The First Time God Speaks to You (Revision 2)

[Achebe]

I don't like "they say" - it sounds clumsy. But otherwise the new version reads better than the original, because the "if/then" argument in the latter was confusing - I now see that it represented someone else's argument, not the narrator's, and therefore  was not contradicting the  subsequent strophe.
Great ending. Thanks for posting.