“..Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these..” Lk12v27
TL;DR Jesus’ call to consider the lilies surely applies to all of nature, and so, consider Covid. “Considering” is not nothing, it is not casually observing. Considering demands we see rightly, contemplate holistically and interpret accurately. Before solving for the effects of Covid, in a God-breathed cosmos, Christians should study Covid-as-Covid.
[2] Consider the Lilies: but how?
👀 Consider Covid. But. Covid is unseen and I am blind. Or, Covid is spectral and mercurial and I am dull.
👻 Covid is unseen: a rough beast, pervasive as a hyperobject, a microbe-cum-macrobe, it is unmissably real yet ineffably evanescent, a psychospiritual affliction visits us both asymptomatically and psychosomatically, presenting from moment to moment as barely more than a figment of a clickbait algorithm - a black cat in a dark room that’s not there? I flail squinting. Is that you Rona?
🙈 And I am blind. Blindness at the end of the world is familiarly cinematic:
It is note-worthy the trope of blindness as apocalypse ~ Bird-Box, Day of the Triffids, Blindness, Minority Report..
It is note-worthy the trope of blindness as epiphany - a revelation visited on characters who lose their sight ~ Notes on Blindness, Gloucester in King Lear, Saul travelling to Damascus..
It is note-worthy the trope of the blind-seer as hero in the context apocalypse ~ Book of Eli, Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One following Luke in EpIV, House of Flying Daggers, Neo in Matrix3, Odyssey’s Tiresias, ~Red Light, ~Matrix’s nodding-back blind man, etc..
We fear blindness whilst also revering the blind as somehow otherly powered, suspecting that our sight obscures true sight by desensitising all other senses. Is there a way in which the pandemic is first a lesson in knowing ourselves as rightly blind? A corrective discombobulation. A wilderness experience where everything is unfamiliar. But then. If I relearnt to see, what would I look for? And if I knew what to look for, how should I interpret? Can a lily mean anything? How can I learn to see that?
🔭 2.1 Consider the Lilies: Seek to see, again.
“..seek, and you will find..” Lk11v13-14
🔭🔬 “Seek” Therefore Go. Go into the world and catalogue the variety of a diverse and God-breathed world, explore the infinity of God's provision and character, discern and receive, filter signal from noise, scour. Seek the Spirit. The Spirit is the destination you are looking for, the treasure hidden, the prize waiting to be found, a revelation discovered rediscovered and incrementally expanded in scope by ever more by earnest research.
“..O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you..” Ps63v1
🧐 “earnestly seek”A long hard look. How hard can it be? What is the measure of sufficient seeking? What is sustainable? How does one comport oneself towards the examined life with a level of intensity that is actually effective? Holistically, desperately, ask-seek-knock seeking.
“..And [Zacchaeus] was seeking to see..” Lk19v3-4
👀 👀 “seeking to see..” Active and Recursive. Seek to seek. Be a sensitive seeker with a strategy. Look into looking for and wanting to want. How? (Asking for a Five) Zac “..ran ahead and climbed.. to see..” What is that for me? What is running ahead for me? What is my sycamore? How should I climb?
“..And he said to his servant, “Go up now, look toward the sea.” And he went up and looked and said, “There is nothing.” And he said, “Go again,” seven times. And at the seventh time he said, “Behold, a little cloud like a man’s hand is rising from the sea.”..” 1Ki18v43-44
🔂 “..“go again” seven times..” Repeat. The Bible considers that repetition bears repetition. Injunctions to look, look close, look patiently, look again. Habituate a ritual liturgy of looking.
Considering Covid requires an emotional effort of the will and an engagement of the appetite, repeatedly.
🌸 2.2 Consider the Lilies: Interpret. If-then, more-than.
“..Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! .. Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these..” Lk12v24-27
🔬🌸 “Consider..” What is it to consider? What is the sharp end of its imperative? Jesus argues for arguing from nature. Look. Consider nature. Birdwatch. Binge Blue Planet. Arrange flowers. Hoard and catalogue and observe the glitter and abundance of biology at every scale. Become attuned to the seasons. Engage observational drawing. Specify representational ornament. Ornament. Curate symphonies of nature's artefacts. Retrieve biology from the experts. Decouple the academy from ideology. Unfetter science from utilitarian sponsorship. And allow wonder to unsettle your presuppositions. We obscure nature through abstractions which vandalise it to mere reductive quanta - we would be unmade ourselves by beholding a kernel of nature's terrible beauty. Allow it. Look.
