THE LAST SINNER

CHAPTER 1

He had been coming this way for years. We could finally see him from the top of the wall. He would stagger forward a few steps, then turn and run and hide behind a bush or a rock. When we went outside the City, we could hear the echoes of his wailing in the distance. 
     The Last Sinner was finally coming home. But he sure was taking his time. 
     The next-to-the-last sinner had been in for forty or fifty years. Her welcome party had lasted for a decade and a half. Just last month they had taken down the last of the faded Welcome Home banners. We were all sure she was the last one. Before her, there had been none for a century or more. Then this new pitiful soul was discovered by some of our explorers hundreds of miles out, on the far side of a dozen dimensional boundaries. 
     The gates of The City are never closed. Except during the daily Opening of the Gates ceremony. That's when the huge gates rumble shut for thirty or forty seconds just so we can cheer ourselves silly when they open again. And sinners—or ex-sinners, to be more precise—used to come in through the gates all the time. For ages it was a rush. Which slowed to a stream. Then ages later to a trickle. And sinners have been trickling in for a long, long time. 
	Every one of them is welcomed and celebrated with ceremonies, games, parties, and dinners. Each one tells his or her story over and over; we never get tired of hearing their stories. Many of them cry a lot, but a surprising number laugh. Once they get in, they can see how silly they had been, being so slow about it. 
	As the centuries have gone by, we have seen changes in these late-arrivers. Latter Ones they are called. They are different. They come in, go through long and glorious rehabilitations, but never completely lose some of their outer darkness aura. It's hard to describe what that looks like, but after a while, you get so you can spot them in a crowd.     
	“Look! There's a Latter One!” We whisper to each other, pointing across large gatherings. There is a sadness on them, but a sadness mixed with lots of other things; gratitude for one. I once saw a Latter One standing for hours with his hand on a white marble column, rubbing the cool stone while silent tears—I think they were tears of joy—ran down his cheeks. 
	We usually saw them coming long before they got to the gates of the City. Usually . . . but not always. One of the first sinners I witnessed repenting his way into the City surprised everybody. Nobody saw him coming until we heard him sprinting across the wide meadow just outside the Naphtali Gate. You don't normally hear somebody sprinting; they're too busy breathing. But this man somehow managed to sprint, breathe, scream, and yell all at the same time. And, of course, you don't hear many people scream in Heaven. Shrieks of delight are about as close as it gets. But this was a real scream. Birds and angels exploded into the sky as he pierced the air with his “Ee-yah-yah-yah-yah- yahYAHHH!” Heads jerked up in unison, most of us sipping afternoon drinks on the wide veranda under the yellow umbrellas just outside the gate. Drinks were spilled, their celestial contents dribbling through the slats of the table. 
	Yes, you can still spill things in Heaven.     
	I was fairly new to Heaven in those days, but even most of the old-timers had never seen anything like it. The only thing more surprising than his scream was his running. He ran like someone being chased by a lion, but he was clearly not a natural runner. Erratic limbs flopped in all directions around his twitching torso. When his feet hit the sandy-gold path, he made straight for the gate—people, carts, animals and angels jumping aside as he barreled toward them. As he neared the huge opening, he raised both arms high over his head and let out another garbled scream. The gate was filled with people standing in line—travelers, officials, and sight-seers—they parted like the Red Sea and the crazed man passed through on dry ground alright, Pharaoh's army right on his tail, evidently. As soon as he was all the way through and back into the sunshine of the street, he fell to his knees and pressed his face hard into the cool stone, gasping for air.     
	“Well, that's one way to do it,” some smart aleck whispered as we all jostled to see what would happen next.     
	Half a dozen saints converged on him, mostly those who had been around a while and still remembered how to assist newcomers. They crouched down, touched his back gently and whispered in his ear. His heaving sobs diminished little by little until he raised his wide wet eyes to look into the faces of those gathered around him.     
	“Am . . . I . . . safe?” he muttered, one word per breath.     
	Comforting arms encircled his shoulders as a fresh wail rose from his tormented soul, this time the long, tremulous wail of relief.     
	He had darkish skin, long unkempt black hair, and wore nothing but a loin cloth and a few shells around his neck. “Amazonian?” I wondered to myself.     
	No one who has witnessed such a scene could ever question the reality and horrors of hell. When the man had calmed down, he was raised to his feet, applause rising from the crowd now gathered around him, and one of the attendants stepped forward to put a soft robe over his shoulders, and soft shoes over his bruised and bleeding feet. The crowd cheered again, and the man lifted his face toward us for the first time, raised one quivering hand as if to say thank you, then the attendants turned him around and began escorting him toward the Welcome House.
	We knew we would see him outside the Welcome House in four or five days gawking at the splendor around him, then he would be transferred to Training and Recovery. He would be there a long time—months or years, to use earth terms—-catching up on all he missed in his earthly life, where he could have walked with his Creator but had not done so, and catching up with much that he had missed so far in heavenly life.     
