I want to tell you about the night everything moved.
By then, the question had been sitting in me for almost eight years. Not loudly — I didn't talk about it much, even with people close to me. But it was there, the way a splinter is there, not stopping you from walking but not letting you forget it either. The question was simple and terrifying: what if eternal conscious torment isn't the ending the God I'd come to know would actually choose?
I had preached hell the way I'd been taught to preach it. I believed it the way I'd been taught to believe it. And for eight years, something kept quietly asking whether what I'd been taught and what I actually knew of the Father's heart were the same thing.
It came to a head around two in the morning, on a night I hadn't planned for anything to happen at all.
The room was dark in a way I don't remember it ever being before or since — no moon that night, no light from anywhere, just black. I was lying there crying — had been for close to two hours by that point — completely undone by the love of my Father. Not sad tears. Overwhelmed tears. The kind that come when something is too big to hold quietly anymore.
And one by one, I saw my children. Each of them, brought to my mind the way you'd bring someone into a room. I don't know how else to describe it except that it felt like being shown something rather than thinking it up myself.
Then I heard Him.
I lay there in that darkness a long time after that sentence. I didn't move. I don't think I even kept crying for a minute or two — I just went still, the way you go still when something enormous has walked into a room and you don't want to miss it by moving too soon. I didn't understand yet what the sentence meant. I only knew it had landed like a door opening somewhere I hadn't known was sealed shut, and I was afraid that if I reached for an explanation too quickly, I'd miss whatever was still coming.
It felt like a long time before the second thing came. Quieter. Almost like He'd waited on purpose, to let the first sentence finish doing its work in me before He gave me the second.
He seemed to lean on that word. Ever.
I did not answer Him out loud. I don't think I needed to. I already knew the answer, the same way you know your own child's face in a crowd — instantly, without having to work it out.
What Changed That Night
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound tidier than it was. The balloon didn't pop all at once. I didn't wake up the next morning with a finished theology. What happened that night wasn't an argument winning — it was a Person showing up.
For thirty years I had preached a God who loved deeply but whose hands were tied by human free will — a God who wanted to save everyone but who, in the end, could be permanently defeated by a single stubborn "no." That night, lying on a pillow that was frankly a mess by the time it was over, I understood that I had been describing a smaller God than the one who was in the room with me.
Scripture had been telling me this for years, if I'd been willing to hear it. Peter writes that the Lord is "not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). I had read that verse a hundred times and quietly assumed it described a wish that would ultimately go unfulfilled — a Father wanting something He wouldn't get. That night I understood it differently. What if it describes not a wish, but an intention that His love is fully capable of seeing through?
John doesn't say God has love. He says "God is love" (1 John 4:8) — not a description of one of His attributes, but a claim about His identity. Love isn't something God does when He's in a good mood. It's what He is, all the way down, with nothing behind it that could override it.
And Paul, writing to the Romans, lists everything he can think of — death, life, angels, powers, height, depth — and says none of it "shall be able to separate us from the love of God" (Romans 8:38–39). I used to read that as a comfort for believers. That night I started wondering whether it might also be a description of just how far that love is willing to go to begin with.
The Larger Hope, Not a Smaller God
Here is the distinction I've learned to hold carefully since that night, because it's easy to get it wrong: the question was never whether God's love has a ceiling. It doesn't. The question I'd actually been taught — without ever hearing it stated so plainly — was whether human choice could tie God's hands so completely that His love simply runs out of road. That night, I stopped believing that our "no" is bigger than His "ever."
I still don't fully understand how that works itself out for every person, in every circumstance, on the other side of this life. I'm not writing this post to hand you a finished map. I'm writing it because that night, on a wet pillow at two in the morning, I stopped being afraid that love loses.