There was a long silence, as I waited for a push, or worse still, a punch from Tom. But it never came. So I kept my head low, looked up at Tom, held out my hand and said “Thanks for taking the time to talk with me, Tom.” He stood there looking at my hand. Then something amazing happened. He took my hand, squeezed it, and apologised for the way he acted. He said that was an example of what he was working through, the anger just appearing out of nowhere. Then to my surprise, he sat back down to talk again.

I asked her How much of her sins did she think Christ died for? She said all of them. Not 30-40% of them? No, all of them. So if Jesus died for 100% of her sins, how much was left for her to pay for? Matea said zero. So if she had no sins left to pay for, how sure could she be that she would go to heaven? She said “100% I suppose”. I said that she didn’t sound very confident about that, and that tells me that her faith really wasn’t in Jesus, it was mostly Jesus and some of herself. And as soon as Jesus becomes number two or three or whatever, saving grace is forfeited.

Unfortunately, his sarcasm took the better of him. I asked him if he had any thoughts on the afterlife, and he said yes, but they were nothing to do with me. I said I would like to hear his thoughts about if he would make it to heaven or not. He said he would, but not via anything I would know about. His sarcasm was the sort that could escalate quickly, so I wished him well on Judgement Day and left him to it.

I noticed Sala was using humour to distract us – nothing offensive, but using that Pacific Island giggle to try and brush off the seriousness of what we were trying to portray. Thankfully we were able to keep focus enough to get him to agree that he would not end up in a good place on judgement day based on his own goodness. From what we could tell, God did not soften his heart, but we pray that the seeds of doubt would claw at his heart. We passed Sala later. I threw a checking question at him, but he was back to his giggly self. All we can do is keep him uplifted in prayer.

Like all of us, he failed the good person test miserably. His response was that God is forgiving. This is a natural fall-back for those who understand little about how justice works. You would never expect a judge to just forgive someone for their crimes. God should be the ultimate example of a perfect judge, well, because He is the perfect God!

His heckles went up, and his self-righteousness flared at me when he knew he was in trouble. He said who was I to judge him I said I wasn’t, I was just telling him what the Bible said. We went back and forth a bit, and he was getting angrier. His partner sensed this, and grabbed his arm. At this stage I thought it was better to diffuse the situation and let them go – but not without asking him to read the Bible, specifically the Gospel of John. He mumbled something I didn’t hear and walked off in a huff.