I was Only Gone for a Minute

I know God is supposed to see everything. I've heard how He sees the smallest sparrow fall and the insincere man fake piety. But what if He doesn’t? What if He checks in once in awhile just to see if the water is boiling or whether the toast has burned? What if He goes out to feed the meter right when I take His name in vain? What if He misses a sparrow falling and when He gets back, there it is, dead right in the middle of His living room? What if God is out for a minute, and a minute to Him might be a millennia to us? He could leave just as Pilot is washing his hands and come back this Tuesday. Think of all we’ve done since then; we've had two wars that were so big we had to call them World Wars, we killed of entire species of some of His animals, we’ve invented music videos, and we’ve dirtied His water and His air to the point where we have warnings when the air is too dangerous to breathe, and birds are washing up on His beaches wearing a suit of tar.

Have you ever seen The Odd Couple? Not the TV show but the movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon? There is a scene in that movie, and I believe the play, where Felix and Oscar are entertaining two women over at their apartment, most likely hoping to get laid. Everything is going fine when Oscar steps into the kitchen to make some drinks or something. While he is out of the room Felix starts pining for his ex-wife and his old life, and eventually starts crying. The two women start crying too. It’s at this point when Oscar bursts out of the kitchen and in the bandleader-at-the-nightclub voice says, “Is everybody happy.” He sees the three of them there, Niagara Falls spilling out onto the sofa, and he yells, “What the hell happened?”

What if that happens to God? What if he goes out into the kitchen to mix us up something really nice? “Here everybody, a brand new Tahiti,” or “I just made a new color! It’s kind of like blue and kind of like sparklers.” So he comes bursting out of the kitchen, just like Oscar, only instead of drinks he has a second Tahiti on his tray, and his tray is blue/sparkler colored, and He says, “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” He is expecting to see everything as he left it but instead his pet parrot is missing and we’ve got feathers on our lips, He is coughing because the air is toxic, and he slips on an oily harp seal and falls on His ass?

If I remember correctly, it was at this point in the movie that Oscar kicked Felix out.