“..But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?..” Mt6v30
↩️ If-then. A minore ad maius. Dwell on the cut flowers fading in the vase on the kitchen table. Are you of more value than them? I cannot think that it is possible to live consistent with a framework of proper equality with the non-human, as Deep Ecologists profess to. You must discriminate. You must prefer humans. Only nihilism can flatten a world, only recklessness and narcissism can self-deceive a world without peculiar human rights and correspondingly peculiar human responsibilities. If-then. If you give an inch to this disparity, what then? The world is unflat, riven with ontological unjustice, unequity, and privilege. From this you must infer upwards, to grasp the alarming more-than-lilies truth that God supplies all and more-than you need for the beautiful flourishing of his Kingdom, his gospel, his creation, patterned in excess of lilies, ornamented more-than. If there is a God, if his lilies are beautiful, if you are worth more than lilies, then infer how much more will he supply for the unanxiety of his children.
↩️ If-then. If such as Corona can transform the world, if some rogue piece of RNA can halt air-traffic, unite neighbourhoods, end non-essential shopping.. - not all this change is good, not all will last, but, I had previously assumed it was impossible to bring late capitalism’s juggernaut to a juddering halt. Covid’s very stark presence in international consciousness offers an unprecedented opportunity for us together to calibrate the imperative to consider all such lilies. Nature is not background noise, it demands a response. Nature is not merely a standing reserve.
↩️ If-then. If-nature-then-how-much-more. A preeminent reason for considering covid-qua-nature is to better understand God-as-supernature and his church-as-supernatural. Considering Covid-as-the-lilies should reframe my place in nature, and sober my self-piteous sense of the possible and so chasten my metaphor making and harrow my “church-planting” “going-viral” “contagious disruption” allegories.
Considering Covid supposes that there is a there there. And if so, then, there is more-than. What is it?
🔀 2.3 Consider the Lilies: Foggiest? Do not not interpret.
“..He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times..” Mt16v2-3
“And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, ‘There will be scorching heat,’ and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Lk12v55-56
🌅 “You know how to interpret..” Don't you? Do I? In Mt16 Jesus accuses the Pharisees for their unread sky at night. In Lk12 he accuses the crowd at large. Is he making misinterpretation a culpable offence? More than that. These interpreters should know better. Jesus makes disinterpretation a culpable offence. The universe is sufficiently ordered, sufficiently patterned, sufficiently legible as a domain of cause and effect, that I bear a responsibility to interpret signal from noise and to live accordingly with a good-enough moral/theological framework. I observe epidemic disinterpretation - in my millennial self and in so-called postmodern culture at large: the sanitised hypocrisy of abdicating epistemic responsibility (see Mt21v27 “let's say we don't know”), the infinite palliative agnosticism that claims we cannot know, the self-soothing disinformation which ambiguates order and wilfully disconnects cause from effect. Chaos ensues.
🌫 See meteorologist JBP elsewhere: “..maybe they generated the fog, to hide what they did not want to see.” (12RfL, Ch10) Fog is an intriguing phenomena, a thickness of atmosphere, an opaque air, a closeness and a distancing - conjuring our immersion in nature, while also, our alienation from it. Defogging is the antidote? Yes, if and insofar as we can disambiguate access. Set your own house in order, tell the truth, or at least, don't lie, and be precise in your speech.. Ignoring for the moment, the detail of his advice, there is an underlying call to take responsibility for your language, to let your yes be yes. JBP, perhaps, exaggerates the extent to which this is a contemporary predicament, or perhaps not. Similar has long been the case, Jonah is called to a Ninevah in which “..120,000 persons who [did] not know their right hand from their left..” Jh4v11 In this way, let your yes be yes, your left be left, call a spade a spade, and so your pronouns and so your identities. JBP's surprisingly controversial, surprisingly disruptive, good-enough common sense maxim, is coupled with counsel to study nature. Consider the phenomenology of being-in-fog as a mindful and political action, consider the world as it is, be it lobsters' serotonin or Ruskin's morphology of leaves or Christopher Alexander’s butterfly wings, in all the inestimably rich throwness of our being in nature. So. Go. Observe, draw, speak, imitate as an act of rebellion against the systemic disinformation’s fog of war.
🌧 “Like clouds and wind without rain, is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give.” Pr25v14 Nature is what it is, and it is interpretable. So should you be. I want to be of substance, to follow through, to grasp the world weightily, to be consequential, to be of consequence. True seeing, true interpreting, in all things, has its allegory and instruction in attending to the natural world. God let me learn to see and understand, and to speak with like consistency, to attend to the logos, and carry meaning deep into the modern maelström.
