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- Written by EJ Sweeney
Underwood’s Deviled Ham. That’s how I pictured Hell as a kid. Not the deviled ham. It wasn’t half bad. No, the picture on the can. I imagined Hell as a fiery place in the bowels of the earth where a little red man donning horns and a pitch-fork—the devil as pictured on the Underwood can—ran around tormenting people.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
Several years ago, Rob Bell wrote a very popular book called Love Wins. In it, he argued that a loving God could never send anyone to Hell. It’s beneath Him. A loving God would give everyone a chance to repent—even after death—and wouldn’t stop pursuing them, wouldn’t “close the door to Heaven”, until they did. Hence, in the end, (God’s) love wins.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
As a volunteer firefighter, I’ve been to a number of fires where civilians have died. I’ve never been to a working fire where a brother firefighter has died. Once, however, we did come as close as you can to losing one of our own. Two of our members were operating on the first floor of a house. Fire was raging in the basement below. Without warning, the floor collapsed, plummeting them into the well-involved cellar. The firefighter who first witnessed them plunge into the fire below kept screaming: “They’re burning up! They’re burning up!”
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
In high school, my baseball coach loved making us do wind-sprints. For those who’ve never had the “pleasure”, a wind-sprint is when you run as hard as you can and just before you pass out, slow down to a jog until you catch your breath and repeat this insanity all over again for about fifteen more times. My coach would line up our team in pairs and then have us jog around the gym. The first two in line would then have to sprint as hard as they could around the gym until they caught up with the back of the line. When they did, they’d yell and the next two up front would go. We would do this over and over until we were delirious from exhaustion.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
We recently bought our first Smart TV. While learning how to use it, I’ve run across several documentaries about 9-11 I had never seen before. They feature some incredibly gripping interviews, including one with the Captain of a Harlem ladder company who’s been on the Fire Department for nearly forty years.
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- Written by EJ Sweeney
Here’s a quick trivia question: on the animated TV show The Simpsons, who’s the only character who has five fingers? (Everybody else on the show has four.) It’s God, which includes Jesus, or as Homer calls Him, “Jebus”.
