Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Book 3 in the SEEING JESUS Series

  SHARING

  JESUS

  A NOVEL

  By

  Jeffrey McClain Jones

  SHAring JESUS

  Copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval, without permission in writing from the author.

  John 14:12 Publications

  www.john1412.com

  Cover photos from Shutterstock.com

  and Gabriel W. Jones

  Cover Design by Gabriel W. Jones

  For the Monday night group, my super friends: Amanda, Hannah, Jeremy, Jonathan, Jonny, Julia, Kate, Michael and Sarah. The best is yet to come!

  Chapter 1

  New Home

  Jason Stivers sailed over the tree-lined street, his legs compelling his bicycle without intervention from his mind. He had more important things to consider. He had a wife now. He had a new apartment that didn’t smell like a gymnasium, but of flowers, both organic and artificial. And he had the ambitions of adulthood, ambitions that rode along next to him, with their own compulsion, their own spinning of gears and wheels. Just now, he was heading home, the beginning of a story building in his head, a story that felt as if it would write itself—the sort of story a writer craves.

  Very little about Jason’s life was the same as the year before. He had left the single life of a young graduate student, in favor of the married life of a young graduate student. His whole world had changed. Kayla was the name of that change, the source of those fragrances, and the spin behind his new ambitions.

  As a married man, he needed more than dreams. With the responsibilities written between the lines of his wedding vows, he had accepted his obligation to have goals now, something more than mere dreams. The formulation of a new story, the beginning of a new novel, was a welcomed fulfillment of those goals and ambitions. He knew that the best thing to do with that rise of momentum, was to simply sit down and write. But he felt more like telling Kayla about it, than actually doing it.

  He was new to ambition.

  Kayla Stivers bent at her waist and stroked the two-inch brush five more times along the top edge of the four-foot square canvas leaning against the studio wall. The windows open to admit the May air and floating birdsongs, her hand moved as effortlessly as the legs of her young husband on his whirring bicycle. She thought of him, even as she worked. She thought of him often, including when she knew she should be concentrating on her preparation of a canvas, or her cooking, or her Bible reading. But she restrained her self-rebukes, knowing that she was a wife now, and her life was not the same.

  Standing up straight, and arching her back slightly to ease the dull ache, she surveyed her canvas preparation, nodding her satisfaction. Even Frank would approve. Frank was one of the artists for whom Kayla worked three-quarters time. Ella and Frank Morrison were a recognized institution in that medium-sized, Midwestern college town. They had both once taught at the big evangelical college, which Kayla and Jason had attended, and which Jason now attended as a graduate student.

  For Kayla, Frank and Ella were like a deep-tissue massage. Frank, the painful pressure that felt like muscle being ground against bone, and Ella the warm, relaxing hands smoothing out anxiety and tension. To say that they balanced each other out, would be like characterizing a swerving driver as keeping a straight line…eventually.

  Frank’s perfectionism, which plagued Kayla, permeated every aspect of her work: whether she had put enough gesso on the canvas, whether she put too much, whether the base color Frank requested was really that yellow, or that brown, or that blue.

  Kayla figured that, for twenty dollars an hour, she was willing to put up with a lot; and, if she could learn to please Frank, she could please anyone. In the meantime, she purred under Ella’s conciliatory strokes, whenever Frank blew up, or just fumed at somebody else’s failures.

  When not working for Frank and Ella, Kayla focused on her own painting, and on teaching a class at the community college. Being a new wife took time too, of course. More than that, it seemed to be taking up her attention. Even as she stood surveying that last canvas, she was thinking about whether Jason was working enough hours, taking seriously his part of their financial responsibilities.

  At their apartment, Jason had just arrived home, locking his bike on the rack next to the back staircase. He swung his backpack off and trotted up the shiny gray stairs, toward their second floor apartment. He and Kayla didn’t mind this location, since they had considerate neighbors both above and below. In fact, Kayla maintained that they were actually the noisy neighbors, most likely to be up late, most likely to be playing music loudly, and most likely to have vociferous friends over.

  Jason unlocked the back door and pushed into the kitchen, allowing the screen door to slam behind him. The school’s building management had designated May 1st as screen installation day, storing the heavy storm windows for next November 1st, when the process would be reversed.

  He kicked off his sneakers by the back door, but only after walking all the way through the kitchen and then back, still developing his new domestic habits. As soon as those pale blue deck shoes landed on the mat, Jason’s phone buzzed. He had the notifications turned down for class, but he both felt and heard the vibration, as his employer invited him to login and get to work.

  Jason worked for a large computer manufacturer that included antivirus software with all of their computers. Jason was part of a world-wide network of support technicians working from home and culling the queue of calls from customers confused or frustrated by their software. No trained or seasoned computer support professional, Jason had merely been taught the solutions to the twelve most common problems involving the antivirus software. Those twelve answers addressed eighty to ninety percent of the calls. The harder questions were shuttled off to more skilled technicians in an office on the other side of the world—an office where staff had actually met their bosses. Jason had only seen his boss on video chat, including the hiring interview. It was a brave new world.

