I don’t know whether to be happy or sad that the End Times failed to materialize yesterday.  For all those expectant souls counting on Harold Camping’s mulligan from 1994 to be right, you’re heart goes out to them.  It’s gotta be rough having to get refocused and all.  I mean, end of the world isn’t like spring cleaning, it does take some major preparation.  And he seemed so sure of his calculations this time, didn’t he?  Though, having blown the call before, you had to wonder why such an important message would be trusted to someone with such a poor track record.  But “the Bible promised,” he said, and folks did want to believe.  You gotta give `em that.

Sure, I hadn’t quite made it to my three score and ten, but I’d come close enough not to feel cheated if the Rapture had indeed filtered out the deserving from the not.  And based on all the evidence, it would seem I still had about five more months coming, though suffering would have consumed most of that.

But here we are, again, in the aftermath, wondering how literally to take Your musings as transcribed by Matty, Mark, Luke, and John.  I mean, you can make any kind of hash you want depending on how you choose from all that’s in there.  In fact, that’s the problem.  It’s open to interpretation, and we’re not good with that.  For heaven sakes, we can’t agree on tonight’s side dish for dinner.  How we gonna get together on the metaphysical stuff?

For instance, I read something in the May 23^rd issue of New Yorker Magazine which made a lot of sense.  Take a simple phrase, something like: “a shimmering star, or a flickering lamp,” and repeat it, person to person, along a line.  By the time it reaches the 30^th person you’ll get, “shivering style, flickering lamp.”  Which tells us plain enough, we humans are notoriously poor at passing along information.  And not because we don’t mean well; surely, we do.  But we just don’t process information very well.  And then, meaning well and all, we choose to pass along what we think we heard, rather than admit we didn’t quite hear right or understand the message in the first place.  So it’s not human error so much as human nature at the root of the problem.

Now ask Yourself, who created humans and our nature?  And when did the Bible get written?  Well, You can see where I’m going with this.  Listen, we can’t even find out the splits in a marathon from 20 miles down the road.  So any attempt at translating Your word over thousands of years must be considered iffy at best.

Which begs the question, what were You thinking depending on us to bear Your message in the first place?  If it was all that important, You ought to know better than trust us with it.   You created us.  And if it’s all true, You know,  about the All Knowing, All Loving, All Powerful thing, then You had to see this coming.  You’re the One who engineered all these design flaws, like Michelle Bachman’s American history and Donald Trump’s hair. What kind of messenger did You expect us to be?  Nobody to blame but Yourself.  Come on, now, ‘fess up.

I have always had a sneaking suspicion about Your methodology, anyway, beginning with the whole creation thing.  I mean, what was going on there?  First of all, You had no peers.  You’re hanging out doing what, exactly?  Probably bored out of your mind.  You’ve got nothing else better to do, so You roll up Your figurative sleeves and, boom!  “Let there be light!”  Are You kiddin’ me?!  Well, it had to be the greatest start in history, needless to say.  And, please, kudos all around.  Honest.  We absolutely loved it.

But like Kenyans running the marathon in the early days, I think You might have gone out a little too hard.  Because from all the evidence that followed, You seemed to have lost a little focus or enthusiasm shortly thereafter.  Call it creation debt, You know, like oxygen debt.  Heck, You didn’t get around to making us till day five.  So you buried the lead right there, as we say in the newspaper business. And what’s with babies waking up in the middle of the night while Mom and Dad are trying to sleep?  What’s that about?

See, that’s just lazy engineering.  Looks more and more like design error, far as I can tell. And You just don’t want to admit it.  And You can’t blame it on that nasty Garden of Eden business, either. That was all ex post facto.  This was no fit of pique.

I don’t know.  It’s all a little baffling, which I know is all part of the drill, too. But if I ever have a face-to-face with You, I might enquire about Your rep staff.  They haven’t been doing You a lot of favors over the millennia.  And this poorly called End Times is just the latest example.  Know what?  Maybe You need to get a little more hands-on for while.  Whataya think?  Well, anyway, thanks for listening, and all the best from down here. We know it can’t be easy up there, either.

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