Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Jason was just catching up with where this conversation was going. His memory of their violation of those pre-married rules was less guilt-laden than Kayla’s, but he knew how she felt, and recognized the point of the conversation. He struggled with discomfort over Jesus knowing about that week in Minnesota, not just the intimate details between him and his fiancée at the time. He wriggled beneath the mundane interest it implied. Abstractly, Jason wouldn’t have argued God’s inability to know about every part of his life, past or present. But, emotionally and practically, he lived insulated from the embarrassing, and the amazing, implications of God’s moment-by-moment attention.

  While his studies specialized in multi-syllable words such as incarnation, hermeneutics, kenosis and predestination, his personal life scampered along on a level beneath such lofty concepts, like a field mouse in tall grass. At ground level, amidst the stems and roots, he couldn’t carry such long and awkward baggage, especially if he was going to move quickly, and get all his busy work done.

  At some point, those complex constructs worked as a repellant, turning him away from thinking deeply, or meaningfully, about real consequences of a God who is with him, a savior united to his soul. Perhaps that was just a rookie problem. Jason had concentrated on studying literature and writing during his undergraduate years, he had only turned to biblical studies and theology as a focus for the past two years. On the other hand, he had not been greatly impressed with his professors, and the more experienced theology students, as deep wells of spiritual presence or power. He was pretty sure how they would react, for example, if he told them about this breakfast with Jesus.

  Pancakes, sausage, juice and coffee sat on the table. The stove was off, the kitchen smelled of vanilla and Arabica, of sage and citrus. Kayla and Jason sat a bit closer to each other than they generally did at those meals where they managed to coordinate their schedules. The man sitting across from Jason, at the other side of the small rectangular table, seemed to take up more space than his medium frame would imply. Never in their lives had Kayla and Jason hosted a guest so welcomed and so feared. The mix of those two feelings left them eating mutely.

  Jason found a depth of hunger he hadn’t felt for a while, and Kayla turned to nibbling, what she did when she was nervous. Jason had seen that nibbler at work at a fancy restaurant in St. Louis, when Kayla had met his parents for the first time. She was excited to finally meet them, but scared of the sullen and judgmental people Jason had portrayed. There too, the intensity of the event overwhelmed natural appetite and even common courtesy. She had known she was pretending to eat, she knew she was essentially playing a game with her food, and she knew that she was hardly aware of exactly what that food was, in fact. But she couldn’t stop herself, even though she could tell it was irritating Jason, who, of course, was not entirely relaxed either.

  Mr. Stivers, Jason’s father, owned several businesses, including custodial services for office buildings and a window-washing business for commercial properties. There was always a summer job ready for Jason. There was always money for tuition. What Mr. Stivers lacked, as Kayla could see for herself, was warmth and affection. He looked at Jason, over his silver reading glasses, with some pride when they discussed academics and published stories; but that pride lacked the warmth one might see in the eyes of someone describing their favorite horse or dog. Kayla could tell that Jason and his father were strangers to each other, which made that meal even more of a formality than she had already assumed.

  Next to Jason, sat his mother, a woman with perfectly formed blonde hair and a painted-on smile. Even over Christmas break, she was tan, though a woman of Scottish and Irish descent. Kayla avoided looking directly at Mrs. Stivers. Doing so would force her to contemplate the artificiality of that shiny hair and shiny skin, as well as that shiny white smile through perfectly painted lips. An artistic observer, Kayla had to avoid looking. She tried to stay focused on Jason, as if her eyes could send supportive beams to prop him up in front of the heavy storm of his father’s cloudy demeanor and his mother’s distant flashes, like lightning that never arrived any closer.

  At breakfast, that morning with Jesus, Kayla was not peeking up at Jason. She was peeking up at Jesus, whenever she felt that he was looking away, attending to his own—apparently hearty—appetite. Anyone who has tried this trick knows that a sort of rhythm develops, of looking and then looking away. Like a man capturing trout with his bare hand, Jesus waited for that rhythm to circle round, and then looked up at just the moment that Kayla would be looking up at him. He caught her. And their eyes locked.

  His eyes did not say, “Caught you.” They said what his voice had said the day before, “Don’t be afraid.”

  And she wasn’t.

  Chapter 8

  Staying Around

  When Jesus didn’t disappear from the studio, out of their sight for those moments, Jason began working under the assumption that the experience they were having was Breakfast with Jesus. Though this had not been included on any of the lists of mystical revelations of saints in the Middle Ages, and no monastics had included it in their spiritual disciplines, it seemed like an identifiable container, even if it was original.

  But, as older and wiser people have already learned, assumptions are just errors waiting to be revealed. Jesus led the way in revealing the new plan, into which Jason would have to slot his spinning mind.

  When they had finished eating, Jesus sat back and took a deep breath. There were only two pancakes left, and two sausages. Jason and Jesus assessed this remnant simultaneously, but Kayla spoke up. “Jason can have the leftovers for breakfast tomorrow.”

  Jesus nodded. “I’ll stay out of them.”

  Jason briefly pictured Jesus snatching the pancakes and sausage as he started to fade away, like a greedy ghost at the end of his visit. But Jesus answered the deeper question behind that random thought.

  “I’ll be staying around a while. But I won’t cook every meal, or insist on eating a big hungry share of your food.”

