Many of you Faithful Readers know my good friend Roger Flatford, presently the principal of Sharps Chapel Elementary School. Roger stood up with me at my wedding. He told me that if the ceremony hadn’t been at Loveland Baptist Church, and if he thought he could have gotten by with it, he would have had the then-popular song “If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep on Going” played at the rehearsal dinner.
I’m sure my very soon-to-be wife would not have appreciated the humor. I would never be one to purposely be sacrilegious, but some things on this earth are so almost unbearable that they are, to those who must endure, “hell” on earth.
Just like my hero Abraham Lincoln, I married a Mary Ann. I remember once reading (though I have not taken time to look up the source*) about his impending wedding. It seems that sometime after Mr. Lincoln proposed to Mary Todd, the engagement was broken off. When the wedding was on again, Lincoln was getting ready to go when a young boy supposedly asked him where he was going.
“To hell, I suppose,” was supposedly Lincoln’s reply.
And there are several stories that have been handed down through history that relate that Mr. Lincoln’s marriage was indeed somewhat of a hell on earth for him. It is pretty much a well-known historical fact that Abraham and his fiancé Mary Todd (tradition says that Lincoln once said that one “d” was enough for God, but not the Todd family) had a tempestuous marital relationship.
And to be fair to Mrs. Lincoln, she suffered much tragedy in her life that added to her distraught state. Her mother died when she was young, she did not get along with her stepmother, Lincoln was not able to immediately provide her with the high style of living to which she was accustomed before she married, and she lost two children to death at early ages.
Just when she seemed to have reached the epitome of social success—becoming the First Lady of the United States—the Civil War robbed her of much of the joy that the position might have held in peaceful times.
Mrs. Lincoln was reputed to have been extremely jealous of the President. There was reportedly a time during Lincoln’s presidency that guests were being entertained. There was a woman present, and Mrs. Lincoln thought the woman was paying too much attention to the President. The First Lady made a scene for which the President purportedly extended an apology with the statement, “I suppose you should be able to stand for twenty minutes what I have endured for twenty years.”
I have always pictured hell for present-day schoolteachers as never-ending bus wait, where no bus ever arrives, no child is ever picked up, more children arrive every second, there is no bus wait partner, fights break out, pandemonium reigns, and the gym gets hotter and hotter for all eternity. I picture similar scenarios for bus drivers and cafeteria and study hall monitors.
I am sure there are those of us who can relate some episode of life that was, for us, literally so unbearable that it was, to us, hell on earth. I think of those who have endured great pain, watched loved ones pass away, watched every possession they owned go up in flames, had the greatest opportunities in life jerked out from beneath them, and the list could go on and on.
It is not for me to say what the worst thing on earth is for anyone other than myself, and maybe I can’t say it even for myself. But we can tune in to media and see everyday examples, real and imagined, that are far worse than most of us have ever experienced. Some examples: rape, murder of loved ones, physical abuse, robbery, mutilation, torture, combat, kidnapping, starvation, homelessness, natural disaster, and this list could go on and on.
I used to ponder what constituted the best and worst days of my life. The worst so far is having to tell my mother that she was dying after the doctor said there was no hope. Bad as it was, I at least got to tell her goodbye, and a lot of people wish they could have had that blessing.
Next time I’ll look at the opposite of this topic—Heaven on Earth. Once again I leave you with a thought from email:
Why is the letter W, in English, called double “U”?
Shouldn't it be called double “V”?
*NOTE: All Lincoln anecdotes related in this article are from my memory of things I have read. To ensure historical accuracy, please conduct your own research.