I often lose arguments with God. Ok, “always” might be more accurate than “often.” Not that it matters, since God isn’t much for arguing anyway. She’s more about challenging assumptions, saying She loves me in my most unsavory moments, or making my entire premise irrelevant by trotting out some illuminating new angle.

The argument I most often lose with God involves the existence of a Bad Guy. As a recovering fundamentalist Christian and a good American, I believe in bad guys, whether it’s the spouse who had the affair, the drunk driver who killed the cyclist, the neighbor who shot my dog, the Catholics, the Republicans, or the friend who can’t read the room.

Surely all the filth in this world has an evil cause somewhere. But the more I hang out with God, the more I suspect He doesn’t even believe in a devil. We never get around to discussing the devil though, because God is still mentoring me toward releasing the idea that I’m the Bad Guy. She seems pretty hung up on this. She seems to think the way I treat myself matters, a startling contrast to the general assumption that what matters is how I treat other people.

Evidence suggests God may be onto something. He may, despite my razor-sharp intellect, understand the world better than I do. So every time I get up in arms and go around town painting Bad Guy graffiti, God follows me with Their own cans of spray paint and turns my judgments into some damn flower or quote about equality or self-love, and the thing is, I just can’t be mad at Them.