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What did it mean to be loved by God?
The answers to that question would have been changing over the ages. Some would say it was a blessing, others a miracle. Books would say God loved all humans equally, but there would still be all stories about his favorite. How he would grant great fortune to his devoted disciples, graces bestowed upon the utmost loyalty. They would say those whom he loved shall ascend to heaven upon death, while those whom he hated shall descend into hell, chained all alone above a lava pit.
As for God himself, he would find the question naught of an answer.
Hundreds of years ahead in the future, people would create the word religion. They would talk about faith as if they comprehended even a fragment of what it defined. They would worship, set up their altars, and offer God all the things he neither asked nor desired. They would light candles, put up flowers, and say prayers of their own making.
Hundreds of years ahead in the future, people would refer to the Champion with not his name but their Gods. They would call him God’s master friend, his favorite devotee, the ever closet follower, beloved one of the Almighty. They would call him anything but his name. They would do the same to their God.
Every household would hang a beautiful golden frame carved with holy flowers God did not know the names of. His portrait would be hung on the walls of every school in the land. The painting of a man with the most gorgeous golden hair glistened by a halo shining behind him like the sun. His face pristine and pale like a doll. He would wear a white robe decorated with gold and jewels. His eyes were soft, his smile gentle. It would be a painting of a perfect man, a man who was everything God was not.
God would hate it, and people would forget that God was once but a man.
In fact, God was far from holy. His hair was a tangled mess, his face had freckles, and his hands were scarred. He wore a black and green hoodie and refused to take off his headband. He hid his halo simply because it kept distracting him. He jumped over blocks for he loved parkour more than flying. He could barely read and his handwriting was beyond illegible. He had always thought he was not worthy of worship. He had always believed no human was born to ascend.
By God’s side stood the Champion. He who wore diamond boots and a crown. A mortal who came to the throne and ruled over the land. A thousand years later people would debate what made of the Champion’s appearance; a dark mysterious creature made of void, cloudy haze that shaped of a person, a pile of ink, a crow, a demon, some might say he had the prettiest constellation engraved on his skin.
All the tales, however, would say that he is the first and only God’s favorite.
God, however, would not think of the word favorite. He would not see the distinctiveness of it all. All the books would paint God as a divine deity, too highly for a mortal to compare. Untouchable as he was unapproachable. In the hundreds of years after this, people would call Champion God’s favorite instead of God’s friend. They would think mere mortals could never befriend a holy being such as God. Yet God would not be aware of such belief, not until the day the strongest tie between him and the mortal world was cut down.
The Champion used to sit on his throne and God loved to be by his side. He would talk, would tease, and would laugh. And Champion would look at him with the stars in his eyes and butterflies in his gut. A dark hand held a scarred one, despite how people would deem such an act a defilement of their God, God would love the warmth of a mortal hand. He would put his hand on his Champion's star-littered shoulder, his smile would be as bright as the sun.
Historians would call their relationship faith, God himself called it friendship, but the Champion called it love.
People would wonder how the Champion worshipped God. What did he offer on his altar? His heart, his stars, the sky, or his life? How melodious and sweet his prayer must have been? They would not know, for the Champion never kept records of such things, and no one else had access to the highest level where the throne holder resided. (This is a misconception, for there was one other ghost residing there.)
The Champion’s offerings to God were many; his love, his hope, and his trust. For all that he didn’t put them on a golden tray before the altar. He hid them along the gentle kisses he placed on his God’s temple, along with how he pronounced his God’s name, how the warmth of his hand kept his God from the cold. He’d tell God how much he loved him, whispering pleading words only the two of them got to hear. He would tell God how he looked awful in a white, pristine robe, how he looked out of place with the gold and jewels on his arms. He’d tell God he looked uncanny without that hideous green headband he so loved, and God would laugh and agree. And God would be more than happy by his side.
To be loved by God was to see him smile as he did when he was once a human. To love him was to see all the flaws he had and would be.
To love God was to love his humanity; to acknowledge that the dirt in his hair made it look more brown than it was blonde, to see beauty in the scars littering his body, to know that the light reflecting off his violet boots was nothing compared to the mischievous glint in his eyes, to call him by his name and let him reply by your own.
The Champion loved his God with all his heart, but God had yet to realize that he, too, loved his Champion with all his might.
God did not understand the word love, for he had not been loved in the way he could feel. He was born alone in the lowest layer of a hellish system, no parents nor family to go to. He would never come to understand the concept of it all. The love he had for himself was of a man too afraid of death to give up. The only thought occupied his mind was what ought he to do to survive, to struggle just enough to stay alive day by day. He loved life in a way one feared death, desperate and ugly. Naught of warmth or comfort as it should.
He knew love only in letters, just the words heard from a poet. Love was too subjective, too personal, too complex for him to come to. He didn’t know he had loved and been loved for so long.
He didn't truly know what it meant when the Champion said he loved him.
