Spinning and Spinning Into Eternity

To say that Jay Carty is an unusual communicator is a mild statement. Maybe a little nuts would be more accurate. Not a preacher, not a teacher, more a storyteller with a very important message. Where some deep preachers are too snoozey for the rank and file and where some humorists don’t have much to say, Jay’s stuff is generally regarded as an unusual blending of humor and profound content. A former Oregon State basketball star and LA Laker, Jay has dedicated his life to helping people say yes to God. Now, we hope you enjoy. Carty’s contemporary classics.

You’re a white out storm in South Dakota, snowstorm, no frame of reference. You decide to walk to safety. What will you find about an hour later? Your own footprint because everybody has one leg that’s slightly shorter than the other so that when you walk without a frame of reference, you will always walk in a circle. If you’re swimming without a frame of reference, you will always swim in a circle because one side is more dominant than the other, always.

You think you’re going straight. All of a sudden, there’s your footstep. Pilots. You make a private plane that doesn’t have gauges in it and you accidentally get caught in the cloud. Typical altitude, you’ve got less than 12 minutes to get out of the cloud before you crash because you’ll go into a spiral, not know it, think your level, centrifugal force duplicates the feeling of gravity and all of a sudden bingo, you’re in the ground. You think your level. You’re not. You cannot maintain level without a reference. Did you know that?

I asked a trainer of pilots. I said, “When you have a dominant decisive personality and the pilot thinks one thing, but the gauges say another, how do you get the dominant personality to accept what the gauges say?” And he says, “We don’t worry about that very much. They tend to weed themselves out rather quickly.”

With every fiber of my being, I reject the concept of hell. I do not want it to be true. It can’t be true because you see, if it is, I have loved ones who will be there and I have friends who will be there. It’s too tough a concept. So I’ve got to come up with some mechanism to dismiss it so I can deal with the truth of the whole thing. The bottom line is when I disagree with something God says is true, who do you think is have to be right? Especially when Jesus spoke situationally a third more about hell than he did about love. He was the original hell fire and brimstone, turn or burn, flip for fry, change your stroke or go down and smoke preacher. And if Jesus emphasized hell a third more than he emphasized love, don’t you think that place is apt to exist, but I got to deny it because it’s too tough.

There he is. Mr. Carty, your son was just killed in a car crash. What would be my first response? There must be some mistake. Instant denial. I’ve had my first brush with cancer. I was moving this plant. It bumped me. There was this mushy mass down underneath there. And I said, “Do men get breast cancer?” I didn’t know if they did. Went to see the doctor, poked around. Oh, yeah. No question about it. You got a big tumor under there. It’s coming out next Friday.

Well, I’m a gambler’s kid. Tell me my odds. He said, “You got a 5% chance of being malignant, but if it’s malignant, you have a 95% chance of dying from it because it’s a big one that would’ve metastasized by now.” All right. I can deal with that.

I’m on my way to Seattle to do a speaking thing and I’m typing an article. Will I be sleepless in Seattle? I’m now confronted with my mortality for the first time in my life. I come back from that. It’s following Friday. I go in to have the surgery done and my doctor couldn’t be there, some emergency, and so they assigned me a lady doctor. That’s okay. I don’t mind lady doctor, but this one was clearly a feminist because she sewed my nipple on crooked just to get even, see. So I’m a little scary around swimming pools. I kind of walk lopsided.

I spent a whole week saying no way, couldn’t possibly, I’m too healthy, denial. I was in denial and I’m not talking about some river in Egypt. See, you got to deny the tough stuff. It’s the only way you can cope because that’s why we dismiss hell. Did you know 92% of the population believe in God? Only 8% of the population are atheists and an organized 8% got religion out of our schools and 66% of the population believe in heaven. Do you know that? That’s pretty high, ain’t it? And 46% believe they’re going there. Population United States. 53% believe in hell in some form. 4% believe they’re going there. 4%. Now, that’s an amazingly high number if you thought you were going to hell. Wouldn’t you be interested in some way to not go? And yet, 4% still think they’re going.

