A Broken Hallelujah

Rob looked at Dalton’s pained face and nodded with resignation. “Okay.” He mumbled as his eyes filled with tired tears. “But before you go, just tell me this…why does God hate me so much?” Dalton looked at Rob blankly, caught off guard by his question, but Rob continued undaunted. “I mean, with all that sacrificing and praying you’ve been doing all your life, you must have some secret knowledge to share by now. C’mon tell me, Father Shea…what have I done in my life that was so bad to deserve this? Did I not sleep with enough women the way my father did? Or was it that I was too faithful to my wives or did not abandon my mother and brothers? Oh yes, I know…it was that I nurtured kids who were abused and treated like trash. What Dalton—tell me, Damn it! Yeah well…you want to know what I really think? There isn’t anyone ‘up there’ running things—there can’t be! If there were, he would truly be incompetent, don’t you think? But maybe we’re the crazy ones, making up all these stories that never really seem to check out, and yet we still go on reciting them to ourselves, each other and worst of all, our children until one day, we’re lying in a bed dying from doing good while all those who could give a shit simply put us in the ground and continue telling the same old damn tales. Yeah…That’s MY story. How do you like it?” Rob sat back, spent from his tirade. Dalton remained silent for a long while as he pondered Rob’s words. Finally he spoke.