I heard the voice of God on the intercom at Wal-Mart.
Well, I heard the scratchy, unclear voice of a man
in his mid- to late-forties, but he sounded kind of
like Morgan Freeman, so I did something new, and
dropped to my knees in aisle 15 and shouted “God has spoken!”

I don't know when exactly, but at some point
between the time I went from kneeling to standing,
in a moment frozen by the security cameras,
I thought about it and I realized something.
That voice is the only God we know.

He's pumping His slurring words through
our brains wired to be consumers in a world
that needs to be given something instead. He's the one giving
us a reason to crawl aisle after aisle in search of sale items
given out like the blood and the body at churches.

If you think about it, when He says there's a cleanup
in aisle 3, He's really saying that there's a mess in the Middle East
and that we should send armies with Winchesters from the
gun aisle to resolve the problem with peace-sign
appliqués from the fabric section stitched onto their uniforms.

When He says that the express lane is for 10
items or less He means the wait for Hell is backed up
in this day and age with a shopping cart full of sins and
two kicking babies still screaming about that light saber you
didn't buy them. He means ten black marks or less and heaven
is a parking lot with Hondas and Subarus plastered with stickers
for breast cancer and Jesus. We don't allow Toyotas because heaven's
about quality.

And if you go to Customer Service you can receive amnesty
if you can put up with the elementary school level saints behind the counter,
but, excuse me, Miss, we didn't have high schools and colleges back
when Jesus could have signed my yearbook. And God said that the meek
shall inherit the Earth, but he forgot to mention they wear a size XXL stretch pant
and they surf the aisles with food stamps and Southern accents,
and they discuss White Supremacy like it's scripture.

And people say that God's in Mexico, on a tortilla,
and Mary cries blood on occasion and Jesus appears on toast
around the world, but they don't know the truth.
That we no longer get smiley-faced stickers at the door because
God doesn't like us all that much anymore, and no one really
listens to him when he says Mary has a phone call and she should
report to Customer Service.

Maybe if we were listening we would hear that Joseph was
on the other end, and he was refusing to pay child support again,
because he got skipped on by the Trinity and fades to the Clearance aisle.

Maybe we would understand that Wal-Mart is a twenty-four hour store,
because you can always be saved.