The Champion understood that deeply. He never rushed his God of such fact. They loved each other in the way people from a thousand years later would never admit. For there was only the Champion who had seen the scars on God's hand. For there was only him who kissed them as if they were the most precious treasures to behold. (They were, as it was these hands God used to help him when he was captured, it was these scars he got trying to free him. Because when left to choose between the Champion's death or the end of civilization, God had chosen his life over anything he’d built)
God was naïve, he did not understand the world like he should. He would live his immortal life and forget what it meant to be a constant forever. He would make a four-block jump with a 360, he would parkour around the city like a child. He would tease the Champion about how he struggled with his command blocks. He would not notice all the signs that had shown, how the Champion would complain about the pain in his back, how his legs would give out after a few hard jumps he'd made, how his dark skin hid all the wrinkles that he had formed. God would forget he alone was the immortal one.
It would be the day the Champion failed a simple two-block jump that God finally understood his avoidance of using command blocks. How he wasn't bad at four-block jump, but his body was not capable of it anymore.
Suddenly it'd make sense.
Suddenly it'd be as if something clicked,
and then he'd notice everything.
The reason the Champion rarely visited citizens like he used to do with his God, The reason his memories started to mess up like he could not remember anything for so long, the reason God had to speak louder for the Champion to hear his voice as clearly, the reason he talked about the future as if he would not be there to see it.
oh—
He talked about the future as if he would not be there to see it.
At that time God would feel immense guilt settled in his heart. He would be worried, panicked, anxious like the day he first woke up as a noob. He wouldn’t know what to do or where to start. How could one fight against the flow of time? How could he stop anyone from aging?
And God would realize that soon, he would lose his Champion to his death.
And he had to let it happen.
When that day came, God would weep. It would rain all over every land he’d been, every block he'd touched. He would hug his Champion too tightly to his chest. He would sob while he choked on his words. Why didn’t you tell me? He’d ask. Why did you let me think everything was the same?
But nothing really changed, did it not? His Champion would reply. He would stroke his God’s hair while chuckled. I know my soul will be with you forever.
God knew the afterlife like the back of his hands. He knew what ought to become of those who withered, but he would accept the lie as quickly as he knew of the truth. He would wished to never know the truth of it all.
The thunder would roar, the storm would rage. He would hug his Champion as if it were he himself that would die.
It would come the day the unavoidable had settled.
With a voice so hoarse and quiet, the Champion would whisper the final I love you to his God,
And God would say it back, over and over, again and again. He'd understand the pain of losing a loved one. Grief would let him know the true meaning of that word, of what love truly meant and had been.
God would not cry, but he would do everything close to it. The Champion would hold his shaking hand and place one last kiss on his scar. He would tell him thank you. For his love, for letting him love him.
(God would say thank you back, but his Champion wouldn’t be there to hear it)
And so the strongest tie between God and the mortal world would then cease, and God would begin to see everything he did not. He would see the sanctuaries people had built, the statues they'd sculpted, and the scriptures they'd written. God would begin to learn what he was in the eyes of mortals. God would begin to understand how people hadn't perceived him the way he thought they would, the same way his Champion had.
God would hear all pleading prayers, reverence. He would see all the golds and offerings on the altars, stained glass windows resembled the image of their God. He would look at them, stare at them, hear all they thoughts and whispers.
Only then would God realize, he was never a person in their eyes.
A millennium later, God's love would become pretty words in the books. It would be told through countless tales and lessons. Thousands different definitions of that word morphed into a million more misconceptions. To God's most devoted believers, his love was pure and holy, the greatest blessing one could wish for.
People would speak of God with respect, talk about his love as their hope. They would use fancy words to define their faith, but they would not understand what it really meant to believe in God, believe in him.
They would see God and brush him off as some poor noob, for he'd still wear that same black and green hoodie and headband. His hands would still be scarred and his face still had its freckles. Because he would look nothing like the portrait hung on the walls of the ever sacred churches, and no one called God by his name. Because the God they prayed to wasn't him.
(and their prayers would slowly stop reaching him, as they prayed to the painting on the walls.)
Eternity later far ahead, both God and Champion would exist only in children's lullabies.
No one would know their names, and there would be no records of their faces. God would not even be called God, and the word Champion would disappear from their dictionary. There would be only two characters in their tales, ones that God couldn't tell it was him.
There would be no faith left in their God, for no one would believe he was real.
Another eternity would then pass, and the Champion and his God would both be forgotten.
Time would continue to flow, days would continue to pass. Ten months, thousands years, trillions of decades and more in the future. People would abandon all the concepts of a god. No one would know his name, his story, his being. No one would pray to him anymore. People changed too quickly for him to keep up. Even so, the scars on God's hands would remain.
What did it mean to be loved by God?
A funny thought occurred in his mind. God would look at his hand and smile. He'd laugh at how long it took him to settle on an answer. In a time where no one remembered God, there was still someone that he missed.
It meant to be loved forever.