🌌 “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.” Blade Runner's paean to humanness as it is being lost, Roy Batty, a robot, has seen and recognised the heavens declaring what humans in their depravity and hypocrisy have forgotten. Considering Covid is more obvious than I’m apt to protest. There is a common-sense good-enough revelation that is sufficient to inform necessary action. I am far more likely to obscure the data that which I know how to interpret than I am to lack the data.
Considering Covid requires interpretation - over-against the counter-narrative fog which I create to obscure conviction. You know how to interpret. I know how to interpret. Especially swimming in our thickly Judeo-Christian cultural inheritance, we are without excuse.
🌬️ 2.4 Consider the Lilies: Nature speaks of the God who is
“..Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” Ac14v17
“..The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard..” Ps19v1-3
“..For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse..” Rm1v19-20
“..For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together..” Col1v16-17
God’s qualities are legible in nature. God is not Covid. Nor does it seem productive to attribute a bland or capricious authorship to Covid by God. But. To the extent that I harm the world primarily by my self-relation, my dis-Othered myopia, my totalitarian rendering of the world in my own image, my idolatry of abstraction ~ Covid’s personal terror and global disruption would offer God’s own re-realing, a theophanic recalibration. Covid is a bellowing testimony to a world worlding beyond my modelling of it. Nature is not me. Nature is not a reductive mechanism. Nature is not a tame lion. Nature is not nothing.
Consider Covid because nature is God-breathed, nature is not-me and nature’s natureness is the gestalt I need to disrupt my reductivism.
If this [2.4] considers that Nature-in-general is a revelation of God-in-general, what does it look like in more detail? Inconvenient, unwieldy, unstable, woo woo? Cowardly, I tend to dismiss my own God hypothesis before it really gets going. I lack conviction to grasp the nettle of a form of speculative realism wherein a greater reverence for nature and a greater humility of comportment and a more total responsibility would be demanded of me.
I have this feeling that humanity could do vastly better in the ontological key it uses to inform its coexistence with nature. I have this feeling that Christianity should be that better interpretation. However, it would need to be better than [1] aloof evangelicalism’s dismissive, cerebral and recreational engagement with opt-in creation-care as band-aid for protestant modernity’s rampant environmental exploitation. Ditto conversely, such a Christian interpretation would need to be better than [2] proto-pantheist sentimental eco-Christianities in its reconciling the necessary and inevitable technological project of a humanity differentiated from non-humanity. How?
The bible repeatedly hints at and speaks directly to a re-enchanted universe - a natural world whose lions and lambs are participants also in final and ongoing redemption. It portrays a natural world which contends for something greater than itself and resists reduction. A natural world which can be communed with and brought to a sibling kinship in the telos of our churching. I prodded this in Living Stones and A Theology of Rocks and I’ll prod it again here - caveating the tentativity of this whole enterprise. Covid’s bad-guy persona stress tests this thought experiment. Writing here to invite critique where my re-enchanted account of the universe still lacks proper explanatory force.
2.5 - nature’s doxological metaphors
2.6 - nature’s didactic proverbs
2.7 - nature’s direct activity
⛰️ 2.5 Consider the Lilies: Nature Speaks, Metaphorically
“the kingdom of heaven is like.. […]” Mt13; Lk6; Mk4; Mt20..
“..For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands..” Is55v12
🦁 The Lion of Judah calls oaks of righteousness. The farmer scattering seed buys a pearl of great price. The Lamb of God battles a brood of vipers. The Kingdom of parables is like a box of chocolates.. We know God by metaphors. We live by metaphors.
🔡 All of language is a metaphor by extension. Highly recommend a16z’s podcast on this formidable year of neologisms. Words create worlds. Not all metaphors are created equal, how we metaphorise our plagues directs the actions we take to manage them - highly recommend this article reviewing Covid’s metaphors via Susan Sontag essay on AIDS. So now, against Covid, are we an army or a fire brigade?
🛠️ There is a dynamic tension between we as a language-using community, and the source material that undergirds our language, and the consensus mechanism we employ for adopting certain meanings over others. Christians who would be logocentric people-of-the-book have a dog in this fight, and should as such, be winsome gatekeepers, transparent in our semiotic filtration and semiotic enriching processes, and ebullient in our sponsorship of alchemists, prophets and artists in their business of language-making and culture-forging.
