Faith

Caught in an explosion with a child dead. Nobody envied us. We were questioned. We were ordered to see the department shrink.

The first day when I was scheduled for an appointment, I called in sick. I just... I couldn't do it. What could I have told him? That I was possessed an ancient spirit? That the local gang worshipped the afterlife? That they did this because they knew about me?

I became a police officer because I wanted to protect people, and now, simply because I was near him, a kid was killed. It was sickening. It was a betrayal of everything I had silently believed about the world. You want to believe in justice. You want to believe in fairness.

You want to believe in good.

Growing up, I heard stories about crises of faith. Priests liked to tell those stories to me, as if it was something special and world-shattering that even men of God sometimes have doubts. I'd never actually had such a crisis before, but that changed after the bombing.

I wanted to know how such a thing could be allowed to happen. How such cruelty could exist in the world. And what of God? Could a caring and just God exist in the same universe where such wretched things existed? Where gangers worship a being who possesses the bodies of the dead. Where a man can walk the streets with an ancient monster lurking inside him, slowly pushing his body into decay. If a loving and all-powerful God truly existed, how then, could He allow these beings to exist and spread such misery?

I wrestled with these questions. And when I was laid off a few days later, apparently under pressure from someone very influential, my world came crashing down. There is no reward, it seemed, or trying to do good. There only existed profit in evil.

I drank that night. It was the first time I'd even touched a bottle since college. Since that accident...

Can't remember much else. It was all a drunken haze. It's my mind recalls me picking up the first bottle, and then...

And then I'm walking down the sidewalk. It's night, and there people walking past me, going on with their lives, cheerfully oblivious to the evils lurking just around the corner, in every shadow, in every heart. I reach out to touch one of them, and I stop myself.

My side itched. I ran home, and checked my rash. It had grown. In the center of it a blister had formed. I cursed my weakness then. I had fallen to despair, and Judas had taken over.

I became a police officer because I wanted to protect people. Even without my badge, there was so much I could do. Whatever it was that Ophilim and the Timberwolves were planning, I resolved to stop it.

If there is no good in the world, then we must make that good. Even in the face of overwhelming evil, we must not succumb.

I don't believe in good, I don't believe in God, because I want to. I don't believe in such things because I am weak, or because it is simply how I was raised. No.

I believe in such things because I have to. Because without them there is only darkness, and there must be light.