  Accepting the proposed paying work did not erase Jason’s desire to start that new novel, but it did postpone transferring that story from his imagination onto his laptop. For now, he would log into his desktop computer, with its dual flat-screen monitors, on which he would harvest calls from the customer queue, and then remote into their computers via software which made fixing their problems much easier than trying to talk nontechnical people through the process of troubleshooting their own PC. If something was wrong with the customer’s Internet connection, or with their remote control software, then the call was handled by the wizards working from Mumbai or Bangalore. This way, the large majority of their U.S. customers heard a familiar American accent, something that the customer service people had decided, based on focus groups and customer surveys. To Jason, this was ironic, because he didn’t really need the customer to understand all of what he said to them, as long as he could get into their computers and attempt the fixes the company had taught him. However, the second level support people, in India, had to walk the U.S. callers through much more complex actions on the customer’s part, requiring clearer communication.

  Jason just shook his head and did his job. This was a temporary gig for him, to get through graduate school, and then until he could maybe get a book contract with a publisher. He was glad Kayla had a good paying job, just hoping that she didn’t get fired for throwing something at Frank.

  Clicking through screens until he reached the phone queue for customers, Jason raised hi
s brown eyebrows at the twenty-two-minute wait time. He dreaded answering a call when someone had been waiting that long. His soul had not yet developed thick enough callouses so that the abrasive attitude of a weary and frustrated customer just slipped over the surface without inflicting pain, or even much of a sensation.

  In contrast to the bright bars of sunshine falling on the wood floor next to him, Jason braced himself for some stormy weather.

  “Hello, is this Jim?” Jason said, hoping the voice recognition software had heard right when it collected that name from the customer.

  “Yes, it is. How ya doin?” said a cheerful voice over what sounded like a speaker phone.

  “I’m well, thank you. Can I get a good call-back number for you, in case we’re cut off?” Jason said. Over the wide gamut of the phone audio, he could hear what sounded like exercise equipment winding down, accompanied by heavy breathing.

  Jim recited his number to Jason, huffed and puffed for a few seconds, and then gulped some water, or so it seemed. “I was just gettin’ in some miles while I waited. Figured may as well make the best of it.”

  Jason laughed. “That sounds like a wise approach.” He was tempted to get personal at this point, but his compensation depended on getting through a certain number of calls per hour. “So, what seems to be the problem?”

  From there, the conversation sorted and straightened into a predictable pattern of nontechnical explanations for computer behavior, followed by Jason instructing Jim on how to make his computer available for a tech support remote session. Like many of Jason’s customers, Jim was impressed with this capability. To the uninitiated, it was magical to watch one’s home computer controlled from an office a thousand miles away.

  Kayla finished the last of the canvases, cleaned the last of the brushes, and headed for home. Like Jason, she rode her bicycle, and relished the swim through the warming spring breeze, hair breaking out of her pony tail and twirling in dark tendrils around her face, which was flush with the exercise and the excitement of the season. She locked her bike next to Jason’s, remembering, as she often did, the time that she failed to lock up her bike, and it disappeared. How did someone happen to notice it unlocked on that one day, her senior year of college? She shook her head once, trying to free it from that regretful thought.

  By the time she reached the door of the apartment, she was rid of the sting of that old loss, that guilt of irresponsibility. She stepped through the screen door, the inner door left open for the breeze. She could hear Jason talking. She knew he was on the phone. But the tone of his voice was friendlier, and more wistful, than the usual discussion of computer temporary files and corrupted antivirus installations.

  “But a true romance has to have both longing and fulfillment, otherwise it’s not a romance, it’s just a tragedy,” Jason said into his head set. He turned when he heard Kayla’s hesitant foot fall on the hard wood floor. He grinned like a kid caught teasing his sister.

  Kayla scowled and tipped her head to question what her husband was doing.

  “Well, Mrs. Hollister, it looks like your system is in good shape. The restart did the trick. I’m gonna close out the case, if that’s alright with you.”

  He listened to her reply and Kayla stood waiting, curious about the odd turn in the support call conversation. Jason ended the call, clicked the case out of the queue and pulled off his headset. He spun in his chair and stood up to hug Kayla. He was laughing.

  “Hey, she’s a novelist. I get tired of hanging with the Bible nerds all day, I gotta talk story and literature with someone.”

  Kayla laughed too, pressing her smile into his shoulder, before raising her face to kiss the blushing young man she had married. “You sure you’re not just saying this to cover up a torrid affair with some older woman?”

  “I think she was like seventy years old,” Jason said, his smile tweaked to the right a bit, one eyebrow peaked.

  “I knew it,” Kayla said, squeezing his backside playfully. “I gotta keep my eyes on you.”

  The teasing bounced between them like a four-square game among children released from a dreary winter to finally go to the playground. They were still getting used to the lack of restrictions about what they could say and do with each other. Jason and Kayla had successfully saved themselves for marriage, an epic accomplishment, for which they would both always be grateful. Or so, they had been told.

