#167

But what if God
is the one who's actually tired?

Hold on a minute.

I am not belittling Our Lord God,
nor am I against the faith.

I am simply
looking
at a different perspective.

Oh! Please forgive me,
and strike me down
if what I say is sacrilegious.

But I am, first and foremost,
a human—

mind you!

If not the most,
then one of the most
curious of our kind.

Now, indulge me
in my query.

It is not just us
who grow exhausted.

What about Him?

Heed me, mind you!
Let me finish!

I can tell you're questioning my folly.

How can someone without limits
ever know what it means
to be limited?

But that is not my subject.

What I ask about
is the exhaustion of the spirit.

Has no one heard
the stories of the Bible?

The tales are filled with tragedy,
and at their center
are always men and women—

characters given breath
by the One who made us all.

And yet, I believe,
not one of them
was forsaken.

Even so,
their stories were not spared
from tragedy.

Over and over and over,
He builds the perfect—

Oh! No, no.
I shouldn't say that.

A perfect human, I mean.

For there is only One
who could ever bear that name.

A great story, then!

Only for it to succumb
to the follies of humankind.

Different follies,
different failings,
different ways to fall—

and yet,
how familiar
the ending always is.

I may be wrong
in holding this belief.

I am not a man learned in faith,
nor am I a man of faith.

But this
is how I see it.

Much like a child
building a sandcastle
on the shore of a restless sea,

each night,
when the tide recedes,
the castle is torn down.

And yet,
the child builds again.

Mind you,
this is no cycle
repeated once, twice,
ten times, or a thousand.

It has happened
more times than we could count
the grains of sand along the shore
or the stars
in a cloudless night.

And all I am asking is this:

Can we try to—

be better?

We cannot fathom
the greatness of the One
who made us all.

But I do know
that we can strive.

Although, perhaps needlessly,
like the stories before us,
we are all fated
to meet the same end.

But should that not make Him
want to build
a beautiful story?

And should that not make us
want to be one?

At the very least,
though the ending be bitter,
much like drunken men
savoring their spirits,

why not make our tale
worth the telling?

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