	Different sinners require different degrees of processing, and they all require different kinds. All of them have traveled a painful path, some more painful than others. 
	This particular man has been safely home for ages now. I recall his entrance because it was unusual, and because it was one of the first I witnessed first-hand. Scenes like this—some even more dramatic, but many less-so—have played out millions of times over the ages. The trickle of Latter Ones slowed even more, like the last drops falling off leaves after a summer rain. The strategy of the Sons of God shifted from StayHome-and-Welcome to Go-Out-and-Find.     
	This led to the discovery of many Last Sinners, each one supplanted when a subsequent Last was found. The first time most of us thought “Certainly, this must be the last one!” was several hundred years ago. That Last Sinner was a man from China. He had been hiding in caves for eons because anytime the light of the City hit his eyes or skin he felt like he was on fire. He had dug miles and miles of tunnels and trenches to avoid the light. A Rescue Team member fell into one of his trenches while pressing through thick underbrush. The Team fanned out and eventually uncovered an entire mountainside of abandoned digs before they figured out that the digger had moved his operation to an adjacent valley. There they discovered fresher piles of dirt, and shortly thereafter the digger himself. As is usually the case, the man was deathly afraid of the Rescue Team, and they had to entice him into conversation through months and months of gift-giving and gentle coaxing.     
	Once communication had been established, weeks of careful conversation followed, all of it in the dim light of the man's cave, during which they found out much about his earthly history and his mental evolution here in the eternal Realms. 		Yichen Wu was his name. He had been brought by the Redeemer to the spot Yichen had chosen for his eternal—or so he thought—resting place. Jesus escorts every person as close as possible to the Light, but the escort-ee always resists at some point, often claiming the Glory burns his eyes and skin. The fire of Hell, as you probably know, is nothing other than the Glory of the Lord resisted. The only gospel some human beings ever see is when the Son—holy wounds still visible in brow, wrists, and feet—escorts them to their outer darkness domicile. And although at the time they can only see him as a terrifying specter, as the eons drag by, their memory of those wounds grows, softening their hearts like rainwater dissolving limestone, creating great caverns in the bedrock of their rebellion. Every Latter One I have ever talked to eventually developed a longing to see the man with the wounds in his hands and feet. 
	The job of the missionaries—the old term is still used—is the same as ever: To describe to the sinner the never-ending love of God; the Man with the wounds. Sometimes this was surprisingly easy. At other times, infuriatingly difficult. No two sinners are the same. Yichen Wu, the man in the cave, once he was persuaded to stop eating dried leaves and tree bark, and once he was convinced that the light of Glory no longer burned his eyes and skin came out quite easily. He was escorted up and out of his trench, his helpers careful to guard his eyes from the light of glorious day. When he stood at the top of his last pile of dirt, he wept, tears splashing onto his bare feet and running down in muddy rivulets. The rescuers had a hunch what might happen next, and they were not disappointed. As the man stood there sobbing, a newcomer walked up and began washing Yichen's feet with a white towel and tears of his own. The rescue team stood transfixed. 
	A minute later the man with the towel stood up in front of Yichen Wu, and pulled back his sleeve. Yichen gaped at the wrist, gawked at the face, then collapsed into the man's arms, wailing at the top of his lungs.     
	It takes a long time for a millennium of folly to work itself out. The rescue missionaries took their time escorting Yichen toward the City of Light. It took many weeks of walking, and just as many weeks of talking. News of his rescue reached the City long before he did. This gave saints and angels lots of time to prepare for his arrival. The central stadium was modified, cantatas were written, statues were carved, streets were festooned with banners of purple and gold—the colors of mercy—and word went out into far-flung galaxies: The Last Sinner—so everyone thought—was coming home.
	We all thought it was the party to end all parties. It lasted for weeks. Or months. Maybe a year or two. Yichen Wu was the most famous sinner in the cosmos. His restoration and training process went on long after the party was over. He was invited to give his testimony in hundreds of clubs, associations and gatherings.     He would tell how he had grown up in a traditional Buddhist home, and how a Christian missionary had come to his town when he was a young married man. His wife had received the missionary's message with joy, but Yichen refused to change, and persecuted his wife mercilessly. Very often Yichen's wife would participate in telling their story. Each of them was a trophy of God's grace. Together they were a whole wall full of trophies. Yichen was a very stubborn man. His stubbornness became such a habit, he carried it into the Eternal Realm. When he told his story, his audience marveled that he could persist in his unrepentant state for so long.     		
	Human beings can resist the goodness of God precisely because they contain within themselves the goodness of God. Their free will is the most powerful evidence of their God-likeness, and it is this very will that is used to resist the God who gave it to them. In Yichen's case, this resulted in eons of torment, digging endless miles of trenches and tunnels to escape the searing light of God's goodness. 	
	And for a long, long time we all thought he was the last one. How could anyone possibly hold out longer than he? How little we knew.     
	He was just the first of the last.