrorize the darkest of my nights.

It always started out in a familiar place, with people all around. I would try to speak to others, but they wouldn’t respond. It seemed as though they couldn’t even hear me. When I couldn’t get their attention, I would start frantically trying to get someone to notice.

I would try to touch the people around me, but my hands would go right through their bodies and then the image of the person would disappear. One after another, everyone around me would disappear — until I was left all alone.

And then the place where I was — home, school, office, whatever — would start getting hazy and dark. The physical world around me would slowly disappear. I could still see my body if I looked down at myself — as though something was illuminating me — but there was no physical substance of any kind for as far as I could see.

I was in a dark void. I was all alone. Worst of all, I would always feel as though there was no other presence that I would ever experience again. I knew I would be alone forever.

And then I would always wake up in panic, eager to make sure the world was still solid around me, but mostly eager to make sure there was someone in my life who would talk to me, would touch me, would listen to me.

I needed to reassure myself that I was not alone forever.

The late Rev. Billy Graham described hell as eternal separation from God. I have no interest in getting bogged down in the theology of hell, but Graham’s metaphor resonates more for me now than it did when I was young.

When I first heard that hell might be described as eternal separation from God, I thought that didn’t seem like that big a deal. After all, I lived here on Earth without God, so what would be the difference if things stayed that way?

I understand it quite a bit differently now, because I understand that the thing that makes us need one another so much is that Divine Spark of God which causes us to recognize one another and be drawn to one another. If it were not for the Divine in each one of us, I’m not sure we would need one another so much.

To lose contact with the Spirit inside other people is to lose touch with our Creator. To be alone and without love is the closest thing we will experience on this Earth to that hell-like separation from God which Graham postulated.

There are people all around me tonight, but I might as well be alone. In fact, I would feel less alone without these people in my sight. I feel no spark of Spirit from them. They feel like lifeless automatons moving through the world following pre-programmed scripts.

I feel as though I could put my hand right through them and there would be no substance there. I feel as though I could close my eyes and the physical substance around me would disappear — as an illusion might — and I would be alone in that void from my nightmares.

I want to reach out and touch Someone who is real. I want to find that Divine Spark in a person — and hold onto that person the way a frightened child might hold onto a candle in the dark.

I am in a world where almost everybody is sleepwalking. A few reach desperately for metaphors and explanations and hope. A few understand that the world we have been given is an illusion with little meaning. A few somehow gain the intuitive understanding that love and connection are all that ultimately matter — while all the rest chase things which will turn to dust as the illusion fades before their eyes.

I am alone tonight. I feel no love around me. I feel no presence.

I sense only the void. My spirit reaches out for love and connection, but there is no one there. I cannot awaken from this nightmare, because it is my reality for the moment.

I can’t step back into their world. I can’t live the way they do. And so my spirit lives alone in this void — desperate for connection, desperate for love, desperate for mutual understanding, desperate for that spark that ties spirits together in a way that no physical tie ever could.

This void — this disconnection from love and meaning — is what I know is real right now. And awareness of being alone in this void is the only hell that I will ever know.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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