If she was really losing her mind, and needed to be admitted to the psych ward, she could wait for Jason to finish writing. He had been struggling to get motivated lately. Kayla turned toward her studio, instead, and then heard the voice again.
“Don’t be afraid.”
If that had been the first time she had heard that voice, she would have assumed it was Jason, with something wrong with his throat, to sound so strange. Not that the voice itself sounded strange. It was a calm and peaceful voice. It just wasn’t Jason. And strange is a relative term. Hearing disembodied voices embodied strangeness.
She stopped just inside the door to her little sanctuary. One hand reached back to the door handle, testing an urge to slam it, in an effort to keep that voice out. But what the voice had said to her distracted her from the fight and flight instincts vying for her attention just then.
“Afraid?” she said to herself, pretty sure she had not spoken aloud, but not absolutely sure.
Though she was baffled by the voice, she realized that she wasn’t frightened, not in a spooky or evil way. She just felt like she did when someone important said something to her and she didn’t quite catch it, only to see them walk away without a chance to have it repeated. That, plus some concern about her sanity. The voice wasn’t scary; hearing it was.
Kayla heard Jason muttering, reading back something he had written. She smiled and breathed a faint laugh. She loved it when he did that, recalling her grandmother reading stories to her. Kayla also loved being the first person to read each of Jason’s stories. She was a fan, what every writer needs—the sort of person every writer should marry.
She waited to determine whether Jason was finished writing. She wondered if the persistence of the invisible speaker justified pouncing on her husband, when he first finished writing. He usually needed to wind down a bit, to come down from the creative high. She generally tried to speak softly and demand nothing while he made that slide back into normalcy.
Her frustrated, through-the-nose sigh did an encore. She closed the door, forcing herself to gently land it against the door jam. But, just as she started to slough off her outdoor clothes, in favor of one of her long painting shirts, Jason called out. He sounded like he was done writing and wanted someone to high-five with.
“Dobbins, is that you?”
Kayla sped up her change of wardrobe and called back. “Yes, dear. It’s me. You have a good time writing?” She knew the answer by the proud projection of his voice, but needed a bit of delay for buttoning some buttons. She knew what he would be thinking about, if she didn’t do that before stepping out to see him. And she wanted to leave room for introducing her invisible friend into the conversation.
“Yeah,” said Jason. “It’s good. I like it. It’s a good start. I can see it going somewhere.”
She could tell that Jason was up and walking toward her, when she reached for the door knob, and pulled the door open. He rounded the corner into the short hallway, just as she swung the door past her tentatively smiling face.
Jason’s bright eyes and raised eyebrows darkened and fell when he saw her fake smile. The sort of observer who would detect faux happiness on a stranger, Jason felt the impact of Kayla flashing that pasted smile at him. It felt like an accidental knock on the nose.
“What’s up? Something happen?”
Kayla found a real smile to go with that look of concern on her husband’s face. She was so grateful for a sensitive man. So far, she hadn’t regretted not being able to fool him with a costume smile.
“I had the strangest experience,” she said, stepping out of her studio to greet him with a peck on the lips and hands slipping around his neck.
Jason grasped her waist with both hands, effortlessly finding that place where her hips would hold up his hands—their favorite place to rest.
“What happened?”
Kayla paused to consider how to say it, not whether to say it. She didn’t want to sound crazy, even if she was crazy, but then that felt dishonest, and she didn’t want to have any secrets in their marriage. But she didn’t want to worry Jason. The merry-go-round of thoughts began to make her dizzy.
“What?” Jason’s brow furrowed as much as his young face could manage.
“I’ve been hearing a voice,” she said.
“A voice?”
She pulled her hands back and looked away, disturbed by his anxious eyes. She didn’t want to be one of those needy wives that the husband has to be totally heroic in order to stay married to. She was, in fact, afraid of lots of things that weren’t likely to happen.
“The first time was yesterday, when I was praying, and then again today at the park.”
“What were you doing when you heard it in the park?”
Kayla turned her face back to check Jason’s mood, and then leaned her right shoulder into his chest, slipping her head under his chin. “I was praying there too.”
Saying this out loud flipped a switch for Kayla. She tested an idea. “But it just happened again right here, as I was going into my studio, and I wasn’t praying then.”
“What does this voice sound like?” Jason’s tone remained interested, no hint of sarcasm or doubt.
“It sounds like a man, a very gentle voice.” Kayla wrapped her right arm around Jason’s waist and rested the side of her head on his chest. “It reminded me of you, at first. I even thought you had snuck up on me and were pretending to do this other voice, ‘cause it doesn’t really sound like your voice.” She leaned back to see his eyes, and to measure his reaction again.
“How does this voice make you feel?”
She smiled. He was really taking this well. These were good questions.
“I was just thinking about that. It’s not creepy or anything, not bad at all. It just seems weird to hear someone talking to me when there’s nobody there.”
Jason had always thought of Kayla as the more spiritual of the two of them. Though neither of them aspired to it, he thought of her as more of a mystic than he. He had studied the mystics in church history, during college. The notion that God might be talking to Kayla, didn’t feel as far-fetched to Jason as God speaking to him, for example.
