While I was cleaning up my desk drawers a couple nights ago, I found a torn up little piece of paper.  It was one of my favorite readings.  I completely forgot I had saved this for over 5 years.

The Gentle Rain
Henry Gregor Felson

Once in my life I had the strange sensation that I was God above, and the lives of those below me lay in the palm of my hand.  

There was a grim, limited truth to my feeling.  My plane's wings were hung with fire bombs, and the exact moment I chose to release my bombs would determine the exact moment that certain people died while certain others lived. 

It was not merely the ablity to sow death that made me feel God-life, but my power to alter the strike of my lightning and amend its list of victims.

My target was a medium-sized industrial city; my self-imposed mission was to make it suffer.  Although the war was not officially over, the enemy was beaten, and I was able to fly alone, unchallenged by hostile aircraft or ground fire.  I had the legal right to kill, and I intended to exercise that right.  I wanted to punish the city whose approaches were littered with the charred remains of my best friends, and whose very name had made me sick with fright a hundred times.

I looked down at the gutted skeletons of factories and the sooty rubble of their toppled chimneys.  I saw the rows of little houses where the workers lived, their neighborhoods pocked with bomb craters.  And, because it wasn't a large city, the open fields began very soon, almost at the factory walls. 

Revenge lifted my wings as I banked over the city, looking for a tender place to strike.  That was the moment I knew what it was like to escape the limits of mortality, and to look down with the eyes of God.

Below, a city of humans heard the drone of destruction and prayed for deliverance.  Above, I rode with the wrath in my hand, and it was mine to decide which prayers below would be answered, and which ignored.

Who, in my mighty rage, would I destroy?  The red rood was a target.  I hurtled down on it, my hand on the bomb release.  A squeeze and they were dead under the red roof.  I stayed with my hand and nosed up into the sky again.  The green roof?  Another dive, with my finger on the fatal trigger, and all who prayed under the green roof were dead - until the moment i changed my mind, and rose into the sky again.

Again and again I chose a target, condemned unseen humans and resotred them to life as I withhelf my bombs.

And so I circled their city, while my people below prayed, and felt pity, and comtempt, and considered the question of how much destruction, and upon whom. 

Red roof or green?  Brown roof or no roof?  Which cellar would be the tomb, which the haven? Only I knew.  I, for the moment, their God above.

In the last instant I spared all roofs.  I whipped them a sound and chastised them with my thunder, but i spared them out of the goodness of my God-like heart. I did not completely whithhold my devastation-that would have been weak.  I hurled my bolt where it would frighten them. and shake them, but not harm them.  So they would see what they had escaped, and be thankful, and yet not fully comprehend the reason-which is as it should be when men ponder on the ways of God.

I passed over the town and dropped my fire bombs in a wheat field at the edge of the city, leaving a broad path of Hell-fire against the grain.  The earth had received a token of my terrible power, but the people were safe.  I had been a God of mercy to them.

I flew home with an exalted feeling in my heart.  A month later the city was in our hands.  At the first opportunity I visited it.  I wanted to walk through the streets of my city and to see the people.

I wanted to find the people who lived under the red roof and the green, and see whom I had spared in my moment of mercy.  Perhaps I would find a Noah or a Moses to whom I would reveal my identity and my works.  I wanted someone alive to look at me and realize that he owed his life to the deliberate staying of my hand. 

My people were busy digging in the rubble, trying to pile the scattered bricks into shelters once more.  I saw many men and women at work, but evidently the children had not yet been returned from the rear areas to which they had been evacuated.  There were only a few children, and they worked side by side with the adults.  I wished they would rebuild speedily, so that all the children could return, for without them my city seemed with-out spirit, and without a soul.  I walked to the wheat field where I had jettisoned my bombs.  It was blackened and scorched, but here and there was a little green was showing through, where new life was making a start.  I saw an old man toiling at the edge of the field.  Perhaps here was my Noah, or Moses.

I joined the old man.  " It is too bad such a fine wheat had to be destroyed by bombs" I said.  That was my opening.  From there I intended telling the old man that as much as I hated to destroy grain, there had been a choice between grain and life, and then reveal myself to him  - his saviour.

"The wheat...who cares about the wheat?" the old man said.  "Wheat can grow again.  Its loss is no tragedy."  He shook his head in a helpless angry way.  "The tragedy is that we were such fools! Raid after raid we had, and our field was never touched.  Not a bomb fell on it.  Last month we had another rain.  Only a single airplane came.  The wheat was high, and it had never been touched.  How could we know what would happen?  When the alarm sounded, we sent all the children to hide in the field."