Until you can forgive and include all of the parts, every part belonging, every part forgiven, even the tragic parts now seen as necessary lessons, you cannot come “home.”  

When you succeed at your real life task, or what I like to call “the task within the task,” then wherever God leads you, it doesn’t really matter.  Home is not a geographic place.  It is a place where everything belongs, and everything can be held, and everything is another lesson and another gift. “Hell” would be whenever life has come to a halt, where there is no rejoining, but all is exclusion, blaming, and denying.  We no longer need to believe in hell as a doctrine or a geographic place.  We see it in this world almost every day.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394) – one of the Eastern fathers of the church, and one of my favorites – defined sin as “the refusal to keep growing.”  The saint and the true elder grow from everything, even and especially their failures.