This Day Is Tuesday

The day the world ended, God sat quietly alone in a huge room, alternately dozing off and turning the pages of a fat scrapbook. God could remember everything, and this no doubt saddened Him.

Far below Him there were, here and there, people floating in boats and still –many of them, anyway– praying. 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 pray and puzzle over the position in which they found themselves.

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– prayed in their terror for survival. They still wanted to live.

The purest among them prayed 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 recognized the seriousness of what had occurred, the man ventured out into the valley, where there was still 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, staring up with a smile of unmistakable joy on his face at the ragged kite rattling in the wind– God’s heart stirred.