If You Could Be God: Story #1.
If you could be God, how would you change the world?
I started asking people that question a few years ago. Why? Because I wanted to know what they would do if they had unlimited power to remake the world in their image.
I wasn’t surprised to hear that virtually everyone is passionate about curing cancer and other diseases, because those problems often hit close to home. People also wanted to end starvation, prevent wars, clean up the environment, prevent climate change, even fix potholes in the streets.
Then a conversation with a young woman who worked at a health club pointed me in a direction that I didn’t expect. After she identified the usual problems, I asked if there was anything else she would do, perhaps to change her personal life. She confessed that if she could be God, she’d send her manager to Hell for how he treated the employees.
Revenge was not the kind of answer I was looking for, but from that day on, when anyone finished telling me the big things they hoped to do, I asked if there was anything else.
In 2018, I published a collection of the answers to the question in 19 short stories featuring what I call the “anything else answers.” These stories appeared in my book, You Can Change The World, Even if You’re Nobody. I have updated them a bit from how they appeared in the book.
As you know, if you’ve written a book in the last ten years, it’s not easy for readers other than family and close friends to find your work or care about it amidst the enormous amount of material out there. So, I thought why not share my stories with the Medium community.
Each of these stories was inspired by an actual conversation or situation I encountered. I changed the names of the people and dramatized each exchange to make it readable and provide a beginning, middle, and end. I also added my thoughts about what I learned from these characters. The following is story number one called a Taste of Heaven.
A Taste of Heaven.
It wasn’t easy for me to walk up to strangers and ask what they would do about the world if they could be God. But some of the most interesting answers came from people I didn’t know at all. Here is an example.
While standing on a street corner one afternoon waiting for the light to turn green, I noticed a guy about twenty yards away standing by the side of the road. He held a sign, but I couldn’t make out what was written on it from where I stood. He was dressed in clean casual clothes, khakis, golf shirt, and cap, which piqued my curiosity. I watched him walk away from the curb and settle down on the grass in the shade of a tree.
I wondered if he was a campaign worker, or maybe advertising a product? I decided to investigate. As I approached, I saw his eyes were closed. His sign lay flat on the ground beside him. In bold print, it read, “Will Work For Free.” That grabbed my attention.
I came closer and he opened one eye. He smiled like he thought I might be a customer. He started to rise to meet me. I told him not to get up, then I sat near him on the grass and introduced myself. He told me his name was Kevin. He looked maybe forty years old, lean, clean-shaven, good tan. We chatted for a few minutes, then I asked him about the casual way he was dressed and about his sign offering to work for free.
“You know,” he said. “I’m not sure I need or even want a regular job anymore. I used to send out resumés, made calls to friends, joined Linkedin — all the usual stuff.” He sighed and shook his head at the futility. “Didn’t accomplish a thing. But I like working, so here I am. I think people are more willing to trust me when I’m casually dressed. By the way, you’re sitting in my conference room.” He smiled.
“What about your offer to work for free? How can you make money giving away your time?”
“Reciprocity.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Somebody gives you something, you feel obligated to give back. When I give freely, people naturally feel like returning the favor. I don’t ask for money, but ninety percent of the time people pay me anyway, and often more than I might have charged them. The freemium model works, too. People often ask how much I’ll charge for doing additional work. I trust people, and people always need help with something. They see me standing over there with my sign, and they pull around the corner into the parking lot. They ask if I can help them move a bed or cut down a tree or solve a problem with their computer. That’s my specialty and why I wear this.” He pointed to his baseball cap with the word “GEEK” printed in bold block letters on the front panel.
“One thing leads to another. I come back to this corner when I’m not helping somebody. A lot of traffic passes through this intersection. Word of mouth. I’m the guy on this corner that can do just about anything you need.”
He described a few of his strange jobs. Then I told him I was working on a book. I explained the premise and asked him the big question. “If you could be God,” I said, “how would you change the world.“ He didn’t answer right away. He scooted back against the tree and closed his eyes and like he was thinking, maybe that I was the odd one.
After a long pause, he said, “You know what I’ve always wanted to do?”
“What?”
“I know this sounds crazy, but I’d like to fence off a big chunk of the Mojave Desert, turn it green and create a model of Heaven on earth — like the Garden of Eden. Then I’d give everybody a chance for a tour.”
“A tour?”
“We think Heaven is a paradise. But we don’t know for sure, do we? Why not create somewhere to go so you can see for yourself? I used to work construction for a big home builder. My specialty was building model homes. Models sell homes, you know.”
“I’m sure they do, but are you saying you think people would live better lives if they could get a taste of Heaven on earth?”
“ I think we’d all be a lot kinder to one another if we knew for sure what was waiting when we passed on. That is our greatest fear, isn’t it? We don’t know for sure what happens to us when we die. A model Heaven would help clear that up.”
I was amused by this idea. Wacky, but fascinating!
“How long would they get to tour your model Heaven?”
“Three weeks, and I’ll tell you why. When I was working for my builder, I was running seven days a week. My wife was always trying to get me to take her on a vacation, a real vacation. She wanted three weeks. Finally, we saved enough. Things were a little slow during the recession, so we went to Hawaii. We had a marvelous time. It is paradise. We could build a model of Heaven there, but it’s a little far to go for most people to go, plus there’s 40 million people right here in California. Here’s my point about three weeks. The first week I was wound up like a Swiss watch, worried about the future. Then the second week I started to relax. By the end of week three, I didn’t want to go home. That’s why I think three weeks is about the right amount of time. It would sink in that Heaven is worth the effort of doing good while we’re alive.”
“How would people find out about it?”
“I don’t know.” He thought for a few moments. “Social media. Ads on Craigslist saying, ‘Visit Heaven Now.’ ” He sat there for a moment, almost in a trance, then he looked up and pointed at the sky and in a soft voice and whispered, “Yes”
He jumped to his feet, brushed off his pants and said he had to run. “Thank you, thank you!” Then he shook my hand.
“What are you thanking me for?”
“You gave me a great idea, and I’d love to continue our conversation, but I gotta go.”
“What about your customers?”
“Right now I need to get to my computer. I can have the site built by Friday.”
“Site?”
He grinned, “Visit Heaven Now dot com.”
At first, I didn’t grasp what he was talking about. But as he hustled toward the parking lot, I guessed he was talking about building an online model of his concept of heaven. What that could possibly look like, I could not begin to imagine.
Turning the Mojave desert into a model of heaven on earth was crazy, of course, but maybe that wild idea was the inspiration he needed to conceive something less-impossible — a virtual place to learn how to be kinder to one another.
Who knows where Kevin’s fantasy would lead? I checked online a month or so later but didn’t find a Visit Heaven Now URL. I’ll keep checking back from time to time. You never know.
From Kevin, I learned something new about the power of reciprocity, about counting on the kindness of others to reward us for honest work. His philosophy was simple: do good work, ask for nothing in return, and you’ll have a better than even chance of being justly rewarded — in this life and the next.
