I have just flicked through Rob Bell's book, Sex God - it deals with many a thought about sex, God, intimacy, spirituality and argues that you can’t separate these entities, that they are all in fact different sides of the same coin.

This particular story from chapter one, which has the finest title of any chapter I have come across - God Wears Lipstick - moved me to tears…

"In 1945, a group of British soldiers liberated a German concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. one of them, Lieutenant Colonel Mercin Willet Gonin DSO, wrote in his diary what they encountered:

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them…

…One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it.

One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves….. [a] dysentery tank in which the remains of a child floated.

….It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and i don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick.

Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmorten table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At least someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. that lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Because sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick…"

and you know, after being in town twice this week, I am now looking for a great shade of red.