GOSPEL

I met God in my local mall’s food court. I was eating chow mein.

“Hello Matthew,” he said.

“Hello,” I said. “Do I know you?”

“Not yet,” he said. “I am God.”

“Oh.” I said. “Oh my god.”

“That is correct,” he said.

He sat down across from me. His eyes were piercingly blue. His skin was glowing white. His hair was blonde. His gaze pulled me in, enticed me, and filled me with a sense of longing. I actually recognized him.

“Hey, you were on TV when you were a kid, weren’t you? On that psychology show?”

“You are correct, Matthew.”

“Woah. What the hell? What are you doing here?”

“I came to speak with you,” he said, calmly. “I would like for you to be my disciple.”

I started shivering and I didn’t know why. He placed a hand over mine. It was like being touched by hot coals.

“Are you really God?” I said.

“I am,” he said.

“Prove it.”

God leaned in close. His eyes glowed with fiery rage. “You fucking worm,” he hissed. “I do not owe you an ounce of proof. You are my plaything and nothing more. I intend to use you as I have used countless other of my creatures to amuse myself with and then toss aside. Do you understand?”

“All right, all right,” I said, holding my hands up. I was very frightened by him. Power seemed to radiate off him. “What do you want me to do? Just tell me what to do!”

“Come with me,” he said. “Once again, I will make my message known and my demands clear to the world. All people will either worship me or they will suffer. The doubters and the faithless will burn in an eternal pain, in this life and the next.”

This was the same thing he said all those years ago on television. The doctor who hosted the show had done everything he could to convince the boy that he was experiencing delusions of grandeur, nothing more, but the boy denied it. His mother did too. “He is God himself,” she said, “and I gave birth to him. I was chosen for this. I am greater than the virgin Mary.”

“Do you believe that I am God?” he asked me.

I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t need to. “I do,” I said. Upon saying those words, I heard a high-pitching ringing in my ears that blasted until it felt like my ears were trumpets and the ringing was being pushed out of them from the back of my eyes.

“What is that?” I asked.

God pressed his thumb to my head for a moment and said, “Worship me.”

“What?”

“Worship me.”

“How?” I said.

“You sit before the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and of every creature and plant that exists upon it. Find it within yourself to show me that I alone am worthy of all your praise. If you are unable to accomplish that, perhaps you do not believe that I am who I say I am.”

The fear I felt in that moment was so concentrated, it was as if the very mouth of hell was chomping away beneath me. I crawled under the table and began to lick the bottom of his shoes. Between licks I whispered, “I am not worthy, oh holy one. I have sinned. I have sinned. I have sinned. I am not worthy. Oh God, please save me. I am not worthy.” He allowed me to lick his shoes until the undersides of both were drenched in my saliva and a trail of drool and muck was dangling off my chin.

“You may rise,” he whispered.

I climbed awkwardly back into my chair. He greeted me with a napkin.

“Wipe your face.”

I did.

“You have proven your faith,” he said. “You are worthy to know the truth. Ask, and your questions will be answered.”

I was exhausted from my groveling. I panted and sagged in my chair.

“God,” I said. “Why?”

“You wish to understand why I am here, why I have chosen you, why I have come down to earth in the form of man, why I allow suffering, pain, death, and every other horrible thing, why I allow sin, why I demand perfection, and why I condemn all who fail to worship me?”

“Yes,” I whispered. I was filled with terror by his gaze now, which seemed to see into me, to see every wrong thing I had ever done.

God stood from his chair and leaned over the table. “I’m here in this place because I know exactly where I need to be in order to find loyal followers who will obey me without question. I have chosen you because you were always chosen, and if you had failed me at any point, you would have burned up where you sat which is just as good, as far as I’m concerned. I am here on earth in the form of man to demand the worship and devotion of all my creation. I allow suffering, pain, death, and every other horrible thing because you are a pathetic, ungrateful race who does not deserve mercy, grace, happiness, or even an ounce of relief. I allow sin because I want you to fail me. For that same reason I demand perfection. I am just as pleased by the cries of the souls in hell as I am pleased by the cries of worship from the souls in heaven. If I weren’t pleased by the sound of endless torment, I would stop the torment, but I do not stop the torment, and so it must continue to please me, mustn’t it. I condemn all who fail to worship me because all deserve to be condemned, even the ones who do worship me. The only reason they aren’t also condemned is because of my other-worldly generosity.”

After speaking so intensely, his quiet breath blew across my face, which I took to be a blessing.

“Are you evil, or are you good?” I said.

God began to giggle. His giggle grew loud into a guffaw and louder still until his laughter echoed all across the court and people standing in line for popcorn at the theater across the hall turned to look at us. He slammed a palm on the table and his laughter stopped.

“Any who would call me evil is deserving of eternal torture for such blasphemy!”

“But God,” I said, “when people hear you speak like this, they are going to call you evil.”

God slowly sat back down. “No, they won’t,” he said. “Not once they see the consequences of such words.”

“And what of the Christians, God? Your bible tells them to watch out for the anti-Christ. Won’t they accuse you of being the anti-Christ?”

“No,” said God. “They will recognize my words as the words of the one true God, not some imposter.”

“Will they?”

“They will, or they will burn.”

“God,” I said. “I am but a worm in your presence, as you know, and I am not worthy to be speaking to you, let alone questioning you, but you, in your almighty grace, have sought me out to serve as your disciple, and in order to do this, I seek, with your permission, to question you.”

“Go on,” said God.

“God,” I said again. “Are you evil, or are you good?”

God took my hand and said, “Matthew, I am the ultimate good in the universe. I created this universe. Good exists because I made it so. Evil exists in order for good to be rare, and therefore valuable. I exist to be worshipped for my goodness. Those who choose the evil path of not worshipping me, not obeying my commandments, and not trusting me blindly like a child - they choose to suffer for eternity as a form of worship. How could anybody see anything evil in that?”

I felt sick. Moving made my head spin.

“I don’t feel well, God.”

“That is because you are sick. You are disgusting. You deserve to be sick and to suffer because of your imperfection.”

Saliva rushed into my mouth, and I threw up into my bowl of chow mien. I wretched, gagged, and threw up a second time, splattering vomit across the table.

“God damn it,” said God, sliding his chair away from the table. “How disgusting. Go and clean yourself up.”

The taste in my mouth was so bad it made me want to throw up again. I hurried to the bathroom and rinsed my mouth out and blew my nose. God was waiting for me outside.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“I don’t care,” said God.

“I understand,” I said. “You are holy, oh God.”

God took me by the hand and led me out of the mall. I didn’t know then what miracles and wonders I would see. I couldn’t even imagine what majesty and glory I would bear witness to. All I was certain of was that as long as he held my hand, I was going to be OK. I prayed he would never let me go.