🌱 Further, Christians should advocate access to nature to this end. While nature is not merely a standing reserve to buttress my subjectivity with convenient metaphors, it is paradigmatically more substantial than not-nature for this purpose of communicating the gospel. Jesus’ parables are agrarian because his context was agrarian, but also because that agrarian world order is closer to the real than our hermetically coddled and antiseptically sterile landscape for language. Covid’s invasion offers to re-anchor our metaphor-making in the unabstract. I say this, but I’m not clear how. I take for granted that nature offers a great reservoir for meaning, and so, for me, liberally, biology metaphors abound Seeds; Water; Viruses offering themselves as synecdoches for all of nature. Are they? How then do I filter my anthropocentricism? How do I transcend cruel naturalism? How might I weigh technological choices against nature or in the grain of nature?
📚 There is something in the process and ritual and gift of story-telling which offers to break this loop, by telling tales we co-attend the task of observing and articulating the active behaviour of real reality over non-static time. This is no very new idea, it just seems to have surfaced in a few places I’m listening to recently.
Guardian flagging in this in Van Tam’s better Covid metaphors;
Elena Semino “Not Soldiers but Fire-fighters” – Metaphors and Covid-19
Paul Vanderklay advocating story-telling as primary, healing in itself and key to the pastoral mandate (~11:00 on stories ~20:00 on pastors as story curators)
Pageau/Dreher positioning story-telling as resistance and resilience (~23:00)
Familiarising ourselves not merely with the image of nature, but with the behaviour and interdependencies of nature’s beings and processes, seems to me vital in better metaphor-making. Covid, for having interfered with time, order and relations so conspicuously, lays bare the story we had been telling ourselves about nature, and demands new metaphors from new stories.
So, considering Covid-as-metaphor, and metaphor-as-story-contingent, and that story-as-finally-redemptive situated in a cosmically comic arc of a history bending toward justice. I want to believe that this metaphorical mode advances my ability to cooperate with the good by participating with nature’s doxology, but also, to weather suffering heroically, and to engage granularly in the specific next right thing - by considering Covid-as-Covid in the day of small things.
“..“He who has ears, let him hear.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?”..” Mt13v9-10
↪️ Because. Lilies are parables. Parables are if-then more-than devices. They are instructive as artefacts. And they are paradigmatic as praxes. Jesus could speak in parables because of who he was: parable-attuned and parabled-inclined and because of the parabolic reality he has created all around us in every direction. Jesus’ parables are about layers and linkage, symbols of and for substance of his bottomlessly depthed and coherently networked semiotic universe. We should hear in parables, see in parables, speak in parables.
👂 Ears: We all have ears no? What then is Jesus emphasising about such a quality of perceiving? That parables especially require a deliberate hearing, an intentional listening? .. v10 Why parables? But really why? What are the four causes of Jesus' parabolic discourse?
Materially. Because the Kingdom's very substance is poetry, made of layered layers, a pregnantly fractal thing found at work in a million metaphors.
Formally. The Kingdom as a whole is a giant poem, all parables function in conformity to the essence of the whole, parabolism is a true Truth.
Efficiently. Because Jesus' mind is fervently creative, bubbling over with allusion and metaphor, constantly buzzing with this-which-is-like-that.
Finally. Towards the parabolisation of his listeners, dignifying them with poetry, the engagement of true-hearing of which is itself healing. We hear miraculously.
Consider Covid because nature is a metaphor.
🐜 2.6 Consider the Lilies: Nature Speaks, Proverbially
“..Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest..” Pr6v6-8
“..Four things on earth are small, but they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer; the rock badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the cliffs; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard you can take in your hands, yet it is in kings' palaces. Three things are stately in their tread; four are stately in their stride: the lion, which is mightiest among beasts and does not turn back before any; the strutting rooster, the he-goat, and a king whose army is with him..” Pr30v24-31
“..Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves..” Mt10v16
⚖️ Ought. The Bible continually portrays that what nature Is implies an Ought. It is selective in what and selective in how. What is the interpretative key for imitating this way of speaking of nature? Perhaps I might attempt more humbly that Is implies a Could. Nature suggests an if-then for virtue at least in the scale of endeavour. If an ant can then you could.. Therefore if Covid can up-end society, then do not think it impossible to do likewise. Seems a safe reading. But the bible is vexingly more bullish on this proverbial and prescriptive reading of nature.
↪️ Proverbial maximalism. Salt’s saltiness ~ is it salient to discipleship because Jesus selected it? Is it singular or are there legion other salts and attendant saltinesses, other doves’ innocenses, ants’ dilligences and serpents’ cunnings that we ought to discern and so make imperative? Even with all the epistemic caveats in the world, it seems that a God-authored universe would press oughts into all things authored. How? What are Covid’s proverbs? Answers on a postcard.
Consider Covid because nature is a proverb.
