That afternoon walk changed everything. God saw, in the brush, two people exposed to their guilt. The perfect sky dripped blue. The full moon cut itself to shavings. The tempered ocean crashed its shores.

In the face of hosannas alluring ease, you saw through the veil of cloaks and palms to find the soul of restless humanity who spat and hurled insults within the week, the dying messiah who wouldn't speak, ignoring the politic while submitting to the instrument designed that day to reconcile sin by the color red.

I press my ear to the door and listen. I hear a conversation. It drifts in and out. At times there is nothing, just silence... and me – my own person – some purveyor who has bought into the trick and doesn’t know how it works. God, let’s not pretend. My perception of your whole story, from closing up the garden shop onward, falls onto stony paths most of the time.

I am wet with preacher spit: water and peppermint. I sit and sit, waiting for something spirited, but an ego ten stories high is sadly all I get. I feel talked down as you condescend from your mountain of illustrations and other charades that dance like shadows on some vacated cave.

Faith carries weight, gravity, and history. Christ in you, the hope of glory, begins at the beginning, where nothingness blooms into a garden, into seas, into beasts and birds, rocks and trees. God speaks it into being and it is. And for humans, God breathes in his very own breath.

The Christmas story is a puzzle, pulling together whispers from old rabbis, rumors lifted from dusty scrolls, with the surprise of shepherds and singing heavenly hosts. It sows prophecy to fact, theology to gravity, eternity to time, holy to pedestrian.

We’re inside and away from everyone so go tell the beat generation we finally found home, even though it rapes us of how things once were. Do you remember? Phrases like “new normal”, “social distancing” and “wear a mask” all broke out of the insane asylum and into the heads of faulty followers of Fauci.

Release a trial balloon
so we can gauge how soon
all these lies transition into truth
that finds a home in ears that can’t hear
and keep itching and itching with fear.

The prophetic is silent. Its heyday is now rained out in an unbaptized haze of tolerance run amuck. O'Connor warned us: we really want a Christ without all that crucifixion talk. We want everyone carrying around open minds on top of shoulders broad enough to narrow nothing, and arms that carry no punch of truth, no signs of crosses, no healed withered-ness in its hands.

I wonder. As I approach history, visiting churches dating well before the declaration of our independence and the security of our constitution with its promise to make no laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion and the right for any of us to peaceably assemble together… I wonder... why are all these churches locked, boarded up, empty shells?

He made us, human beings, from the dirt of Earth, and he breathed in his very own breath to spring forth life, will, animation, and purpose within us. So, from the very beginning, God conspires with his human creatures, for, as you might know, conspire is broken into con and spire, which means together and breathed, respectfully. God breathed together with humans to give life, and in Jesus, life more abundantly.

You over there, do you see me? I’m just about six feet away, but I could really be on another planet far out in the ether. Winter came in and spiraled everything normal into the hands of escher, into the halls of the asylum.

At no other point has the whole world melted into a mold that looks like the end. You can cite wars and all their rumors but they are starting points that progressed us here to a tiny infectious agent that masquerades itself until it kills us, or at least some of us. Sound familiar? It’s the garden story recycled.

Wherever we find life, we find virus. The onslaught of the coronavirus shouldn’t shock us, especially in our deeply interconnected world. Like other bleeps in nature, viruses spawn out every so often. We see it in history.