PART 3: Clumsily Destructive Mud-People with Hearts of Gold

HUMANS STILL DON'T GET IT and GOD ATTEMPTS A HEART-to-HEART

Using our fleshy, three pound mud-lumps a few feet above our asses, we started getting really good at being humans. We celebrated this by creating better places to live life and trying to seperate ourselves more and more from our plain-old-muddy surroundings. The Greek Mud-People and the Roman Mud-People were especially good at this, and very good at using their lumps and thinking up a lot of ways to keep Mud-People going, and a lot of really creative ways of turning Mud-People back into plain-old-mud. The better they get at loving and laughing, the better they get at arguing and turning each other into plain-old-mud.

At this point, God could see that the Mud-People were becoming too schizophrenic and were making everything meaningless by going all crazy-go-nuts with trying to make cool new ways to "love", "laugh", "argue", and "turn-each-other-into-plain-old-mud." At some point creativity stops being creative and beautiful and starts being insanity, with a death wish (i.e. for more on this, Google "famous artist suicides").

God is frustrated with humans again and decides to try something besides the flood thing he did last time with Mud-Noah, the naked drunk guy. God decides he better get muddy and try to tell us what it's all about, face-to-face. He chose Roman-Occupied, overcrowded Bethlehem to stage his entrance into the mud. Let me tell you, the stuff in that stable didn't smell like mud...

Ed. Note: Things can get confusing and complicated here, trying to figure out how God became human and stayed God and all of that. The best thing our fleshy, three pound mud-brains have figured is something where we claim that God is actually three things, but not three seperate things... just one thing. Hm. We call it Trinity, because that is more managable than saying the whole thing and trying to explain it every time. Plus it's a great name for a church.

God-as-human, named Jesus, tried to have a heart to heart with us. He talked plainly about why love was best, and how to love in a non-crazy-go-nuts-homicidal kind of way. He said stuff about not trying to turn people into plain-old-mud over stupid arguments, and to try to help each other deal with our humanity better. He even used mud to fix us some. And to make some Mud-People better.

The long and short of it is that his ideas were not very comfortable and we murdered him. We used a particularly creative device to try to turn him back into plain-old-mud.

So it goes. He didn't play by our rules and wouldn't stay plain-old-mud. We started trying to do what he said. We got better at loving and laughing, and continued to get better at arguing and turning each other back into plain-old-mud.

To be continued...