Dear God,

I pray to you in whispers

And tired, weary sighs

My days are empty echoes

Of restless, night time cries

But I think on how You do collect

Each tear spilt from my eye

You keep them in a vessel

Because for me, You chose to die

—————————————

You keep track of all my sorrows.

You have collected all my tears in your bottle.

You have recorded each one in your book.

Psalm 56:8

Dear God,

Please make these unending wars stop. Please end the plight of the hungry. And, on a personal note, please end this insufferable writer's block.

I know I should not elevate my petty problem into the league of worldwide catastrophes. But I sit here with nothing to write about. I feel my prose is just drivel. Unremarkable. Just another grain of sand on a beach somewhere. Who would want to read my stuff? This is the pits. Why should I even try to write? Why...?

My bad, God. Sorry for the pity break.

Now, about those wars and that hunger. If you could just...

Maybe if I could write something to my representatives, my friends, anyone. Something that would inspire a solution to problems. Maybe I could...

Thank you, God.

Yours,

Sandlot

With countless names, how do I address thee?

You respond to all aliases, whatever they may be.

All I ask, after thanking you for the day:

Let rationality and brotherhood prevail, I pray.

There are the strong and the mighty who can

Decimate others in a shocking, short span

To these, I ask, that you bless with being aware

That aggression leaves nothing to spare.

To those who are weak, and feel repressed at lot

Please provide strength to endure the onslaught

But also to be wise against retaliation of fear

So a semblance of the elusive peace can appear.

For on this tiny speck of a planet in the void

There's much to preserve; though lot has been destroyed

And from your vantage point in the heavens above

All that matters is, understanding and love.

It’s the high holy days, the beginning of the new year when we ask to be rewritten into the book of life and atone for the wrongdoings of the past year. I’ve always felt autumn is more of the season for the new year than January, maybe because my birthday is in it, so I have been trying to account for my many failings and flaws lately.

I haven’t felt very good about myself, although I don’t know how much of that is due to my lack of employment and reliance on my parents. I know I am supposed to honor my mother and father but when I live with them, when Mom works at home and complains I see her as a “playmate”, when Dad demands I “use my brawn” whenever anything needs lifting or dragging and sticks his nose up at the prospect of helping me out physically ever while regularly bemoaning “i’m tryin’ to help!” when it feels like pestering and nagging, it’s extremely difficult. I’m lucky I have them, I’m aware of that. I remind them that I love them often with both words and actions, Mom more often because she’s around more.

The future just looks so bright I feel like staring at the sun, risking blindness if I try for too long. I don’t want to be Not In Education Employment or Training (a NEET, the discord server I’m in calls us) through the twenty fourth year of my life but I don’t want to work at a job I’ll hate even though that’s probably a rite of passage. I don’t know what I’m doing. Half the time I don’t feel like I’m doing anything but wasting time on Reddit or writing words very few people will read.

Being Jewish is scary in a world where Israel is bombing multiple countries and everyone has always and will always associate Israel with Jews. My neighbors have children in Israel, can you keep them safe at least? I know that part of the world is not exactly easy for you to enact influence, what with free will being such a human right you’ve given us and propaganda having infected generations of citizens, so I’m just going to contain that part of this prayer to selfishness. Keep my cousins and neighbor’s kids alive.

May we beat the weapons of war into ploughshares and don’t stop. Keeping beating them into musical instruments! May whoever next attempts to wage war have to beat them back into ploughshares first. That was a poem in the Siddur I memorized as a child and still agree with.

Thank you for letting me live in a world where the beauty of nature still exists, even amidst civilization. Seeing the viceroy butterflies and bumblebees and every creature that could possibly live on a goldenrod this summer has helped keep me sane. Even witnessing death and then life reborn from death has been beautiful, like when the ant colony was dragging a dragonfly a hundred times its size across the sidewalk and I not only had the chance to see it but to video it for others on YouTube to see as well. People liked it! People also disliked it, but still, I brought joy to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have been as happy. Maybe.

Please let me live to eat apples and honey again next year. Thank you, amen.

Dear God,

I realize that I am nothing more than a fancy bag of salt water with an electric current running through it. And yet I know you listen when I pray. Thank you for caring about me.

Love,

Your disobedient kid (but I'm trying)

Hello, long lost friend,

I cannot remember how long ago I spoke to you (apologies for not using divine capitalizing of my words if I speak about or to you but I simply have no feeling of hierarchy, even when a holy hierarchy, in my system of speech, writing, or thinking), and therefore doubt if you remember me, or, for that matter, care to listen to me at all.

What have we done to what you in whichever way have created.

Now that I mention creation, a colleague of mine honestly believes that Earth as we know it suddenly, as if with a snap of your sacred fingers, was there. No big bang and gradual emergence of stars, solar systems, and planets, but Boom!, without further ado, there is Earth in the universe. Can you imagine? Ha! But, blessed are the ignorant, I'd say. Frankly, I do know that you, or better Matthew in your name, wrote differently: blessed are the poor of spirit, referring to the modest of mind, rather than the ignorant. So, admittedly, it is I who thinks that the ignorant are blessed, and, taking it a step further, should be forgiven for the silly ideas that erupt from their simple minds. Do you know that there are - in this era - masses who claim that Earth is flat? Another Ha! You must be heavily disappointed in the way the human race has evolved.

