He gets paid to write this crap?

From Paulo Coelho's column in DC:

A lion met a group of cats having a chat. "I'm going to eat them," he thought. But then he began to feel strangely calm. And he decided to sit down among them and pay attention to their conversation.

"Good God," said one of the cats, "we have been praying all afternoon! We beg you to make it rain rats from the sky!" "And up to now nothing has happened," said another. "What if the Lord does not exist?"

The sky remained silent. And the cats lost their faith.

The lion rose and went on his way, thinking, "Funny how things are, I was going to eat all these cats, but God stopped me. Even so, they stopped believing in divine grace. They were so worried about what they were lacking that they did not notice the protection they received."

Reminds me of a story I submitted as a kid to a competition that, in its entirety, went something like this: Ramu was a bad boy, God punished him, Ramu became a good boy. But there were two differences: a) I didn't win the competition b) I was five years old at that time.