“What does the voice say?”
Again Kayla checked for hints in his face that he was making fun of her, or beginning to think she was just being silly. But, this time, she kept her eyes on his face, resting them there along with a generous portion of her soul. She could trust Jason. That’s why she married him.
“Um, once I asked who was speaking, and the voice said, ‘I am love.’ And then, when I didn’t get what that meant, he said ‘I am grace.’”
Jason shivered so that Kayla could feel it, and that gave her the shivers. They just stared at each other for ten heart beats.
Then Jason said, in a whisper, “What else did he say?” The voice had graduated from “it” to “he.”
“Just now, he said not to be afraid.” Kayla whispered too. She felt like she might start to cry.
“Don’t you think it could be God talking to you?”
Kayla looked at Jason until she was looking right through him, wondering at herself. Why had this not occurred to her? In fact, it had occurred to her, but she rejected that idea early on, because the voice was confusing. Right then, she couldn’t remember what he had said that was confusing, and she was reconsidering whether there really was a rule that people couldn’t be confused by something God said or did. She was into another carnival ride of thoughts, but this one was making her excited, her breath becoming dangerously shallow, trying not to let the implications of her experience slip away.
Kayla nodded, but then stopped when she saw Jason’s face take on the look of someone rewinding the conversation, to where he found something he hadn’t noticed before.
“When you say ‘voice,’ do you just mean a thought in your head?”
Now Kayla slowly rotated her head from side to side, so slow that it could hardly be called shaking it. “It was a voice.”
&n
bsp; “You heard it with your ears?”
She nodded. Her eyes were even bigger and brighter than usual. Just as she had allowed the elevating implications of her experience to lift her off the ground, her tip toes just coming free from anything solid, Jason was adding weights to get her back down to her feet.
Kayla tried again, a sprinkle of annoyance tightening her voice. “It was a voice. I heard it. That’s why I thought it was you at first. I literally heard it.”
Without meaning to abandon his love, Jason stepped back, as if Kayla’s full revelation pushed him away, like a playground bully. She reached impotently for him, dropping her hands to her sides, feet planted back on earth, her heart sinking.
Kayla hardened her voice for self-protection. “I knew you would think I’m crazy, or just silly.”
Hesitating only a moment, Jason stepped back into her orbit, careful not to stub her toes with his long feet. But he didn’t wrap her up in his arms, just taking her by the shoulders, instead.
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he said, with shreds of uncertainty falling off of his voice, so that it unsettled him.
Kayla was more than unsettled.
Jason had shifted out of sorting the possibilities, from a theological perspective, to trying to rescue his marriage. Later, he would marvel at how easily those religious considerations gave way, in the face of the prospect of wounding his union with Kayla.
“If you say you heard a voice, then I believe you.” His own voice sounded more certain now, less ethereal. He was certain that he didn’t want this to drive a wedge between them. That was all the clarity he needed.
Kayla recognized this loyalty from her husband. She lowered her guard. To be honest, she wasn’t sure herself, whether the voice was real, whether she was totally sane. She smiled a brief, but firm, peace treaty up at him.
Jason leaned forward and wrapped her up in his arms now. Kayla laughed out a grocery bag full of tension.
“Maybe you should think I’m crazy. But, please don’t leave me chained in the attic, if I am.” A sideways smile greeted Jason when he leaned back to see her playful face.
“What, maybe chained in the back yard, instead?” He teased with raised eyebrows.
Kayla clapped him hard on his right arm, with enough force to elicit a grunt, but not enough to stop him from laughing at his own joke.
“I’d leave you a bowl of food and some water, when I went off to gaze over the moor, with my brooding brow,” he said, simulating that far-off look.
They both escaped the real crisis with playful laughter. But they also both knew that it wouldn’t leave them that easily.
Chapter 4
A Touch
Sunday ended with the uncertainty of Kayla’s experience intact, but their relationship intact as well. Monday mornings were among Kayla’s favorites, because she would have Frank and Ella’s studio to herself. She liked talking with Ella, of course, but had never spent any time longing for a scolding from Frank.
Jason liked Monday mornings because of Dr. Shanklin’s New Testament Theology class. Into the red brick building housing the graduate school, with its towering white Corinthian pillars, he strode—out of Spring sunshine into academic darkness. He tended to think like that on the way to this class, inspired by the irreverent, and self-deprecating, wit of his professor. With only the one class, and no need for a textbook that day, Jason was traveling light, just a pen and notebook. That light feeling was one reason he liked to leave his laptop at home. He preferred taking notes with pen on paper. Kayla teased him that it was for the doodling potential of pen and paper, an assessment borne of the scrolling and sketching which filled the margins of most pages in that notebook. But Jason contended that the laptop would be worse. Every day, he saw someone distracted in class by email or sports scores on their laptop. At this point in his academic career, near the very end, he had established his habits, even to the point of carefully placing himself where he couldn’t see anyone else’s laptop screen. He sat in the front row, at the end farthest from the door.
