Amalgam

God so loved Mary that he gave her 20,000$ worth of snowglobes, and said "my will be done".

That's roughly 1400 snowglobes, and they filled up Mary's exposed brick loft. Snowglobes on the counter, the shelves in the bathroom, the window sills. Mary's bonsai tree was relegated to the top of the tv where it chilled with a Paris snowglobe and a World Trade Center snowglobe, she thought it was appropriate to have a theme for each section, some sort of catalog structure. Every day she woke up, ate breakfast, and started shaking. She'd shake for about eight hours, order some pizza, shake some more with one hand while watching Lifetime.

Eventually the pizza guy Joe asked what was going on. He's had a thing for Mary for years, used to go to high school with her. Mary invited him in to shake one night, and he never left.

The unspoken goal was to get them all going at once, hoping that some miraculous event would happen when all the snow was drifting in identical plastic drifts. There were a few times in the early years when it actually seemed possible, but they were always off by only one or two globes. They could have recruited more people to help them, but neither one wanted to have strangers in the apartment, so they went on...year after year....shaking. Their efforts became more and more orchestrated, so that by the fifth year they were no longer really trying, but going through the same motions that had failed them yesterday.

In the sixth year, Mary got pregnant. Joe assumed it was his, but actually Mary had been having an affair with this guy Darren who was a graphics designer, lived across the hall, and thought this whole god/snowglobes/global mission thing was hot. Their son Jesus was born, and as he grew up, became the key third person in the shake structure. One morning, on his 33rd birthday, as they were doing a celebratory shake session, the snowglobes became aligned.

It was a magical moment, standing in the room, realizing they had finally achieved their lifetime goal. As the moment passed, the last snowflake drifted down, they looked around in excited anticipation. And thats when Joe realized he didn't believe in God, and also that his son was black.