Confessions of a Survivor

In the beginning, God didn't just make one or two people, he made a bunch of us. He wanted us to have lots of fun together so he put us all in a playground park thingy that he called Eden and let us do whatever we wanted.

I guess he was just bored, being alone and all.

At first, we did have fun just like he expected. We climbed trees, rolled down hills, swung on vines, swam in rivers, made faces. I remember laughing a lot.

Then one day this snake told us that it'd be more fun if we kept score. We didn't even know what score meant. But when he said that we should give an apple to the person who played best and we wouldn't know who was best unless we kept score, we finally got it. We could all see the fun in that. And we were all sure that we were the best.

Things were different after that. We yelled at each other a lot. We had to make new games and we had to devise scoring rules for each game. We eliminated other activities, like frolicking, because they were hard to score.

When God found out about our new game he was very angry. He said we couldn't use his garden anymore because we weren't having any fun. But we told him that we were having fun but he didn't listen and kicked us out the very next day. He said we couldn't come back until we stopped keeping score. To make us feel guilty about the whole thing, he even told us that we would all die anyway and our scores would mean nothing in the end.

He was wrong. My cumulative all-game score is now 14,782 and that means a lot to me. If I could raise it to 30, 000 before I die, I'll know I've accomplished something. Even if I can't reach this goal, I know that my life would still have a great deal of meaning because I've taught my children to score high and they'll all be able to reach 30,000 or 50,000 I know.

Really, it was life in Eden that was meaningless. Fun is great and all but without scoring, who'd really care about having fun? God has a very superficial view of life and I am glad my children are being raised away from his influence. We were lucky to get out. We're all very grateful to the snake.

If you think this is about you, it probably is.