Ipicked up my bag. god hoisted his onto one shoulder. as we strode up the beautiful fairway i saw that although he had taken on the face and hair color of an older man, there were tremendous muscles in his shoulders and forearms, and he walked with the springy step worthy of a twenty-year-old olympic gymnast. we went along for two hundred yards in silence. âjudging from that tee shot, and the putts i saw you hitting on the green, iâd say your game doesnât need much . is this some kind of a trick? a test? â again, he shot me a nasty look with the hint of a grin beneath it. âi donât test,â he said. âand i donât play tricks.â well, you could have fooled me and a few billion other people, i thought, but i did not say that either. strange as this may sound, i could tell that god had something on his mind, that he was legitimately troubled. as a pro, on earth, iâd always had an especially good intuition about my clientsâ state of mind. and i had always taken my responsibilities extremely seriously, sometimes worrying over a particular twelve- or twenty-eight-handicapper so much that, in the middle of supper, iâd go to the phone, make a call, and offer a suggestion i hadnât thought of on the practice range. this inability to leave my work on the course was part of the reason why my one attempt at marriage had ended in failure. there were other reasons; i donât really want to get into them now. the fact was that iâd been asked to god himselfâthe reality of it was still sinking inâand i wasnât about to fail to pay attention. that first hole at eden hills, it turned out, was a 666-yard par four named serpentâs advance. my âdecentâ tee shot had left me 400 yards out. there was nothing to do but take out a three metal and blast away. my shot went straight, at least, 225 yards, so that i was, after two hits, just a little ways farther up the fairway than godâs ball after one. we walked silently up to it. i stood back and watched. he took out his eight iron and, again, without any hesitation, blasted the ball into orbit. a huge divot followed after it, flying probably thirty yards. the ball seemed to go twenty stories into the air, hover there as if eyeballing the pin, then it dropped down between the tops of the birch trees less than a club length from the hole. an eight iron, i thought, from 270 yards! my god! ânice,â i said. god replaces his divots. i made it to the green with two more shots and two-putted from thirty feet for a double bogey. godâs second shot, it turned out, had stopped three feet from the pin. he took out his putter and stood over the ball ⦠and stood over it ⦠and stood over it. i saw that his powerful hands were shaking. he calmed them at last, took aim, and yanked his birdie putt two inches off line to the left. more muttering. he walked up and tapped in for his par and we moved toward the second tee in a terrible silence. just before i got there i summoned the courage to say, âyou have the yips then, thatâs the problem? â but my voice turned up and cracked on the last syllable as if i were fourteen. god teed up on the second hole without saying a word