At 20 years old I had this great of idea of writing a book. I was a philosophy major and  I thought I had “deep thoughts” that were worthy of seeing print.  Of course I didn’t know what the book would be about or how it was going to go… until I read Robert Fulghum’s “All I Needed to Know, I Learned In Kindergarden.” It just made sense to me: write about the experiences I’ve had, pull out the meaningful lessons and slap it between nice looking covers.

Of course it needed a snappy title like Dr. Fulghum’s.  So I thought of my experiences and deep thoughts to figure out a thematic thread that could tie all these together. And this is what I came up with:

 “God is A Comedian.”

And if I had to write a foreword it would go something like this:

If I looked at my life in order to find the nature of God, I would say God is a comedian because my life is a comedy.  I read a literally analysis of TV situation comedies and it said that the key ingredient was a conflict or a problem that needed to be solved and the protagonist’s mistaken way of solving it.  Sometimes I think we bungle through our life and there are days we can laugh about it and days that we beat ourselves over it.  But just like the sitcoms I watch, I can imagine God watching me, seeing what’s going to happen, and saying “You silly boy. You crack me up.” Or at the very least, he doesn’t worry about it as much as we do.  In sitcoms the worse can happen– you lose something important or there is public embarrassment — but we as viewers don’t worry about it.

We don’t worry about it because we know in the story there is something more. And in that way, life is a comedy not just in the modern sitcom sense but also in the classical literature sense.  For the Greeks, there are tragedies and comedies.  And what separates the two isn’t the lack of conflict, dilemma, or challenge. What separates them is the ending. Comedies are stories that end well.

God is a comedian because life is a comedy.