God is Love - a short story.

The classroom smelled of chalk dust and lemon polish, but beneath it clung the metallic tang of fear. Eight-year-old Timothy sat rigid in the third row, knuckles white around his pencil. Sister Agnes loomed at the blackboard, veil stark as a blade, scrawling in furious loops: GOD IS LOVE.

Timothy’s hand trembled as it rose.

“Timothy?” Her voice cut like a ruler across knuckles.

“Sister…” His throat clicked. “Yesterday, Jericho. God said kill everyone. Men. Women. Little kids. Even the dogs and goats. Why?”

The room froze. A girl in the front row choked on a sob she hadn’t meant to release.

Sister Agnes’s chalk snapped in half. She didn’t flinch. “Because God loved His people enough to remove the rot threatening them.” The words hissed between her teeth. “Jericho had years to repent.”

Timothy’s voice cracked. “Babies don’t repent. They don’t even talk. He murdered babies.”

“GOD DOES NOT MURDER!” The shout cracked like a whip; the crucifix on the wall rattled. Sister Agnes’s face flushed crimson beneath the wimple. “He judges. He protects. He…”

“He sounds like a bully,” Timothy whispered, tears spilling. “‘Obey me or I’ll slaughter your whole family.’ That’s what Tommy Rickers says before he steals my lunch money.”

Sister Agnes’s shadow swallowed his desk. “Compare the Creator of the universe to a schoolyard thug?” Her whisper was worse than the shout. “You dare?”

Timothy’s shoulders shook. “The Flood, millions drowned. Puppies. Kittens. My grandma says God’s heart broke. But He broke everything else first.”

A collective gasp. Someone whimpered.

Sister Agnes seized the Bible from her podium, pages fluttering like trapped birds. “Genesis 6: ‘Every imagination of man’s heart was only evil continually.’ God grieved. He wept. Then He saved the one righteous family.”

“By murdering the rest!” Timothy was standing now, chair screeching backward. “That’s not saving, that’s a dictator with a delete button!”

“SIT. DOWN.” The command slammed him into his seat. Sister Agnes’s eyes blazed. “You will not blaspheme the God who knit you in your mother’s womb.”

Timothy’s voice shrank to a thread. “Abraham… God told him, ‘Kill your son. Prove you love me.’ Then, ‘Psych! Here’s a sheep.’ Abraham’s hands were shaking so hard he probably dropped the knife. I’d run. I’d hide under the bed forever.”

Sister Agnes’s breath came in ragged bursts. She knelt, gripping his shoulders, fingers digging like iron. “Abraham trusted. Perfect love demands surrender. You think love is soft? Love is fire. Love burns the cancer so the body lives.”

Timothy stared into her eyes and saw something frantic, almost pleading. “You’re scared of Him too,” he breathed.

A beat. Then, barely audible: “If He did all that back then… why doesn’t He stop the bad guys now?” His voice cracked higher. “My uncle showed me pictures from the war. Trains full of kids. Ovens. Six million. Where was the flood then? Where were the angels with flaming swords? If God loves us so fierce, why’d He go quiet?”

The room exhaled a single, horrified breath. A boy in the back began to cry without sound.

Sister Agnes’s grip slackened; her hands hovered, trembling. “Timothy…” The name came out hoarse, almost a plea.

“Why didn’t He smite Hitler like He smote the Egyptians?” Timothy’s tears fell in fat drops onto his catechism. “If He’s still King of Kings, why let the camps happen? Why let the bombs fall on London? On Hiroshima? My dad says God works in mysterious ways, but that sounds like He took a vacation.”

Sister Agnes rose slowly, as if the floor had tilted. Her lips parted, closed, parted again. “God… gave us free will,” she whispered. “The same gift that let Abraham choose faith lets monsters choose murder. He weeps with every child in every cattle car.”

“Then why not stop the train?” Timothy’s shout ricocheted off the walls. “He parted the Red Sea! He stopped the sun for Joshua! One angel killed 185,000 Assyrians in a night! Couldn’t one angel open the gates at Auschwitz?”

Sister Agnes’s face crumpled, not in anger now, but in something rawer. “I don’t… I don’t know why He stayed His hand.” The confession hung in the air like smoke. “The Church teaches that suffering can be redemptive, that…”

“Redemptive?” Timothy laughed, a broken sound. “Tell that to Anne Frank.”

Silence crashed down, thick as wool. Even the clock stopped ticking.

Sister Agnes stared at the board where GOD IS LOVE glared back, suddenly small, suddenly fragile. Her voice, when it came, was barely a thread: “I have no answer that will not break your heart further, child.”

Timothy sat. The tears kept coming, but quieter now, as if the question itself had exhausted him. On the blackboard, the chalk letters seemed to blur, bleeding into one another until the words were unreadable.

He did not raise his hand again.