Journeys Out of Hell

Over four years ago, I totaled my truck. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep the night before and so I became incredibly tired on my three hour drive home to the ranch from Boise, Idaho. Knowing that I was tired I pulled over several times to keep from wrecking; but wreck I did. Before I went around one of the few corners around Jordan Valley, Oregon I dozed off for what seemed to be the hundredth time. I woke up as I hit the gravel and a steel post, with a reflector, that took out my side mirror as well as the passenger side window. After that I don’t remember much, only that I do remember swerving a couple of times, dazedly. Then seeing the world spinning through my windshield and all the time, wondering if I was going to die. When my truck quite rolling and landed upside down, with a steel fence post in the hood two feet in front of me, and I crawled out of the wreckage, I felt as thought I was crawling out of some sort of personal hell of my own.

Elizabeth, in Bessie Head’s novel A Question of Power, had a very similar but yet more of a psychological exit “out of [her] hell” (p. 188). My hell had been primarily one of the physical as I watched my world careening out of control and spinning, at what seemed , endlessly. Elizabeth’s hell, however, was more within herself rather than a physical event. It wasn’t until Tom “seemed to have seen her sitting inside that coffin, reached down and pulled her out” that “her soul-death was over” (p. 188). And he “saw” all of this when he remembered Elizabeth’s love for everything including the vegetables she and Tom were to have for their supper. Though it wasn’t until Elizabeth opened up to Tom about Sello, and ultimately about her schizophrenia, that she started to really pull herself fully out of her hell.

Towards the end of her inner journey out of her hell Elizabeth took comfort in the Lord much like Job did in the Bible after Satan plagued him for so long. She remembered King David’s song, or proverb, from the Bible which says, “I have been through the valley of the shadow of death, but I fear not evil. I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (p. 202). Much like Job, Elizabeth felt that the suffering that Satan, or Dan, put her through made her a much stronger person primarily spiritually but psychologically as well.

There have been many historical figures throughout the Bible who have been put through a great deal of suffering within Satan’s tests and trials; such Biblical figures like Jesus, Job and Esther. And like these great Biblical leaders, Elizabeth and I both came out of our hardships and sufferings as much stronger people in one way or another. The question now would be, would God, or whatever deity one follows, allow their worshipers to undergo a trial that they couldn’t handle? Would “they” allow you to fail so much that it would lead you to your own self-destruction?