We attended an event last week, a lovely event where people doing great things in our city had a chance to tell their story. We were happy there, sharing dinner, seeing faces of children and parents, smiling, lives changed, so eager for everything to be right about this chance.

And then she spilled the tea, the woman standing behind my chair, trying carefully to serve everything so precisely. It was a simple thing. A tilt of the tray became a cascading stream of tumbled glasses and flowing tea, sweetened and iced, and some of it landed on me, running down my arm mostly, and seeping through the side of my dress between me and the seat cushion, becoming a cold, sticky damp feeling. It was not much. It was a lovely event. But the woman behind my chair, trying carefully to serve everything so precisely, vanished. And all she remembers about the night is the iced tea.

I know. I once lost the pastor's grandson from my Sunday School room. It was a simple thing. On a November day while too many parents and children came and went through the classroom door, he was simply gone, with his parents searching the room for him, and then the hallways, and then frantic others joining to look, until they found him. And after we had driven home, my family and me, I crawled back into the garage and into the car, to sit alone until the shame of it had cooled from my skin.

C.S. Lewis paints a picture of hell as a place where we are constantly moving away from each other. To be alone, to be in control, to be the center of our own god-shaped soul, this is what we desire most. Not to be close enough to spill, and lose children, and make messes in each other's lives that cause us shame.

It's not the messes, but the shame we give up to be together. And the opposite of hell is the place where we are together, living the iced-tea stories of our lives.