Tough call

Perhaps there was never a bond between you and me—

no more than a poor man's name in a moneylender's book.

Yet I think of the man who planted a sapling in the desert and went away.

Years passed.

The sapling found water. The roots went deeper. The branches gathered birds. One tree became a hundred, and a hundred became a forest.

Then, one day, the man returned.

But the forest did not know him.

It closed around his feet, hid the sky above him, and swallowed him among its roots.

The hand that planted it had become only another thing for the forest to consume.

Perhaps this is what happened to God.

He made you. He made me. He made the man beside us. Then He went away.

And when He returned, we had become too many to remember His face.

We killed Him— not with swords, but with the world we built in His absence.

And now we wander through that world calling everything we cannot understand by His name.

A star— God.

A miracle— God.

A mystery— God.

Whatever remains beyond our reach, we place His name upon it and continue searching.

But what if there is nothing left to find?

What if the forest has already buried its gardener?

What if God did not disappear from the world—

but from us?

Then perhaps the tragedy is not that God is dead.

Perhaps it is that we have survived Him.

And like younger brothers after the elder has gone, we have grown into the house without knowing who will keep it standing.

So you, and I, and whoever comes after us—

we are left with His unfinished work.

Not to search for Him.

Not to wait for Him.

But to build carefully in the world He left behind,

because if the Maker is truly gone,

then the making has become ours.