Who’s winning?
An extended family of four, on the way to the airport, pops a tire going seventy on the highway. They survive, but they’re going to miss their flight. The first place they find to pull over is a leukemia/lymphoma clinic, which means nearly everyone there is having a worse day than they are.
But they’re just pilgrims, trying to find their way home for the holidays. They didn’t do anything to deserve a near-death experience, a missed flight. God doesn’t make tires. But does He make chance? Luck? If He doesn’t, what’s He doing?
God loves you. Satan hates you. Who’s winning?
They’re just pilgrims on the way. One has fatty deposits hardening in his heart.
When they finally get to the airport, Grandpa pitches over. His ticker had tocked. He’d yawped his last yawp.
Who’s winning?
Underneath the Earth, the shrine of pilgrimage heaves once and switches poles. The death of a patriarch holds precedence over an annual holiday, though in this world, as, as far as we know, in all worlds, there are many more dead patriarchs a year than Christmases.
Like Mohammed going to Jerusalem in a dream, like the mosque over the rock where his dream-foot touched, home is a place from which we leap upwards.
That sound you hear is the pilgrims turning around, reversing course towards the center.
What’s a flat tire that everyone survives? There’d be war in Rwanda, if Rwanda was even a place any more. God didn’t know Adam and Eve were eating, till he saw them with His own eyes. God did not appear to Elijah in the fire or the wind.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The Emperor has clothes, after all, really expensive ones. That’s sort of the thing about being an Emperor. Who’s winning? Well he is, for now. Just look at all his cool stuff. You don’t have, as the saying goes, a pot to piss in. Or maybe you do, but it’s not platinum coated. And it does NOT have a seat-warmer.
Flights are changed and cancelled. Arrangements are made.
If there’s no reward in heaven, are you going to be pissed about how things went down here?
The pilgrims are coming home.