God kept sledding into the first part of the seventh day, realizing then that He still had work to do before next week. Looking at His work schedule and prioritizing, He chose to create Man and take the rest of the day off. Unlike future habits, God chose to finish His work at the beginning of the day instead of waiting until 10:00 at night and cramming a full day’s work into several hours of a panicked frenzy. So Man came to be. He looked at God, God looked at him, and they both thought, “Gee, that face looks familiar.” God showed Man the snow and His sled. Man snorted at Him. God shoved Man’s face into the snow and held it there until Man agreed to go sledding. Once he took a ride down the mountain, Man had a lot of fun, maybe more than God Himself. The only problem was that the sled belonged to God. He only let Man sled down the mountain one time to His ten. Finally, Man got sick of it. After a ride to the bottom of the mountain, he dragged himself out of a snowdrift, grabbed a rock, and carved something into the bottom of the sled. He pulled it back to the top and sat down on it. God said, “Give Me My sled back. It’s My turn.” Man said, “No, it’s my sled now.” God said, “What?! How could that be your sled? I created it!” Man smiled and said, “I don’t see Your name on it.” He held up the sled, showing a rough carving of the letters M-A-N on the bottom. God got pissed and threatened to whitewash Man again. Man said he didn’t care since God had to go to work tomorrow while he could stay on the mountain and keep sledding. God said, “Go to Hell.” *Poof!* Man was gone. God took His sled back, slightly disgruntled, and decided that He’d had enough sledding for today. A bit later, His alarm went off. God planned on spending a nice, quiet couple bits of time watching “ER” and then go back to work the next day. Unfortunately, God hadn’t created any commercials, so the show had no funding and was promptly cancelled. God immediately created cursing. “Shit.” That night, God decided that He should start over. This time, He could sit up in Heaven and watch everyone else agonize through the week, enjoy the brief respite of the weekend, then go back to work for another week. Although He couldn’t go sledding this way, He could still occasionally whitewash people. Or drop pianos on their heads.
Once again, there was nothing. Then, there was…
—Shawn C. Bakken
