The day after I shot the video game hippo, I got a letter in the mail. At the time, I didn’t think the two events were related, but what did I know? I was only six, and when you’re six, you can find a paper message in your fortune cookie and think you’ve won the lottery. So I ripped the envelope open and began to decipher its contents with great excitement. That’s another good thing about being six—every letter you get is an invitation to a birthday party or a check from Grandma. But this one strayed from the norm. The letter read, in handwriting so bad it could have been mine, “Your bad and you shudent have shot the hipo. Yours Truly, The Lard.” Of course, Sunday school had taught me that The Lard was my friend, but I was still a little scared. I pondered the message for a while. What could have prompted Heavenly Jesus to write me a letter telling me I was bad? Did this mean I would receive coal for Christmas? I put the letter in my drawer and went outside to play.

It sat there forgotten until the next week, when it was joined by another letter from The Lard, who now spelled His name with an “e.” “Dear Kenny,” it read, “I dont no wy you are so mean to your oreo cokies but you gotta stop. Yours Truly, The Lerd.” Two letters from The Lerd? Who could be so lucky? I decided that if the Divine Father wanted me to dig my Oreos back out of the ground, I would do so. Fifteen minutes later, crunching on a slightly muddied cookie, I reflected that they had not shown any signs of sprouting. Good thing The Lerd told me before it was too late. From that point on, I regarded The Lerd as someone to be obeyed.

As I grew up, the letters continued. I got at least three every month, and in times of Heavenly crisis, sometimes as many as two every day. The spelling improved, and the name became, consistently, “The Lord.” I stuck to God’s wisdom until I was about eight, when I realized that it was a little strange for The Lord to focus so strongly on my actions toward my younger brother Dylan. “Give Dylan more cookies,” said God. “You need to share your comic books with him.” Come December, I would receive heavenly mandates concerning Dylan’s Christmas presents. Sometimes they were kind of threatening. “Buy Dylan a pet snake for Christmas or I will send you to Hell, where they have no puppies or Juicy Juice,” declared God. Fortunately, the next week, He changed His holy mind. “Don’t worry. A stuffed snake is okay too. Or a fuzzy llama.” Eventually my entire allowance was going to further God’s cause, and I, like many eight-year-old children, was monitoring my candy intake closely. When the lack of money precipitated a sharp drop in weekly sugar ingestion, I irrationally decided to become an atheist. If God was going to ask so much of me, I would just pretend He didn’t exist. However, a week before my “No God” plan was to go into effect, I walked in on Dylan writing a letter about Reese’s Pieces in God’s characteristic shaky handwriting and dark green ink. He tried to convince me that God had asked him to write it that week, but I knew he was the weekly author.

I would have stuffed him in a cardboard box and left it at that, but I was shamed by how much smarter than me he was. And he had sometimes used his persuasive power to do good. After all, he followed the precedent set by the Oreos and saved me from my stupid mistakes. It was a humbling thought, that it was my little brother, not God, who had explained the difference between a crossword puzzle and a coloring book, who had advised against eating chess pieces, who had commanded me not to pour salt on banana slugs unless I intended to eat them, and then told me, salt or no salt, to please never eat them again because it was disgusting. Of course, he was right. To this day, I still look at Dylan and envy his intelligence. What I wouldn’t give to have a mind like that, capable of dancing circles around gazelles, capable of casting mental boulders into the mental sea, and capable of coming up with decent metaphors.

As for God, my faith was shaken that day. But what is faith, really? I can tell you right now, I have no idea. Never did. That’s for smart people like Dylan to figure out. And since I didn’t know what faith was, it grew right back. Today, I see God everywhere I look. I see his Heavenly Majesty in the road kill on the freeway, in the scribbled death threats I get in the mail, in the Dyslexic Canine Association’s advertisements, even in my jars of peanut butter. Okay, I drew the faces in the peanut butter with a spoon, but God is everywhere. All you need is a good hard look around. Although I have to admit, it helps when He sends you letters.