The Incendiaries

by R.O. Kwon

If you love to win, as I did, it’s not enough to do well. Others also have to fail.

By the time I quit, I realized I’d rather have no talent than just enough to know how much I lacked.

Oh, the existence of multiple religions, children starving. The problem of evil—it’s how people talk about going bankrupt, right? It’s gradual, then it happens all at once.

If I was sick of Christ, it was because I hadn’t been able to stop loving Him, this made-up ghost I still grieved as though He’d been real.

It’s often all people want, urging a change: be like me, shaped in this image.

People with no experience of God tend to think that leaving the faith would be a liberation, a flight from guilt, rules, but what I couldn’t forget was the joy I’d known, loving Him.