By the time I got to Rome, I was exhausted. Besides the traveling itself, I think what tired me the most was the Bishops. It amazed me to no end that a young religion undergoing so much repression was so top-heavy with conservative old men trying to maintain their positions.
But now I realized that this was God's great joke. To have a structure of power with His name on it, and its leaders convinced that somehow the structure itself provided the power. The thought comforted me and eased my frustrations. Power came directly from God. My mission was not to the structure, but to the people of Christ. Already, stories were being told of people outside any structure, people who championed Christ as individuals. In almost every case, some structure would destroy them, but they died righteous, they died the hero of their story. They were glad to die for this beautiful new God.
And here I was in Rome, to plead with the most powerful person in the worldly realm, to stop these martyrs once and for all.