Bowie was the last to die. Drawn and quartered by the pack. Snickers was decapitated, Mickey got run over. And God only knows what happened to the rest. But, someone had to pay for the crime. So the orange, shaggy dog took a bullet to the head. He took it as well as any I guess. Squealed, and then hobbled home like the wee little pig. He never knew what was coming, until the pain ripped through him. I just hope it was short, I wasn’t there, I just heard the bullet pop.

I still felt squeamish about the whole deal. The law of the jungle, I suppose. But, it seems like such a nasty affair.

We live in a fallen world, and nothing goes as planned. We are hybrid creatures, longing for love, yet mired in sin. There’s not room enough for us all to be loved, so we push each other around looking for love and acceptance, each one of us making a case for why we are more deserving of love than the other. And so it goes until the day we die. Life is a nasty, brutish mess.

I write about it all the time. The man who raped his girlfriend’s toddler, then went to a bar, stabbed a woman over a drug deal, then came home, stabbed his girlfriend, and then took a nap until the cops came. Or, what about the 18 year old that beheaded his mother with a butcher knife, and then answered the door to the cops, casually holding her severed head as if it were the television remote.

Then there are the perverted, like the teacher who put hidden cameras in the girls locker room, or the other teacher who was impregnated by her 13 year old student and then casually invited his parents for dinner. Or the trafficker who held a 14 year old runaway in a hotel room for three months, forcing her to pleasure hundreds of men, while the hotel staff said nothing of the johns coming in and out, the wastebaskets of used condoms they were pulling out of the room, or the scantily clad teen wandering the hall…

Or the Muslim extremists who force teen girls into slavery, and then tell them that if they go on this suicide mission, the bombs will not hurt them, and then they will be rewarded with freedom and a handsome husband of their choice.

Life is a brutish affair. And such a sordid mess, only God can sort us all out. That’s the beauty of the human condition. God is so gracious, he gives us shot after shot to get it right. And he works with us, time and and time again. Each time, he moves us a little closer to holiness, and little closer to grace. A little closer to something beautiful. And maybe that’s what it’s all about anyway. The beauty of Christ, shining against the mire of sin. So, we lean further and further into the grace of God.

The cats got off cheap I guess.