Seeing God

You should never turn down a chance to see God: that's the cardinal rule of soul searching. If God turns up, you should put down what you're doing and go and have a good look. Because you don't know when he'll turn up again.

"I just saw God!" one of my Japanese friends shouted suddenly in the car yesterday. I was slightly tipsy in the back seat, but this was enough to rouse me from my daydreams and get me to sit up straight. "Just now, I saw God!"
"You saw God?" I cried. "No way!"
"Yes - I saw God!" And then my friend pointed to the roof of the car, in case I didn't know who God was.
"Where?!"
He signalled out of the back window, and I turned round to where he was pointing, but I couldn't see anything. There was - however - quite a lot of light behind a particularly big cloud, so I looked at it as hard as I could.
"Shin, where?!" I repeated.
"Over there! You want to see God?"
"Of course I want to see God! Go back!"
So Shin did an emergency U-turn in the road - the kind criminals do - and drove back down the road.
"Are you excited?" he asked me.
"Hell, yeah!" I shouted.
Shin then pulled to the side of the road and opened his window.
"There," he said. "God."
There was a silence while I watched God munching on some grass and looking balefully at me from over a wire fence.
"That's not God," I told Shin. "That's a goat."
"Yes," he repeated. "God."
And then he pointed to the car ceiling again, except I realised he was actually making the sign of a horn with his right hand.
"No: it's a goat. God lives up there."
"God. Goat. Same."
"It's not the same, Shin. You're saying them wrong."
"You like Goat?"
I looked at the goat.
"He's quite an ugly goat, in fairness," I told him.
"Yes, ugly God."
"Goat, Shin."

There are moments of spirituality in life, where we all graze against religion in one form of another. And there are other moments where we miss it by a long shot.

And that goat on the side of the road, eating grass?

Maybe that was somewhere in between.