Training for Gods

You are in the third day of the God Workshop and already The Almighty is giving the class a pop quiz. You kinda half-assed the first couple of days, nodding off during the Powerpoint and drawing nude
cartoons in your notebook. You never wanted to be a god. You just died six months ago. You just figured you’d tried something new, so you got a copy of the White Clouds, and saw the listing for divinity training. But now, you’re thinking to yourself, “I paid three hundred dollars for this seminar, they should be giving me content. I shouldn’t regurgitating information from the first two days.” You look at your test sheet. It is a quiz on prayers.  You know very little about this topic because that was
the point of the lecture when drool was dropping from your chin.

You read the first question: “If a seventeen year old earnestly prays to get laid, you answer that prayer…a) immediately b) never  c) in conjunction with a matching seventeen year girl who is wishing the same thing d) on a case by case basis.” You narrow it down between C and D, but then miraculously remember that you were actually semi-awake when The Almighty was breaking down the categories of prayers. But wait a minute, is praying for sex fall under a granted? Think…does this qualify as a prayer that will answer itself? Well, kinda. Most seventeen year olds pray for sex and for the majority of them, sex will happen for them regardless of prayer. Sex is the purpose of life as the Almighty demonstrated during the ice-breaker. So, it is a granted prayer, and you know never to answer those prayers because they will someday answer themselves.

Why do you humans do that? Pray for things that can happen on their own? You did the same thing as a human. Rosetta said she would come to your room at 2:00 am to help you “pack” for  your road trip and crash on your bed, next to you, and you still went into the bathroom and prayed that this would be the night.

Anyway, the first question jogs your memory. You remember that the opposite of granteds are zeros. Prayers that have absolutely no chance of happening. Like a grown ass corporate lawyer praying for his childhood days at Quinnipiac Lake to come back. Humans know the rules. They can’t go back in time to skinny dip in some random body of water that they visited in the 70’s. Zeros are like granteds; they never get answers. Which leaves the only coinies. Coinies are situations that can be arbitrarily decided…like with a coin toss. That helps you answer the question about someone praying to recover from a disease. That one’s easy: you use your discretion and choose whether or not you want to answer that or you just go heads, tails. 

You guess on the next couple of questions, then you get to number ten. It reads, “A vagabond goes to a food pantry and is given a bottle of Poland Spring water, but wishes that it was a bottle of Jack Daniels. How do you answer that prayer?” You are sweating because you don’t want to fail and waste your 300 smackaroos. So you have to think of something fast. There, you’ve thought of it. Humans cheat, so can gods. You ask the student to your right what the answer to number ten is. 

He huffs and puffs, but finally says, “That is a miracle prayer, dummy. The rule with miracle prayers is that if a god has performed the miracle before, it need not be done again because said god proved that it could happen and that’s all that matters. Water has been turned into wine before—a guy by the name of 'Jesus'. Ring a bell? Don’t ask me for any more answers.” He covers his paper with his elbow and shrinks away from you.

The Almighty signals every one to put their pencils down. The last question may have gotten you six out of ten. Although you are on the brink of failing, you turn your paper in, leave class early, and convince yourself that the greater lesson is that gods are not perfect anyway. 

-Sidik Fofana