God Will Make It – Part III: The Silence After Faith
We burned the remains of the second chapel.
Not in anger.
In fear.
No one wanted another statue. No carvings. No sacred words etched into stone. The townspeople didn't call it a miracle this time. They called it a mistake.
For weeks after the storm collapsed, the sky stayed clear.
Too clear.
No wind.
No rain.
No sound at night except our own breathing.
You would think silence would feel safe.
It didn't.
People stopped saying the phrase out loud.
But I noticed something worse.
They were thinking it.
I could see it in their eyes whenever something went wrong.
When a child got sick.
When crops began to dry.
When the power flickered unexpectedly.
Their lips didn't move.
But their faces whispered:
God will make it.
Belief doesn't die easily.
It waits.
One evening, I felt it before I heard it.
A pressure in the air—like the moment before lightning strikes. The hairs on my arms lifted. The sky was perfectly blue.
And then the church bell rang.
But there was no church anymore.
The sound came from beneath the ground.
Deep.
Resonant.
Calling.
People stepped out of their homes slowly, confused but calm. Their eyes looked distant, as if listening to something far away.
The earth in the center of town began to crack.
Not violently.
Gently.
Like something stretching after a long sleep.
The whisper returned—not from the sky this time.
From below.
"God… will… make… it…"
It wasn't feeding on loud devotion anymore.
It had adapted.
It was feeding on desperation.
On the quiet hope people cling to when they don't want responsibility.
The ground split wider.
From the darkness beneath, I saw movement.
Not a storm.
Roots.
Black, twisting roots pulsing with faint streaks of lightning. They crawled outward, wrapping around streetlights, houses, ankles.
No wind.
No thunder.
Just tightening.
I ran toward the center of town.
"Don't listen!" I shouted. "It's not saving you!"
But the roots didn't drag people violently.
They waited.
And one by one, people stepped forward willingly.
A mother holding her child.
An old man leaning on his cane.
A teenager with tears in her eyes.
They weren't afraid.
They were relieved.
"God will make it," the teenager whispered softly.
The roots glowed brighter.
I understood then.
The entity didn't want worship.
It wanted surrender of will.
It wanted people to stop choosing.
To hand over responsibility for their lives.
Every time someone gave up control—every time they said, "I can't fix this, someone else will"—it grew stronger.
The roots tightened around the town square monument.
The ground trembled.
And then I did the only thing I hadn't tried before.
I knelt.
Not in surrender.
In defiance.
And I spoke—not to it.
But to the people.
"God doesn't erase your storms," I shouted. "God doesn't fix your lives without you! Faith isn't giving up your choices—it's having the courage to make them!"
The roots pulsed violently.
Lightning flared beneath the ground.
"You want it to make everything better?" I yelled. "Then stand up and do it yourselves!"
A long silence followed.
The teenager looked down at the root coiled around her ankle.
Slowly—
She stepped back.
The glow dimmed.
The mother tightened her grip on her child and pulled away.
Another dimming.
The old man lifted his cane and struck the root.
It recoiled.
The whisper turned into a shriek.
The ground shook as cracks sealed themselves shut. The roots writhed, shrinking back into the earth like something burned.
"God… will… make… it…" the voice hissed weakly.
And for the first time—
No one repeated it.
The earth closed.
The bell stopped ringing.
The pressure lifted.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
Storms returned—normal ones. Rain fell when it should. Wind blew and then stopped. Problems still happened.
But people faced them differently.
They worked together to fix the crops.
They repaired broken power lines.
They comforted each other without waiting for something unseen to intervene.
The phrase didn't vanish completely.
Sometimes, in moments of comfort, someone would say softly, "God will make it."
But now it meant something different.
Not surrender.
Not escape.
It meant:
We will try.
And if the whisper still lingers beneath the soil, waiting—
It is weaker now.
Because it only survives when people stop thinking.
And this town finally learned the difference between faith…
And giving up.