I asked her what it was for.

Her blind eyes scanned the skies.

I asked her what it was for, all this groaning.

She knew what I meant but kept the suspense

Rolling onward. I asked her what she saw, sitting there always with a tooth missing like she stopped caring about the world years ago. I kept asking her and kept on asking her until my heart was filled to the bursting with anticipation, at which point she replied.

"For His glory," she said.

"For whose glory?"

"For HIS glory, the Only One."

"Whose?"

"The One, the Only One, who birthed us into being with birth-pains and is now birthing us into New Beings with much suffering and groaning and hardship and passion."

Such was the way she spoke.
"What??" I asked.

She clicked and began to hum as if something had just caught her attention from that Other World she has access to from the dark corners and creases of her wrinkled, cryptic mind. The humming turned to moaning.
She was praying for me.

"Such is the glory of God," she said, and it hit me all at once.

All of man's failures, all imperfections, shots in the dark, pathways into ravines, highways into chasms, skeletons clinging to chests of gold, winks that destroyed villages and galaxies, all were for one purpose: to end man's reign and begin God's own. The valleys prepare for the mountaintops.

"Such is the glory of God," she echoed, and the echoes rang on for eternity. She just laughed like it was all some grand joke, laughed loud and heartily and without remorse, on and on and on. Like someone just told her the Secret of the Universe, and it was so painfully obvious that only laughter deserved to respond."