I went to a funeral once and wondered if somehow I had crashed the wrong service. The preacher up front was talking about a man I knew, but what he said seemed to have little to do with the person I had worked with at this one particular job.

The preacher kept going on and on about this man and his faith and his decision to believe and so on, but the man I knew hadn’t been to church in years and never said anything about God one way or another, except occasionally to use the word “damn” as His last name.

I suppose the preacher was doing the best he could, talking about a man he scarcely knew, and he was probably trying to reassure the family that this fellow was squared away with God, but it occurred to me that this man wouldn’t like heaven very much anyway. Not that he would like hell, mind you; nobody really wants to go there, but most people, like this man I worked with, really don’t want to go to heaven either.

After all, this guy didn’t want to hang around with Christians on Sundays, so why would he want to spend eternity with those same people? And he didn’t say much about God, except for the swearing I mentioned earlier, so praising God forever and ever wouldn’t quite be his style. And if that man really didn’t care what God had to say, wouldn’t serving Him for eternity be total misery?