Hi, God.¹

It’s me, the geek.

So I think you’ve hardwired the geek thing into my DNA.

I’m incurably curious, for one thing. In fact, I’ve made it a way of life. I like asking the questions no one else is asking and making the connections no one else is making.

I love the world you made, but I daydream about other worlds, too. Or about places in this world no one has discovered yet.

My imagination is pretty active. No, that’s not true. My imagination is pretty awesome, if I may say so myself. To be clear, I give you the credit for blessing me with it, but there you go.

As you know, sometimes my imagination takes me away from things that matter because it’s easier to live in a dream world. Other times, though, it gives me a technicolor, epic perspective on life that other people don’t seem to have. So thanks for that.

I like using my imagination when I pray. Instead of just talking to the air, I approach your throne, see the rainbows, feel the power of it all, and it’s awesome. Knowing that what I’m seeing — or something like it — is actually real? Mind boggling. Knowing that all prayer is a form of time travel is particularly delicious. It makes me feel like a kind of time lord (you’re still the Lord of lords in my books, of course).

Thank you for the rich imagery tucked like treasures throughout the Bible. Being a bit of a Whovian, I enjoy traveling into the stories I read about. I particularly enjoyed David and Goliath, the Jericho battle, and when you walked on water. “Being there” has made all the difference. Brilliant.

That said, regular people don’t get me.

It’s like they think their work suits and power ties are more in touch with reality than my Yoda t-shirt. I wish you’d show them that here in North America, the clothing people wear is a kind of costume, and that we’re all playing roles in a larger story.

If that’s true, God, and I think it is, I don’t want to play a suit holding a briefcase that works in a cubicle. I don’t want to conform, to be one of many just like me. I want to explore the eccentricities of who I am, who you’ve created me to be.

When I find geeks that believe true geeks can’t be Christians, I just sigh. Because I don’t think a true geek could ever put all their stock in science — in laws and observable, testable facts. To me that sounds anti-geek, like a different kind of suit holding a different kind of briefcase. It sounds like bondage to a grey cubicle made of formulas and algorithms and a boring kind of math god who needs to get out more.

No thank you. The universe is a whole lot wilder and mysterious and colourful than science can describe. I think science is fun, I really do. But it has its limits.

Don’t tell anyone, but I don’t actually believe in The Force — or time-traveling call boxes or Klingons or zombies or Malcolm Reynolds. I just don’t think you’re a math god. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’re partial to geeks.

In the Bible, you say “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Hebrews 11:1).

Your buddy Enoch was teleported to heaven before he died. Geek! Noah built a giant boat by following instructions from beyond. Geek! Abraham left his hometown and settled in a foreign country, content because he was imagining a heavenly city to come. Geek, geek, geek.

The heroes of the Bible, you say, were aliens, strangers, foreigners on earth. Geeks! Prophets seeing the future, deliverers seeing the invisible, slaves avoiding the original (and far more terrifying) weeping angel, following a pillar of fire, walking through a sea as the waters parted … I could go on for pages here.

Geeks, every last one of them.

So thank you, God, for making me a geek in the true sense of the word.

May our tribe increase.

Amen.

PS: If you could let me know what happens in the second half of this season of Doctor Who, that’d be great.