This is your life

There was a terrific bang and I vaguely remember hitting the windscreen.

Then I found myself here, waiting outside the gate. Someone has come, the gate is opening, and I am being led inside. I have been handed a big red book.

Michael Aspel is nowhere to be seen.

I look at the cover and sure enough there is the legend ‘This is your life’ and my name is inscribed underneath. I don’t have time to look inside though; I am being led further in.

I am instructed to wait here behind the curtain and told, ‘You will be called.’

This is an odd stage surely this can’t be right, me on ‘This is you life’?

But I don’t get the chance to dwell on it. I am called. The curtain parts and I walk forward.

I am flooded with unimaginable light. I half expect there should be a crowd of relatives waiting to meet me, but there’s no one there.

Then it dawns on me this isn’t a TV studio at all… this is somewhere else!

I can just make out in front of me, a person standing at a lectern reading from a red book like mine, he looks uncomfortable, he is squirming and gesticulating and looking more and more crestfallen the closer I get.

I arrive just behind him as the pages of his book are fanned through from cover to cover and I can see the book is like a diary all filled out in a neat hand in clear black ink. All black and white you might say. But every now and then I notice an entry in red, but the pages do not stop turning, again another entry in red and still the pages turn. Then the page with the last entry on it, the pages stop turning now. The last line is written in red.

The man in front shakes his head sadly. The book closes and he walks away to the left out of sight.

Now it is my turn.

I lift my book onto the empty lectern; it is heavier than I thought. Suddenly the book opens at the beginning and I can see the entries, everything I ever did of any worth and a great deal more that was of no worth at all. I understand now why the man before me was squirming! I notice there’s an entry in red but the pages keep on turning.

I ought to be feeling uncomfortable, but I am strangely calm. Then it all begins to come back to me, the man I put down in that conversation. The time I lied to the policeman when he asked me, ‘Where’s the fire then sir?’ The time I took advantage of the bigger trolley in the supermarket and pushed in front on the timid young woman at the checkout. The time I chickened out when my boss asked me what church was all about. Even the conservative estimate I put on my tax return last year. Even that is there.

Well I know that was wrong. I thought so at the time but I didn’t have a spare form on which to correct it and it had to catch the post, bother!

But wasn’t it was just after that… well I hope that’s on the next page.

There’s another red entry, but the pages keep on turning. Now another red entry and this has a big red tick alongside. Phew! Hallelujah!

The pages keep on turning and the mix of things good and not so good, are paraded before my eyes. But I am still calm. Now alongside every negative entry is written something in red. Forgiven.

All at once I am exhilarated; of course that’s it! The red entries are those times when He spoke to me, I wasn’t sure at the time, too busy usually to wait long enough to find out. I always did fill my time too easily. Now I remember, now I remember!

So that man before me… Oh NO! He hadn’t heard, and all the time God had kept on calling him. He hadn’t heard, he hadn’t heard. Right up to his last page and he hadn’t heard, he hadn’t heard.

Mercy is mine, thanks be to God. I look again at my book and all I can see is the black marks fading and all that remains is what is written large in deepest blood red.

   Forgiven!
     Forgiven!
       Forgiven!