Back at the apartment, Mary’s eyes were so wide that Kayla was becoming agitated, as if something was about to pounce on her from behind, something that pried her old friend’s eyes wider and wider. Kayla resisted the urge to swing around and catch the attacker that Mary seemed to be seeing right through Kayla’s own face. She wanted more from Mary than just a confirmation of what she already knew, that her visit from Jesus was extraordinary.
“What do you think it means?” Kayla said, a slight tint of impatience in her voice, as she waited for Mary to get over the thrill, and move on to processing this epic event.
“Means?” Mary said, as if unsure which of the various definitions of that word Kayla had in mind.
“Why did he show up like that for me? I never heard of anything like that before.”
Mary tipped her head a few degrees to one side and let her eyes wander toward a memory of something she had heard. “My cousin lives in Chicago. And he goes to this church where there’s a guy that claims to have seen and talked to Jesus like a dozen times or something.” She scrounged a bit more for exact details. Kayla seemed to be looking for evidence that produced reassurance. Mary felt that her hearsay evidence would only tease and frustrate, instead of satisfying that urge for certainty.
Kayla wanted to return to something that Jason had said about the voices. “I know people have thoughts that they say are from God, like God giving them ideas about what they should do. But I’ve never heard of anyone that really heard a voice, and even saw his face.” Here she stopped and sidled up to the most astounding part of her experience. “And he touched me. He said my name, and he touched me.”
That didn’t help Mary get beyond her dazed infatuation with the idea of seeing and even physically feeling Jesus’s presence. She returned to that lovesick, wide-eyed stare. And this prompted Kayla to say something that she didn’t even know she wanted to say before that moment.
“It was like he loved me. I mean, not just friendship. It was like he was in love with me.”
Mary made a small squeaking sound that would have been the start of her response, but she was in the presence of a dream-come-true. Like Jason, however, jealousy was clouding Mary’s initial responses.
“What did you do?” Mary said in half of her normal voice, the lower register, as if she had just squeaked away the top half. “Did you pray and fast or something?”
Kayla was shaking her head, thinking more about why Mary would ask that question than anything she might have done to provoke her extraordinary encounter. She was so thoroughly convinced that she didn’t deserve such special grace, that she needn’t bother with checking for something she might have done to merit it.
Suddenly, Kayla knew that Mary wasn’t going to be any help at all. Her friend acted as if she had discovered a huge exotic spider perched on Kayla’s shoulder; she was so fascinated with the unprecedented appearance of that curious intruder that she wasn’t even considering helping Kayla out of her predicament. Frustrated at having merely attracted a gaper, Kayla proceeded through the rest of the evening on a polite and perfunctory level, focused on tea and cookies, as much as divine visitations.
When Mary started tuning into the body language of her hostess, she prepared to take her leave. She stood up and reiterated how good it was to see Kayla and how fascinated she was with Kayla’s experience. Her departure was interrupted, however, by Jason lunging in the front door. When he pulled up short, and stared at the two young women, he resembled a zombie being caught at something even a zombie ought to be ashamed of.
Jason had forgotten that Mary was at the apartment with Kayla. He was stupefied as much with his own amnesia on the subject as with Mary’s unexpected presence. The combination was too much of an indictment for him to stop and consider it for long, however. He had to let his news out of the expanding balloon of wonder inside him.
“I heard the voice,” he said, focused on Kayla. His experience had solidified his belief in what Kayla had told him, and he assumed she would find consolation in that faith. But that was not her first reaction.
Kayla scowled and spoke without examining the words before they entered the evening air. “How can that be? That’s imp…” They all knew she was going to say, “impossible.” None of them would normally have wasted the breath to say “that’s improbable.” None of them were either philosophy or physics majors.
Like an impromptu evening of freeze tag, Jason reverted to stone stillness. Kayla’s response gave him one too many layers of shock to overcome. Mary stared down at her sandals, pretending not to notice the interaction between the young couple, whom she hadn’t seen in over a year. After a few seconds, during which Kayla didn’t even try to retract her incomplete—but patently clear—response, Jason broke free from the dunning. And he turned and walked out the door.
He needed to think. He wasn’t in the habit of storming out the door when they fought. But this hadn’t really been a fight, and he just left, no clouds or thunder entering the room, or leaving with him. Jason felt bad for leaving, but had no resources for resisting the compulsion to get alone with his feelings. The main thing he was aware of feeling, however, was numb. Perhaps drinking in more of the cooling night air would scrub away that coating of numbness, and would open his pores to release the confusion and consternation.
About three blocks from his apartment, Jason began to breath more normally. He had unconsciously dropped his backpack on the chair by the front door, the one they used for taking off their shoes. That fortunate habit had left him walking more freely, feeling relieved, if only of a few books and his laptop.
As he cruised along in this gathering momentum of peace and relief, someone merged onto the sidewalk beside him, someone who knew him.
“Hey, Jason. Out for a walk?”
Startled by the sudden company, Jason glanced at the man, who was a bit shorter than him, with long hair and a beard. He thought he recognized one of the guys from his hermeneutics class. The voice sounded familiar.
