Last Exit Before Oblivion

On the route I walk every day between work locations there are two patches of unloved bare ground. Years ago these would grow up in lovely tall grass when the rains started. Someone didn't like this so they started spraying weedkiller on it. For a few years the grass was able to make a comeback, but one year the sprayers just saturated the ground. No more grass. Sunflowers came up instead but even that displeased someone. One day I walked past and all the leaves were shrivelled. The next year the sunflowers tried to come back but they got the same treatment. Now the sunflowers have given up. The land produces only filaree and puncture vine, noxious weeds that nothing kills.

Apply the same principle to human life, and you get me. A soul so thoroughly burned over and salted and plowed under that nothing but the toughest survivors grow. I know how to survive, and that's all.

It's the plot of a thousand lousy science-fiction novels. Alien take-over. Some presence in the head of the protagonist that he spends the rest of the book eliminating... or not. The God of the Universe lives in me and talks to me.
"Yeah, right. What's he telling you to do? Take over the world?"
"No. He just asks me not to quit."

I have little will at the moment. If God wanted to turn me into a machine for his service, he could. Very easily. The doors are open, off the hinges. I'm lying on the dead ground, not interested in moving. It's the end of the line that I've always feared: no more will to go on.

Will kept me going. I used to be able to force myself to do what needed to be done. No more. I'm worn out and the salt has entered the aquifer. Nothing more grows.

If God looked at me through modern return-on-investment principles, he'd let me drop through the drain. Instead, I float there. I can look down and see what I've feared. Oblivion. But I don't fall. There's little chance that I will ever do anything that justifies God's interference. He interferes anyway, whispering "Don't quit," holding me up, surrounding me, protecting me from life's sharp edges. He does this because of who he is. I don't really care. I don't know what motivates a normal human life. That's gone, burnt, torn down, the pieces scattered. I live now because Jesus touches me and whispers in my ear. "Don't quit. Please."