Are You There God

The man lay painfully wedged between two large boulders, his position an anomaly only the cruelest of fates could bring to a man. In one moment he’d been sure-footed, gingerly climbing the cliff. In the next instant, he was tumbling into a cavity lying beneath a crevice in that side of ancient rock. As he fell, his cell phone clattered briefly and landed somewhere beneath him. Then to his utter horror, he realized that instead of landing, like his cell phone, at the very bottom of the small opening through which he’d slipped, his body was now lodged tightly between the two boulders. Desperately, the man tried to extricate himself from the rocks’ cruel grip, but he was now aware his right arm was dislocated, and the way he was pinned made his struggle to free himself futile. He had no place to put his feet for leverage to push himself either upward or downward. He was suspended mid-air between those two miserable blocks of stone. He imagined those boulders lying in wait for centuries to one day enslave him, an intruder in their realm of quietude. . . That solitude he so often craved was now as burdensome to him as the two huge stones which had become his personal millstones. Unable to even reach behind him for his meager supply of water, the man knew, unless rescued, his time was short. The magnitude of his misfortune washed over him. He was in a desert with no water. The place he had chosen for his weekend excursion was remote, and his chance of being discovered, even more remote. He could see daylight from above streaming down on him, but people, even if they happened to be in this area, would never see him. He thought about his parents, siblings and the girl he’d recently met and fancied spending a lifetime with. . . a lifetime! How tenuous life was! With these thoughts he closed his tired eyes. In the dead of night, chilled to the bone, the man jerked awake. Any tiny hope to which he’d clung seemed to dissolve in that moment. He began to sob. "Oh God," he cried, "Are you there, God? "Do you hear me? Do you see me? I hurt so bad, God! Please, if you are there, God, help me. Help me." Another day became two, three, and then four. Parched and crying dry tears, he repented of any bad he‘d done. He felt some small comfort in knowing he’d done mostly good. Yielding to fate, he looked upward to that small space of heaven he could see and closed his eyes for the final time. . Above him, gazing down from a thinly veiled partition in the sky, was his guardian, who also had wept with him, but she had wept not for a life being cut short. Her charge could not know the happiness in store for him. She had wept instead for the fear and the suffering that he’d had to endure for those four long days alone. As he closed his eyes, she shed her final tear and spread strong graceful wings for her descent. 10/14/2015: Inspired by a true story that I saw a movie about, but I made many changes to that story and have given it a very different outcome. For the Contest of the Silent One.