This Is Love

Have you ever stopped to think
about how a loving god hides his words in riddles and languages so old men spend centuries arguing their meanings?

And to fail to find the answer
to his riddles is to spend all of your future non-existence
in torment and suffering
in a place designed to be unimaginable
in its purpose of pain,
designed not by Him, the designer of everything else,
and not under his domain,
not within the purview of the all-powerful
nor the knowledge of the all-knowing.

This is the price to pay
when you are not wise enough to accept his goodness-or-else.

Spend thirty minutes staring at a featureless wall in a room with no sound.
Spend ten.
Hear the nothing.
See the blank.
Sit in your own head with thoughts fed by a brain designed to make you fear,
to make you see what isn't there,
to hear what didn't happen,
to keep you safe from every imagined harm.

Spend an hour there.
Survive it.
Spend a week.
A year.
Sit in the tortuous silence for seventy-eight years.

A lifetime.

You won't.
You can't.

This is suffering that cannot even pale in comparison to the forever and always of his promise when you fail to divine the secrets of his obfuscated works.

This is love.

Amen.