Can God create a boulder too heavy for him to lift?
Not anymore.
On the 8th day of creation, God made a boulder so heavy he was unable to lift it. The results were terrible. Thoth mocked him ruthlessly. Brahma created a dozen more and dared God to lift them. Ahura Mazda just sat in the corner and grinned, while Thor offered to smash the boulder but was unable to cheer up the Lord. The 8th day was a bad day.
But on the 9th day, God hit the gym. He lifted, he jogged on the treadmills and he vowed that he would lift that boulder one day. People laughed. They called him the ‘flabby god’ or the ‘ancient one’ but he kept going undaunted by their mockery. There were rough days to be sure, days where he doubted himself and almost didn’t go. But he never missed a day. He didn’t let himself fail. After a couple thousand years he met a girl named Mary at the gym and the rest is history.
In 1764, God showed up on the playground. All the other gods had graduated, of course. None were there to see it, but God walked up to that boulder he’d made millennia before and without so much as a grunt he lifted it, and held it up high, and God smiled.
And he also shed a tear. God realized that in those years since his initial failure, it wasn’t his muscular growth that defined him. It was the adult he’d become. No longer did he curse the world to flood when he was disappointed in his people, no longer did he demand blood sacrifices. In those years he’d spent yearning for that one goal he realized he’d lived his whole life.
God retired a few years later and moved to Vermont to write his memoirs. They included the story of the boulder he couldn’t lift, and of his life after. In 1882, God died surrounded by his family and friends. Buddha was there, Thor and Odin, all the Egyptian and Greek pantheons. Many of those who made fun of God all those years ago.
And they all knew. They knew he’d done it and though he was gone, they knew the character of the great deity. The God that never gave up. The God they once mocked, yes, but in those long years after, at work and at parties, at home and abroad: He was the God they called “friend.”
