As You Have Done

As You Have Done


Marching with the solemnity of a condemned criminal on the way to execution, I was walking through a burned down forest. Fog cloaked the post-nuclear moonscape. Ash drifted from the slate-gray sky like radioactive snowflakes. Legs heavy, body wanting to collapse into a heap and decay into dust, I came across a road. Overturned cars, bodies blackened to dust by the nuclear inferno. A graveyard lay beyond. A flaming church, once white and pristine, stood in the center of the graveyard, surrounded by tombstones. I approached. On the steps of the church was a bible, lying open. The pages were blackened but for a single sentence. “As you have done unto the least of these, you have done unto me.”

Was I, alone and afraid, the last person on Earth? What had happened? I’d woken up….and nothing was there. In a trance I picked up the book. It crumbled to dust in my grasp. Saddened, weary of seeing the destruction, I turned away and headed down the road. I’d have liked to have read that holy book. But it was not completely destroyed…..that phrase, a detail showing humankind guilty of every crime, the victim of those crimes was God, remained, if not on paper, forever tattooed in my memory. “As you have done unto the least of these, you have done unto me.”