Damn it, I just got back from another vacation with no internet service and now I’ve got 535 friggin’ new prayers to sort through in my inbox. Guess I shouldn’t really be surprised by now, since it’s been the same story with these needy, clingy humans pretty much every week for the past twenty years.

What do they want from me? I create the universe once and now they think I’ve got the bandwidth to micromanage every single crazy little asswipe down there? Well I don’t. I’m a big picture thinker, an ideas guy — I don’t sweat the small stuff. I’m all for delegation, and that’s why I liked it when my side projects started figuring out how to govern themselves.

I’m not even going to bother reading through all 535 this time, because it’s always the same thing. “God, can you please stop these terrible things from happening?” or “God, can you please smite these murderers with fiery deaths?” or “God, we all look to you for guidance in figuring out how to prevent these formidable military-grade weapons from falling into the wrong hands and killing innocents, please advise.” Yeah, I’m probably just going to trash these new prayers straight away, because this is all so repetitive it gives me a headache and I don’t want to be accused of helicopter deity-ing. You’ve got to let your creations sort their own problems out once in a while, because that’s how they learn.

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m perfectly happy to intervene from time to time when things are getting way too out of hand, coming in hot with some vis major in extreme cases. But it’s usually on a grander scale. Like when I absolutely soaked Pharaoh’s entire army so my man Moses could peace out of Egypt, or when I incinerated those blasphemers and rapists in Sodom and Gomorrah in a rain of fire and sulphur — that was pretty epic. I guess there was that one more detail-oriented episode when I turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt — well you can’t be all carrot and no stick, amirite? People stop respecting you eventually. Everyone needs a good smite once in a while.

But these gun violence-related prayers they keep blasting my inbox with — all on official U.S. Senate and House of Representatives letterhead, mind you — I mean, come on, save your prayers for the things you truly can’t fix yourselves, like asteroids and earthquakes and shit that’s really outside your domain. I want to see them try a little bit harder before involving me in this kind of stuff. Do they really think I have enough time or salt to turn every assault rifle-wielding asshole into a pillar of salt? This is classic boy who cried wolf.

Even if I were to answer their prayers this time around, all I’d probably tell them is the same damn thing I told them at the start and then have had to remind them of over and over again since then: thou shalt not kill. It’s simply beyond me why they keep on manufacturing and selling these weapons so obviously designed to kill, and then are so surprised when these weapons kill. Fairly dense creations if you ask me, perhaps created in my image but certainly not with my intellect. Do they need me to issue a new set of commandments and spell it out clearly for them?

Maybe I’ll do just that. Where’s my next messiah at? Or honestly, sometimes I get to thinking that maybe this is all hopeless and that I should just give up and go back to the drawing board. It sure has been a while since I last flooded them out and started over, and I’m always up for a new project.