🐴 2.7 Consider the Lilies: Nature Speaks, Literally
“..Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness..” 2Pt2v15
“..Now the LORD God appointed a plant and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint. And he asked that he might die..” Jh4v6-8
God interferes with nature for didactic purposes: messaging via talking donkeys, dew on sheepskin, burning bushes as revelations and remonstrations to believers.
Elsewhere, God’s interference is less as nudges or breadcrumbs for hapless protagonists as it is deux ex machina routing plot points in the construction of a Kingdom that is unambiguously God-made: in plagues on Egypt, partings of bodies of water, earthquake prison-breaks etc
Elsewhere, Jesus interferes with nature, sign-posting his divinity, correcting misconstructions Jewish theology, and just being irrepressible compassionate incarnate supernature: calming storms; turning water to wine; addling fishing; healing; healing; healing; walking on water; walking through walls.. But, not turning stones into bread.
👹 How does God addle nature now? Does he? And how is it practicable to speak of such? Neither Theological Intellectualism’s clockwork of deistic lights-out factory naturalism nor Theological Voluntarism’s lumpen charade of God as perpetual puppeteer satisfy. Somehow a dynamic tension or third way is needed to locate appropriate enchantment.
🌪️ In this way, I am less interested to trace a problem-of-evil thread. I am less interested to declare on whether, in crude terms, Covid is and/or is not an act of God. I’m picking at the scab of ambiguous agency. It’s not clear to me ~ do I want a God who interferes with nature? Not as an apologist’s idea, but in a practical theology, boots on the ground, push coming to shove, rubber on the road, shit in the fan sort of a way. How does our, my, your defacto theology of causality affect the lifestyle choices you’re making. We’re all on the spectrum between butterflies-cause-tornadoes and gays-cause-hurricanes ~ both seem unhinged and ungovernable, both in their own way are murky and capricious, but the space in between lacks definition, equipment or granularity.
🎲 Mine own tendency is towards a defacto chaotic fatalism defined by a residual hard wariness of supernaturalism, and so I live a hesitant agency with a buried talent (Mt25v25) as a man indoors (Pr22v13/Pr26v13). Frenetically spinning in zero-gravity between everything-is-caused and nothing-is-caused. Jesus interrupts that with a voice from the outside. Doesn’t he?
Consider Covid because nature is God-addled.
🌍 2.8 Consider the Lilies: Covid-19 as harbinger
🦠 These #CoronavirusBible posts seek to look obliquely at phenomena, and by a sort of defamiliarisation to consider the presuppositions upstream that have generated the responses and effects of the pandemic. I feel more and more a dissatisfaction with how I have understood Covid and the equipment we have for talking about it. And, Covid is a dress-rehearsal for climate change. We must find better meaning-making methods.
⛪ Within the church, I am dissatisfied. Covid has been counterintuitively and counterproductively solved by a rash of crude approximations of the goods and services delivered via Zoom. Church off-line activity has centred on ready at hand targets for sanitised compassion and mediocre acts of mercy, food-bank paternalism by a middle-class rallying for revitalised neighbourliness according to a post-code lottery. Covid has not summoned a call for justice (except shrill Bishops bickering about Cummings) or a call for repentance or a taking stock of our complicity in the inequitable complacencies of our national governance. There has been a marked lack of political radicality, a lack of prophetic vision, a lack of long haul hope. Covid corroded the fragile hooks suspending a veneer of functionality that long veiled a hollow church of irresilient Sunday christians. The pandemic sucked the air out of the plausibility of my ecclesiology - I had considered myself a church-maximalist, in the sense of a small-group-of-thoughtful-committed-citizens-can-change-the-world. I had believed church to be the perfectly imperfect bottom-up radical infrastructal revolutionary ordinariness whose unity in diversity would obviate communism and displace capitalism etc etc. Zoom.
🏙️. Beyond the church, I am dissatisfied. Covid has cultivated a doubling down on the deep faith in the status quo. Even build-back-better assumes an eventual return to a recognisable normal, and is meanwhile preoccupied with medicalised abstractions of infection rates, politicised one-up-manship of PPE squabbles, sentimentalised coping-by-clapping distractions and fringe agitators calling to hodl looroll, bitcoin and guns in the face of simmering economic collapse.
Covid, especially Covid-as-harbinger-for-climate-change, needs a better diagnosis, especially from the church. One that is not reactive and not politically expedient, not a pragmatic adaptation of a lacklustre normal, one that is not a tired apologetic for generic suffering. I must, we must, understand Covid within a symbolic, systemic, prophetic and holistic frame. Help me, God.