  They had no complaints so far.

  Jason did return to his computer, wrapping up his log for the calls he had taken. Even with his unauthorized writing discussion with Mrs. Hollister, he managed to just meet his quota of calls, avoiding a reduction in pay. He had been working the phone lines for six months now, a long stint for a contractor with that company, and he knew his way around.

  That pretty much summed up Jason’s life. He generally knew what he was doing. He knew how to follow the rules, to stay in his lane and to fulfill—and occasionally exceed—expectations. But he knew he was coasting. He knew that staying in his lane, and fulfilling expectations, was the way he had succeeded at childhood, and at being a student. But he wanted more from his life, his adult life. That was one reason he had married Kayla.

  “Your turn to make supper tonight, Dobbins,” Jason said, sitting down on the tan and brown plaid resale couch to do some reading for class. He called Kayla by her maiden name. Always had. It fit her, in his mind, for its echo of words like robin and Hobbit, and had nothing to do with family or genealogy.

  “What are you gonna call me when we name our first daughter Dobbins?” Kayla had changed into her painting-at-home attire, a very long and slightly sheer man’s dress shirt from the 1980s. She loved resale shopping.

  “She’ll have to be Dobbins Jr.,” Jason said, finding his page in the text book, and starting to read about the Maccabean Revolt.

  “I don’t think that’s allowed.” Kayla leaned over the back of the couch so her hair, now loose from the pony tail, slipped down each side of Jason’s face, as her arms encircled his neck.

  Jason snickered into her cheek, kissed her sharply and said, “Allowed? When did that ever stop you?” He twisted his head to get a look at his enticing bride in that loose-fitting shirt.

  She ruffled his spikey hair and turned toward the kitchen, escaping an attempted grab. “You keep up that story that I’m the rebel, just so you don’t have to show yourself for the true iconoclast you really are. Undercover novelist.”

  That tease reminded Jason that he had dropped the story idea that had elevated his spirits on the way home that afternoon. Choosing to work, and then to study, instead of writing, jogged loose a jumble of feelings dormant inside him, like weeds waiting for warm weather. For now, he just sighed, went back to his reading, and pretended to be interested in a section about the origins of the Menorah.

  “Dobbins, Jr.” Kayla tried out the name. “Maybe Dobbie.”

  Jason sighed louder, resisting the urge to shut her out by plugging in his earbuds for some study music, which was actually just any music stored on his phone.

  Kayla heard that sigh and correctly interpreted its meaning without a word, turning her attention to boiling water for pasta. In between stages of preparing the evening meal, she visited her studio, the second bedroom, where she was in the middle of a sunny landscape, in an impressionist style. It was a bit of a departure from the portraits and figures for which she had received kudos in college.

  Generally, the two-bedroom apartments were reserved for graduate students with children, but Kayla and Jason had met with the housing director to win a special dispensation. Sitting in front of his desk, as Mr. Hartwig tapped his pen on his folder of apartment applications, Kayla felt like a couple discussing their child with the school principal. He had been a bad boy, and they had some explaining to do. Mr. Hartwig would have played well as an elementary school principal, she had decided, with his black plastic-rim glasses, his puckered little lips and his rust-colored comb-over. He was as tightly wound as a garden hose newly purchased from
the hardware store.

  Against the unyielding coil that was Mr. Hartwig, Kayla felt like a bad girl. First, there was her selfish insistence on taking a two-bedroom apartment away from some impoverished graduate student from a far-off country, who had brought his wife, and some number of children, with him to this country. As far as Kayla and Jason knew, there was no such student, yet. But he might enroll any day now. Second, she was not planning on using that added bedroom for its intended purpose…babies. The naughty girl inside her had to cap a whole field of oil wells of devious replies, contenting herself with merely devious thoughts. The effect was a permanent blush on her face throughout the interview.

  Jason later speculated that Mr. Hartwig allowed them the two-bedroom apartment out of looming fear that Kayla was about to release a temper tantrum, instead of some perverse response about not fulfilling her God-given wifely duty.

  That initial struggle helped motivate Kayla to use the hard-won second bedroom well, to stay focused on producing enough paintings to convince a gallery that she was worth a showing. She longed to make her mark on the world, literally, and to express who she was, who God had made her to be, her unique beauty. That was a lot to keep in one small bedroom-turned-studio, she knew.

  This time, Kayla managed to prepare a salad, pasta and meat sauce without burning anything. She did so by avoiding becoming too engrossed in her painting. She was proud of herself for this feat of mature self-discipline. She stood in the middle of the little kitchen, holding a small ladle like it was her queenly scepter.

  “I have created dinner, my husband. Please come and dine with me.”

  Jason slammed his book shut and burst out laughing. He dropped his highlighter on top of the book, slid sideways over the couch cushions and leapt around the arm to sweep his woman off her feet. He didn’t mind a little sauce in his hair.