His professor for this Monday class, Bob Shanklin, was nearly sixty, but wore his hair long and curly. Jason couldn’t tell if those were natural curls. The gray and white ringlets seemed too perfect, but he couldn’t imagine his favorite professor getting a permanent. He didn’t want to imagine it anyway.
Early in his first year, during his first class with Dr. Shanklin, Jason had already been an active participant in discussions. That was when the professor discovered that Jason was not on the pastor track, but rather planning a career in writing. The author of six works of popular theology, and two more academic volumes, this fascinated Dr. Shanklin. He often asked Jason about his writing, or teased him in front of the class. Jason felt like the public hazing was meant to test his determination to be a writer, to push him into publically identifying himself as someone who had something worth saying. That seemed the most likely explanation for the gentle prods he often received.
“How’s the great American novel coming, Jason?” Dr. Shanklin said, as he entered the room, a few minutes before the start of class. By now, Jason was one of the teacher’s pets, he knew, and he knew he could reply with a good measure of latitude.
“I was thinking of writing the great Andorran novel first, starting small,” he said, referring to the tiny country squeezed between France and Spain.
“Sounds like a good strategy to me,” said his professor, with a dry laugh.
The remaining half of the students ambled into the room in ones and twos, until Dr. Shanklin started the lecture for the day. He was talking about the kingdom of God, and the New Testament theologians who contended that it was the central theme of Christian scripture. A skeptic about unifying themes in the New Testament, Professor Shanklin still managed to offer a sturdy defense of a position that Jason expected him to reject. But, halfway into the lecture, Jason got a surprise.
“I know I’ve poked and teased those who try to find a single unifying theme in the New Testament, and I still believe they deserve the best we can throw at them. But, if I had to concede that there was a theological center to our scriptures, I would choose the kingdom of God.” He put one arm behind his back. “If you twisted my arm, and forced me to watch network television all day, I would break down and allow that this is the main message of the New Testament.”
He looked at the faces in front of him, almost all paying attention, noting the departure, late in the year, from their professor’s persistent skepticism. “But, lacking such coercive techniques, I reserve the right to refuse to check any of those boxes.”
Jason could see that Dr. Shanklin had saved his best for last, rejecting other means of unifying—or at least interpreting the meaning of—the New Testament, to leave one contender standing. Kingdom of God? Jason decided to give it some thought that summer, after graduation, and before writing the great Christian novel, perhaps.
Kayla had arrived at the Morrison’s studio by nine that morning, a bit late, but the shimmering Spring day would have to bear responsibility for that, she decided. She shook her head at herself, voluntarily working indoors on such a glorious day. Generous light through windows all around the studio would have to do for now.
She got to work, pulling out the paintings that Ella had asked her to package for shipment. Someone named Omid Ansari had purchased three large canvases. They were impressionistic portraits of small children that Kayla stopped to admire, before she put them in supportive frames and wrapped them in cardboard and brown paper. When she looked at a painting such as the one of the little girl squatting to pet a kitten, she noticed the brush strokes, the creative mix of colors that enlivened the subject, and she thought about how great it would be to be a mother. All of that delayed her work for two minutes.
Just before she started to lift that painting onto the pine slats that Frank had cut for the frame, she felt a gentle stroke on one of her arms, as if someone were petting her, a comforting touch, but a shock in a house where she thought she w
as alone. The wooden frame over which the canvas was stretched clattered dully against the shipping frame, as she dropped the painting and swung around to see who had touched her.
In that instant, she thought of both Ella and Frank—how inappropriate it would have been for Frank to do that, and how like Ella it would have been. And she thought of Jason. But these were fleeting. The notion that landed, and stuck, was that the voice she had been hearing also had hands. That’s how it formulated in her thinking…the voice had hands.
She shivered violently, but wasn’t scared, not really. She was excited, nearly frantically so. Standing with her fists clenched at her sides, her ponytail whipping back and forth as she looked for those hands, she suddenly relaxed. Kayla opened her hands at her sides. What was she going to do, punch him?
“I have been punched before,” came the voice, sounding a little more playful than before.
“Who…” she started to say. Then, “Are you…” The net effect was of one disjointed question, but really the first question had been cancelled and the second left unfinished; because she knew that it was the right question and because she knew the answer. She nearly fell over with the joint-loosening chills and shivers that overtook her entire body.
Then, right there in front of her, a man appeared out of the sunny air—out of nothing. Kayla started to fall over, half-fainting, half-collapsing in shock. But he caught her. Those hands caught her and kept her from falling.
In that outside-of-reality moment, Kayla felt the urge to hug him. At the same time, she felt the urge to break free and run for her life. Her head shook from side-to-side, choosing to reject what her eyes were telling her, a mute argument against her own senses. She did break away from him, pulling her arms free with a quick jolt. But she didn’t run. Instead, she just stood, studying his face. The young artist became instantly fascinated with the perfect detail of the face smiling at her. The part of her brain that had not shut down, or found a hiding place, was studying the way she always studied beautiful things. The artist part of her could not look away from those eyes, those lips, the beard, his hair. His skin was unmarred, except for scars along his forehead, a row of dots and dashes just below his dark hairline.
Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3) Page 3