Furthermore, not only my colleague but much of humanity, and surely its majority, is pretty ignorant if not plain stupid if you ask me (you don't ask me but I'll go on telling you anyway). For, once again, look what we have done with your world, the world that you - probably - destined to be ours.

My parents, may they rest in peace in your kingdom of heaven or vibrate blissfully in the quantum dance in which their ashes were taken up, are the real blessed not to have lived in these times. My parents were of the worrisome kind, afraid of the invisible and, as was proven to me through my disobedience, non-existent dangers that they imagined were hidden in dark street corners, behind bushes and scrapwood, in the use of the tiniest drop of alcohol, and even in the eloquence of people that crossed our family's path and whose motives were not completely clear to them. For my parents, in their fright, to see this world, our world, on fire would have smitten them down in despair and depression.

It is true, we're burning up the place. Assuming your omniscience, you are no doubt aware of what our obsessive materialism and uncontrolled desire for wealth have done to our climate. I have little hope that we will be able to, literally, turn the tide. It is no longer, if it ever was, in your hands but in our hands but alas, we woke up too late. And we? "We" still being a minority, an intellectual elite that Plato may have envisioned as those destined to form the government that knows best for the people they govern. In our times, my old friend, this elite seems to be as ignorant as the people they govern. As if waking up from mind-numbing hibernation, all that these 'elites' do now, I am sorry to say, is too little too late.

Was it only that, that what we did to the climate, you might maybe think that it is part of evolution, an evolution that would, be it not very naturally, extinguish one of the many living species that you, possibly, planned to inhabit Earth. We are no more than the rat, the rainword, the lamb, the owl, or the lion. At least, I sincerely hope that you did not - despite that whole Adam and Eve story over which fabrication I assume you did not have any control - see us, humans, as the crown of creation. And if you did, well, then I can only pity you deeply for what our so-called world leaders display in shortsightedness, greed, lust for power, and incapability to leave principles of religion behind in order to overcome conflicts and to prevent bloodshed over borders of countries, for example.

If you had a plan, I am sure this was not it. Currently, and I guarantee you it is not fed by my parents' fears, I am depressed over and disappointed in my fellow men and me. I thought we'd know better, I'd thought we'd do better by now. But we don't. We are far from being the poor of mind Matthew envisioned (modest, humble, and clear of mind), and you maybe hoped for.

I have no power to change things for the better, save spread little ripples of kindness in the small universe of family, colleagues, and friends I live in. But in the back of my mind I know, that also is too little too late. Deep in my heart, I think, and yes, fear that we are lost.

Humanity has nothing to be proud of.

I am truly sorry to not have written on a more cheerful note.

Your friend,

Milton

Mysterious beginning;

Did you have a start?

What parts of you,

through and threw,

are conglomerate at heart?

Why is my Relationship

Defined as it may be?

Do I have some Leadership?

Am I slacking at some Duty?

If Fault finds you not,

And blame is my game,

Is evil my Nature;

(am I a Crock?)

And as Time is told

What might you be?

When it is out what stops?

Is there truth in tale of

Forewarning hailed or

Should it be taken seriously,

Or is it as reliable as that

Which is pliable for

a wooden balcony?

Dear god,

I wish you were real, but the dangers coming from your people contradict everything you stand for.

What of the crusades? Couldn't they have been stopped? Only one of them was won. Maybe that is how your disapproval has been shown. But still, most christians I know hate me. I used to be one of them. I hated people like me, all in the name of serving you. I just didn't realize what it meant to be different.

I remember my parents telling me nose piercings were a sin. They said that people should be satisfied with blending in. They said that we should want to disapear, to give our souls up to the lord. And that anyone who wanted to be unique could face the fiery river at the end of the world.

Now I am one of those people. I am a person who chooses not to blend in, who chooses to question your undeniable words written in tongues of old. I have chosen to question these things because no one deserves to burn for what they believe in. No one deserves to burn for who they are. No one deserves to have their life taken for a piercing or tattoo. Now that I'm older, I see just how rooted in prejudice and racism those ideas were. You said Jesus came down to give grace to all people, that no one was exempt. Well, I choose to exempt myself. I don't want to stand by those who draw a line in the sand, deciding who is good and who is evil. Nothing is that simple. But, neither do I want to forget the lessons I learned in church of gratitude and acceptance. Never mind, I do. Because when I wanted to tell the world how much my mom hurt me, my uncle came up to me and said, "This is not what Christ would want you to do. Just accept it. Just be grateful for what you have." I almost threw him off the roof. Did he think Christ would want me to sit and watch as my life was taken from me one freedom at a time. Would he want me to live in the shadows, never daring to escape because of the fear I lived in everyday? Do you want me, your own child, to suffer? Just so someone like my mom can continue unpunished.

I didn't used to think there was evil in this world. Now, I know there is. I wish I didn't, but I do. I wish you existed, but you don't. I wish there was some salvation, but there isn't. There is only me. There is only one person to help me out of a rut and that is me. I wish it wasn't that way, but it is. I stopped begging. I stopped asking for your help. It never came. I'm not Jobe. I give up.

Thank you for your response

It took a while but it

finally dawned on me

I prayed for your intervention

You strengthened my resolve

Back straight

Chest out

Chin up

Walk tall as I made you