But Jesus said, as they’ll see tomorrow night, broad is the narrow way and many who will go that way and few will find the narrow way, and the word many means a great number, but you contrast it with the word few. It makes a majority out of that word. So Jesus just said, a majority of folks will choose hell over heaven. 4% think they’re going there. If you had to bet and you do, who do you thinks right? The feelings of the mass population or the words of Christ?

Between 17 and 28% of the population, depending on what country you’re in, in Europe believe in hell. Sweden is 17%. Netherlands is 28. Every other country someplace in between. 53% of the United States still think there’s a hell. In other words, Europe is a very dark place. And what you believe is going to dictate how you live. For example, if you think you just turned to dust, you’ll be a fatalist. Live it up because you’re just going to cease to exist as an entity.

If you believe in universalism, everyone ends up in heaven. Well then, don’t matter how you live, right? If you believe in reincarnation, you just go around as many times it takes to get it right. It doesn’t matter how you live. If you believe in annihilation, that some people go to heaven and the rest cease to exist as an entity, then there’s no downside for bad living much. Except that doesn’t fit biblically because the terms eternal for heaven and hell are the same words, and the minute you say that hell isn’t eternal, you’ve just said that heaven’s not eternal. And you’ve got two synonyms, kingdom of a God and kingdom of heaven, synonyms. The minute you mess with the length of time in hell, you’ve now messed with the eternal nature of God, so that rules out annihilation.

And if you believe in the heaven and hell of the Bible, then all of a sudden how you live your life in following Christ tends to make quite a bit of difference. You don’t believe in hell, you’re not going to live like Christ. You’re going to live like hell. That’s the way it works. And I can tell what you believe by what you do. Not by what you say.

Let’s assume that’s my house through that window and it’s three in the morning. Is that Carty’s house? Well, of course it is. Carty’s house is always out that window. Is that smoke? Well, yes it is, coming out of the chimney or out of the roof. I can’t tell. Might be a fire. I tend to think it’s the chimney. Carty’s asleep. If I wake him at three in the morning and it’s just the chimney, he’d be mad. It’s probably the chimney. I’m sure he’s okay.

Good neighbor? You want to live next to that guy? No, I’ve had this one. That’s Carty’s house. It’s three in the morning. Smoke, chimney, roof. Can’t tell for sure. You know Carty’s in there. He is asleep. 9-1-1, fire department. Get over to Carty’s house, might be on fire. Good neighbor? Better than the other guy.

How about this one? That’s Carty’s house. It’s smoke. It’s three in the morning. He’s in there asleep for sure. His house might be on fire. 9-1-1. Get over there. I’m going to go wake him up, but you get there for sure. It might be a false alarm, but I don’t know for sure and Carty’s really important, so you got to get there and I’m going to run over and make sure he’s okay, but get there right away. And I run across the lawn in my tight white and I throw myself against the door. Dead bolted. Yeah, that hurt. Dive through the plate glass window. I’m all cut up, crawling on glass, bleeding on Carty’s white wool carpet as I run up the stairs, dripping blood all the way up the stairs, hollering, “Carty, Carty, get up. I think your house might be on fire.” And Carty says, “It’s just the chimney.” Is Carty mad? You bet. Till he thinks about it.

Then he thinks I can fix the dent in the door. I can put in a new plate glass window and I can clean the carpets, but where am I going to find a neighbor that’s going to put it on the line for me when I might be in trouble? I got a really good neighbor. I’m sorry. I got mad at you there for a second. I’m just thrilled to death that you put on the line for me. I know you really care about me.

Now, why do I say that? Because if you’re a guest here tonight and you’re hearing me turn or burn, flip or fry, change your stroke, go down in smoke, fire and brimstone kind of preacher. Now you’re saying, why did my friend bring me here tonight? Do they think I might be going to hell or something? But I’m a nice person. Don’t they think I’m a nice person? I mean, if they want me to hear this, they must not think I’m a nice person. They think I’m going to hell or something.

And your first reaction is, why did you invite me here? I mean, I’m ticked. My house isn’t on fire. Then you think about it for a second. Say, you know, they must really care about me, wanting to make sure that I’m okay in this area. If I am, that’s great. If I’m not, well, maybe I need to know and they must really care because they must think they know me pretty well to be able to put the relationship in jeopardy like this. You’ve got a good friend there. You know how you can tell? Because they demonstrated how much they care.