“You want to know my story?” he said.
“Well, it’s not some Sam and Diane bullshit.”
He laughed, a dry smoker’s laugh.
“Now that was a great show. A place where everybody knows your name. Isn’t that what we all want?”
“To be known?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, looking off.
He paused, thumb rubbing a groove into the side of his cup.
“But it didn’t end so well for them, did it?”
“Sam and Diane?” I asked.
He smiled faintly. “Oh, who am I kidding—you’re probably too young to really know.”
“Who doesn’t know Cheers?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “if you really know, then you’d know that’s the tragedy of the show—for all the laughs and good times, it still ends in goodbye.”
“Goodbyes,” I said. “Is that what’s on your mind?”
“I’m not a poet. I’m not gonna say some crap like, ‘I’m sand slipping away in an hourglass.’”
He stared at the wall.
“I’m gonna die of cancer. Everyone dies of cancer.”
He paused for a moment, then smirked.
“People say it takes faith to believe in God, you know? Because of all the terrible stuff in the world—wars, famine, kids getting hurt. It’s not exactly a great résumé for a loving God.”
For a second, I thought maybe he was baiting me—gearing up for an argument.
But what came next wasn’t that at all.
“But after all the messed-up stuff I’ve done,” he said,
“I wonder… does God believe in me?”
No eye contact. Just words falling out of him.
“Maybe he pretends I don’t exist. Why would He want to claim me? A guy like me isn’t something you brag about creating.”
He didn’t say anything else after that. Just closed his eyes, like he was tired of hearing himself think.
And, well, I didn’t have a line for that. So I didn’t fill it. Not for a while.
Then I remembered something I’d heard once about playwriting.
“You know the difference between a comedy and a tragedy?” I asked.
He cracked one eye open, just enough to see if I was serious.
“The difference between a comedy and a tragedy,” I said, “is that tragedy denies us another chance.”
He gave a small laugh.
“Yeah,” he said. “For now.”
Before he left, he asked if I’d pray for his kids.
Nothing for himself—just them. So I did. Then he nodded, said thanks, and walked out.
After he left, I sat for a while, replaying the conversation in my head.
What else could I have said?
He’d asked if God believed in him. I keep thinking about that.
I wondered if maybe that’s the mystery at the heart of the gospel— that faith doesn’t begin with us at all.
It begins with a God who moves first.
Before the world turned tragic, before we reached for Him, He’d already reached for us.
Long before we could believe in Him,
He already believed in us—already decided the story was worth telling.
That’s what grace is, isn’t it?
God’s refusal to let the story end where it should have ended.
The mercy that keeps showing up in scenes we thought were final.
The insistence that there’s still more to say.
And maybe that’s the joke grace keeps telling—the one we keep missing.
That the story doesn’t end in tragedy.
That, somehow, it keeps going.