The Day God Called It A Day

The day the world ended, God sat quietly alone in a huge room, alternately dozing off and turning the pages of an immense series of fat scrapbooks. Some of these scrapbooks were filled with nothing but images of puppies, other baby animals, flowers, and even stones (He’d always been pleased with the foundations of His creation). Others featured photographs of crying children, some of them starving to death, others merely spoiled. He had many, many photographs of rich men –a great number of them overfed—and He was eternally puzzled by these photos and these men.

God could remember everything, and this no doubt both saddened and confused Him. He was exhausted.

Far below Him there were, here and there, people floating in boats and  still --many of them, anyway-- imploring. There were also a number of people, those who had spent years planning and waiting for the end of the world, who were holed up in places where the water and the destruction had not yet arrived. Some of them were high up on mountains or hidden away in caves deep in the earth. Like the people in the boats, these others were given additional time to puzzle over the position in which they found  themselves.

Much of the puzzling could be boiled down to a simple, bewildered question: Really, God, this also is your handiwork?

It was more and more difficult for any of these survivors to think of this additional time as any kind of blessing, yet still the most desperate --and they were all, of course, desperate-- yearned in their terror for survival. They still wanted to live.

The purest among them, of course, pleaded for forgiveness.

One man, alone in a valley deep in the mountains somewhere, managed to live in ignorance, and then denial, for a number of days. When he finally realized the momentousness of what had occurred, the man ventured out into the valley, where there was still plenty of green grass and patches of bright flowers. And there in the middle of this valley the man eased a kite up into what was left of the sky.

Seeing this --the man in the high grass, backpedaling slowly beneath a rapidly disappearing sun and gaping with a smile of unmistakable joy on his face at the ragged kite rattling in the wind-- God's heart stirred.