“Yeah,” he said. “Just clearing my head.” He glanced at his companion, but couldn’t catch more than a glimmer of eyes in the night shade of an evergreen hedge.
“I know what you mean. I love to get away and talk to my father in Heaven…just talk.”
That seemed a more pious answer than he would have expected from Gerry, the guy from his class. But it reminded Jason to stop fuming and start praying. He nodded like he knew what Gerry was saying. At that point, they reached the end of the hedge and broke free of the shadows, in favor of a bright street light. But, when Jason casually sought a better look at the man next to him, it seemed that the guy had suddenly turned up the side street, only Jason couldn’t see him where he would have expected.
“Hey!” he said. Instantly, he began to doubt that it was Gerry, so he hesitated to call out his name. Stopping under the brightest circle of bluish light, he looked around a 270-degree arch back in the direction from which he had just come. He hadn’t heard the guy turn and run, no fast footfalls fading into the darkness. Where did he go? And who exactly was that?
Then Jason paused to replay their brief conversation. The point the stranger had made about using the quiet walking time to pray seemed profoundly useful at the moment when Jason heard it, as if a messenger had been sent to correct his attitude and redirect his attention. He had quickly received the reminder as sound advice—even inspired advice.
Jason was back into the role of freeze tag victim. If that was the game, he was losing badly that night.
He returned home as soon as he pulled himself free from the other-worldly gravity that had anchored him to that spot under the street light, a preview of summer bugs winging around and around the bright spot in the night. He had to pause to be sure not to allow a moth into the front door, when he arrived back home.
Neither Kayla nor Mary were in the living room. Jason was relieved. He needed to decompress gradually before finding the strength for the apology he owed. He picked up his backpack and carried it to h
is desk, on the other side of the room. He could hear Kayla talking to someone in her studio, as soon as he reached the end of the living room that was away from the outside sounds. What he heard sounded like a one-sided conversation. He assumed it was a phone call. Perhaps Kayla had called her mother for some moral support. Jason wondered how Mrs. Dobbins would respond to the news that her daughter and son in law had both lost their minds. The notion struck him as funny and he laughed aloud.
Kayla’s one-sided conversation stopped abruptly. Jason stood still, silent again, waiting for her to talk some more. He peaked through the two-inch gap where her door had been left loose. He couldn’t see Kayla at first, and then a sliver of her form filled that gap and the door swung wider. She propped herself against the edge of that door and hung onto both the inside and outside door knobs. She looked apologetic.
“Who were you talking to?” Jason said, rounding the couch and tipping his head to the left.
“God.”
“Oh.” Jason dropped back from the anxious edge he had approached, when he saw Kayla’s sympathetic eyes, thin brows raised. He started to relax, knowing peace was about to break out between them. But a thought interrupted the proceedings.
“Wait. Is Jesus in there with you?”
Kayla laughed. She laughed at how strange that question sounded in the broader context of her life; and she laughed at how much sense it made in the context of the last couple of days. She answered with a teasing tone. “Of course. He’s always with me.”
Jason was thinking about that stranger walking with him in the dark. It had felt both ordinary and extraordinary, as if the one had the capacity to reach into the other. The notion of incarnation became more than a mere notion to him right then. He knew, as well, that Kayla was just teasing. He knew that Jesus had not appeared to her again in her studio. He also knew that she didn’t really believe that Jesus was always with her, any more than he really believed it, even if it was true.
Seeing Jason’s serious face, his head bowed slightly, Kayla adjusted her tone. “This is really shaking me up. It just doesn’t make sense. Mary asked me what I had done to bring this on, and I couldn’t think of a single thing. I’m not even doing the basic stuff I know I should be doing, at least not as much as I used to before…” What followed would have sounded like blaming Jason, so she refused to give it words.
Jason felt the need to finish the thought. “Before we got married.” He knew it wasn’t an accusation against him, just an observation of the way that the tectonic shift of their lives had left a lot of ordinary things tipped over, and even knocked off their shelves entirely. He had felt it too. “I know what you mean. It’s like it’s hard to stay focused on so many important things all at once.”
Kayla was aware of a thought that had crept up beside her, like a friend who wants her attention, but is willing to wait a little longer for her to be done with the conversation she is already having. It had something to do with Mary’s question about what she had done to attract Jesus’s special attention. The conviction that she didn’t deserve anyone’s special attention kept her from turning to hear out that invisible friend.
“And this all seems so random,” Jason said. When he said that, it occurred to him that he hadn’t actually told Kayla yet about the person walking with him. Part of his brain was thinking that she had been there, that she somehow knew. Or maybe he was just afraid to put it into words. But he tried anyway. “Something else happened, when I was walking.”
Releasing the door and stepping out into the living room, Kayla thought she knew what he was going to say, and it excited her that she could know, that she was attached to Jason so deeply that she could hear what he was going to say before he said it. “What?” was all she said, afraid of spoiling the moment.
