Free God Is Disappointed In You by Mark Russell Page A

worshiping foreign gods was because we started messing around with foreign women. Now, here we are, given a second chance after fifty years in exile, and what are you doing? You’re starting the cycle all over again!”
    “Okay, okay, you’re right,” the men shouted back. “We’ve sinned. We married foreign women, and got a little kinky with their gods. But the damage is done. We have kids with these women now. What do you want us to do about it?”
    “There’s only one thing to do,” Ezra replied. “You have to send them away. Your pagan wives, your little pagan kids. It’s a shitty thing to do, I know, but it’s your own fault for disobeying the law in the first place.”
    “What? Send them away? Now? Are you crazy? It’s raining! They can’t go out on a night like this. Besides, these are our families we’re talking about. We need time to say good-bye.”
    “Yeah!” someone else shouted, “Ever hear of closure?”
    Ezra reluctantly agreed. “All right, you can wait until the good weather returns. But then you’ve got to get rid of them.”
    The day came when the skies cleared and the sun came out.
All the men who’d married foreign women lined their families up, gave them sack lunches, and tearfully sent them on the road out to God knows where.
    “I’m not a hard man,” Ezra explained, “but it’s my job to rebuild our people, to recreate our way of life. If I had done nothing, our blood, our customs, our religion would have been compromised and watered down until we were just another group of freeballing shepherds.”
    “Sometimes diversity means getting rid of people who aren’t like you.”

Nehemiah
    Nehemiah lived a comfortable life in Persia. He was King Artaxerxes’ cup-bearer. Whenever the king got peckish, Nehemiah would bring him a tray of roast quail tongues or hand-slain gazelle. When the king asked for wine, Nehemiah would bring him a woody red or a buttery white. And whenever the king was having a bad day, Nehemiah would crack jokes or say something validating about his hair. The two men were as close as lips and teeth.
    Nehemiah was Jewish, and was excited to return to his people’s homeland, even though he’d been born and raised in Babylon. Nehemiah asked the king if he could take some vacation time to go help rebuild Jerusalem’s walls. He was such a cool boss, that the king not only let Nehemiah go, but put him in charge of the city.  
    Nehemiah used this adventure to take a crack at writing his memoirs:

    The Homecoming
    by Nehemiah
    It felt good to be back home. Even though ‘home’ was someplace I’d never been before. One day I was picking out table settings, the next I was running a city. Having been a servant all my life, it felt awkward to suddenly be The Man. Speaking metaphorically, of course. Being a eunuch, I have no dick or balls worth speaking of.  
    First, let me explain something to you: a city is basically a species of animal. A city without walls is like a turtle without a shell. A city without watchtowers is like a cat without eyes. A city without a gate is like a cow without a mouth.
    We built walls, we built watchtowers. Needing a mouth, we built the Fish Gate, so the food could flow in. Needing an ass, we built the Dung Gate, so the shit could flow out. Rebuilding a city is like resurrecting a dead animal. You not only need to bring it back to life, you have to keep the wolves and coyotes away while you do it.
    When the neighboring countries noticed we were rebuilding the city walls, they laughed us off. But as the wall grew taller, the laughter was replaced by threats. Every week, a new message would arrive, threatening war if we continued working on the walls.  
    Stopping work on the wall was out of the question. We all agreed that we had come too far to quit, whatever the cost. And yet, I knew these were not idle threats. So I had to take half my work force off them wall, arm them and use them as guards. With only half the workforce building