Dear God,

I don’t understand how you can give people Family Advice so freely, when you don’t have a family yourself. By what right do you claim to give this advice?

- Larissa

Larissa,

Larissa, like most people, you presume that I don’t have a family. I do have a family.

Take, for example, my brother Clyde. Poor Clyde has always been under tremendous pressure from our mother and father, and my father’s second wife Jeanne.

Clyde lives under my shadow, and it’s been pretty hard on him. My mother is always nagging him, though she thinks that she’s being encouraging.

“Why don’t you be more like your brother, God?” she says to him. “Look at God. He created the universe. Why don’t you try that?”

My mother doesn’t understand that Clyde just might create a universe, if only she would stop nagging him to do it. Nobody can create a universe under that kind of pressure.

Clyde wants to follow his own path, and live humbly, and just make fish. He made the coelocanth, for example, but when he showed that to our mother, she turned her nose up at it, and said, “Where’s the rest of it?” The coelocanth was so ashamed of itself that
it swam down to the deepest parts of the ocean, and was not seen again for a very long time.

I’ve got Clyde involved with a mentoring program through the United Way of Boston, and twice a week he goes and plays basketball. I’m not seeing that it’s doing him much good. I’d give him a job making galaxies if I didn’t think his pride would be hurt.

My point, Larissa, is that I know a lot about family problems. It’s because my family is so screwed up that I can give people like you advice about how to make your own family life better.

- God

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under All God's Advice, Family Life, Divine Rivals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.