Jason described his walk, and the sudden appearance and disappearance of the stranger, who maybe wasn’t really a stranger at all. “When he said the part about his ‘heavenly father’ I got this little chill, but didn’t know why. And then got all caught up with thinking about who this was walking with me, but I forgot about what he said. He was like telling me I should be praying while I’m walking around trying to figure things out. That was the point of him showing up there, not just to give me chills, or make me think I’m totally insane.”
Kayla stepped a foot closer and recalled the smiling face of Jesus right in front of her, the gentle comfort of his hands on her face, and she knew she had done the same thing. “Yeah, I got so blown away that he was actually there for me to see, that I kinda blanked out the part where he was communicating so much love to me. I mean, I could just feel how in love with me he is.” Her throat constricted with emotions, rounding out her voice to a heavier, wobbly tone.
Though he rarely needed an excuse, Jason allowed the quaver in her voice to invite him to reach out for Kayla and envelop her. He felt as if they were two children stuck outside in a snow storm, both shivering with cold, and both knowing that they needed each other’s warmth to make it through.
Jesus had appeared to both of them and they both felt the need to recover from the experience. Neither Kayla nor Jason saw this as ironic. Neither of them understood why it was so.
Chapter 6
Morning Visit
Tuesday mornings Jason had no classes, and Kayla didn’t go to work until nearly lunch time, a quirk in the schedules of her two very quirky employers. A slow, weekend mood often awoke with the young couple, especially now that warm and sunny mornings had become common currency, instead of rare coinage.
This Tuesday morning, the slow start allowed for contemplation of all that had happened in the past two days. Jason lay with his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. He idly evaluated the uneven ceiling paint, swaths of eggshell white next to swaths of grayer and yellower paint. He didn’t pause to evaluate the effect of the morning sun on his perception of those colors. The entire observation served only as a place to hang his physical vision, as his internal eyes picked through the pieces of the giant cargo container that had landed on their lives that week. Instead of special delivery, the result resembled the aftermath of a tornado. Something about that feeling bothered him deeply. He was beginning to look for clues that Kayla was right in her initial response to the voice, that it can’t be God if it makes one so uncomfortable and confused.
But that too seemed inappropriate. Who else would have appeared to Kayla and showed his love for her in those eyes, and that touch? Who else would have joined his nighttime walk to offer advice about consulting God on the things that were happening? That turned Jason’s thoughts to prayer.
When he was a kid, he had become fascinated with a man in his church who seemed to talk to God as if God were a real, and fairly normal, person—not a religious idea from far away and long ago. Jason had begun to strive for that kind of conversational relationship with God, when he was about twelve years old.
Inside his head, he tried one of those conversations: “So, God, I guess you can see what a mess me and Kayla are in over this whole Jesus appearing thing. My question is, how are we supposed to take this? This is crazy, isn’t it? It is crazy, right?”
“What’s crazy about a friend showing up for a visit?”
That response did not seem to come out of Jason’s subconscious mind, that place where he was trying to offer his real thoughts and feelings to God. That response had sound to it—a slightly muffled sound, in fact. It sounded like it came from the kitchen.
Jason froze. Kayla roused to full wakefulness. “Did you just hear something?” she said, also careful not to move.
“Come on out, and have some breakfast,” said that voice again.
Kayla rolled over like a cat, when you try to lay it on its back. Instead of planting four paws on the ground, however, she turned toward Jason, as if he had better answer for what was going on. This was a variation on the enculturated response to a burglar in the house—the wife suddenly asserting the husband’s supremacy in matters of home protection, no matter what she b
elieve about gun control or male headship.
Jason just rotated his eyes toward Kayla. He had been holding his breath, as if those words from their little kitchen might really just be the sound of wind whistling through his nostrils. But the panic on Kayla’s face convinced him that he was not the only one hearing voices, and one particular voice, from an uninvited breakfast guest.
“Come on,” the voice insisted, but in a very friendly way. At least he was a friendly burglar, if that’s what he was.
But both Jason and Kayla knew exactly who this was. They had heard this voice recently. Denial is, however, a very tenacious thing; and two decades of experience does not simply resign its throne, and allow you to redefine your reality on a sleepy Tuesday morning…even if Jesus is waiting for you in your kitchen.
Kayla was the first to move. She wanted more clothes on. Intimacy with God was one thing, but that too had its limits. While she grabbed her lightweight robe from the closet, Jason swung his legs off his side of the bed. He pulled on the pants he was wearing the night before, and had discarded after their long conversation that covered the entire apartment. He had a sudden urge to shout, “Who goes there?” But to surrender to that urge would have been to admit how thoroughly unhinged his mind felt at that moment, even more so than during any of the odd and inexplicable experiences of the previous two days.
Thinking, “Am I really gonna do this?” Kayla pulled the bedroom door open the rest of the way. She stopped and waited for Jason to finish pulling on a clean t-shirt. She abandoned her objection to a clean t-shirt layered on top of last night’s pants, knowing a petty thought when she heard one.
Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3) Page 5