  Kayla and Jason checked with each other, the turn of their heads nearly mirror-perfect, the astonishment in glassy eyes a close reflection.

  “You’re staying?” Kayla said. The husky whisper with which she breathed those words stirred something in Jason. If it was jealousy, it was a different sort than the creature-from-the-deep that Jesus had squeezed out of him before breakfast. Instead of a clutching grip on Kayla, this envy stretched a hungry hand toward Jesus. Jason heard in Kayla’s infatuated question, a prelude to the longing in his own heart, a prelude that reminded him of an old friend.

  Soon after they married, Jason’s best friend from high school came to visit. Skylar had attended the same Christian school as Jason, and they graduated together, in the top five of their class. Four years later, Skylar wore his hair in dreadlocks, tawny tangles of hair so dense that they seemed more akin to wood than hair, like the vines in a rain forest. Skylar had always been wild, but his adventurism had taken on a missionary quality during college. He studied in a big Christian University on the West Coast, which is where Jason assumed his friend’s wild side sprouted into dreadlocks and plans for saving the world, one poor villager at a time.

  As intimidating as Skylar’s true-believer sort of Christianity was to both of them, Jason and Kayla had not wanted him to leave. They had whiffed a breeze of unfettered hope and freedom on that uninhibited young man. And his soul impressed them as being very mature, if not actually quite old. Of course, he wasn’t perfect, hadn’t even yet perfected the foundation of his own adult persona. They had heard the crack in his voice when he considered not seeing his parents for years at a time, while he worked in Nepal or Bangladesh. They recognized the boy that he still carried inside, even as he planned his life as a man of the world, God’s man, liberated to go anywhere in God’s world.

  In a strange way, Jesus struck both of them as a sort of big brother to Skylar, the grownup version of their amazing friend. They hadn’t wanted Skylar to leave when he finally ha
d to go to San Diego for his training.

  Jason spoke next. “How is this possible? I mean, what is this? How does this work?”

  Jesus smiled at him, not patronizingly, not smirking at his silly questions. Jesus actually looked impressed. “You‘ve come a long way in one breakfast,” he said, as serious as one can be out of a broad smile.

  Jason was starting to feel that cheeky freedom he exercised in Dr. Shanklin’s class. Jesus’s smile seemed to offer permission. “You started me out with some kind of exorcism, or something. It wasn’t my usual breakfast,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know about the granola,” Jesus said, joking back. More seriously, he said, “I decided it was time to make it real, to help you get from inside your head out to the real world.”

  The way he said “real” implied a whole list of things that Jason could only guess at. He glanced toward Kayla and was stopped by the pleased little smile on her face. She seemed to be enjoying the exchange. “What?” he said, laughing gently.

  “This is really cool,” was all Kayla could say. Jesus and Jason laughed together. But Jason wanted more of an answer from Jesus.

  “So, this is not just a dream? We’re really doing this?”

  Jesus nodded. “I’ve never been constrained by the usual categories. But, it’s not a dream and it really is happening to you.”

  Something occurred to Jason. “Can anyone else see you like we can?”

  Jesus nodded slowly. “That is a bit of a problem, as this usually goes. No one else can see me like you two, at least that’s the plan.”

  It sounded like there might be room for negotiating this point later. Jason, the fiction writer, was spinning out a scenario or two, in which it would be problematic that he was seeing and hearing someone that didn’t exist to anyone else in the room. Gratitude that Kayla was in on this secret steadied him, like a wide rock on which to stand in a strong tide.

  The flipside of his concern, that only he and Kayla could see and hear Jesus, was a sense of privilege. He appeared to them and only them. Not only had they never heard of this happening to anyone, now that it was happening, it was only happening to them. Neither Kayla nor Jason would pump their fists and say “yeah,” in celebration of this winning ticket, but neither of them was too mature—or jaded—to feel the tingle of excitement at being chosen.

  As if he were reading all of this as it tumbled around in their heads, Jesus burst out laughing and clapped. “I think you’re getting it,” he said.

  They looked at him for an explanation.

  Jesus had appeared to a fiction writer and an artist. Perhaps he chose them for their imagination, both singly and as a couple. In recent weeks, they had begun to play an online world-building game together, imagining the planet they wanted, and building it as a team, as an alliance—to be more exact. Their parents’ generation certainly included people of imagination and vision, but rarely did a married couple share fantasies and adventures of the mind as extensively as this generation has.

  Perhaps too, there was the sense of confirmation that Kayla and Jason each found in the trusting looks on the face of the other. The more they saw their spouse acquiescing to the impossible, the more they each let go of arguments against what their ears and eyes were telling them.

  Jason wanted more of the rules explained. “So you’ll be here waiting for us whenever we get home?” He actually hoped this Jesus revelation was a moveable feast, but aimed low to protect his shaky expectations.

  “Is that what you want? For me to stay confined here?”

  Kayla answered immediately. “No. I want you to come with us when we go places and do things.”

  “But with which one of us?” Jason added, not willing to ignore logistical concerns in the face of the miraculous.

  “Why not both?” Jesus said.

  Jason paused to imagine Jesus splitting in two. He realized that he should fit this situation into his existing theology of an omnipotent and omnipresent God. In the process, it felt as if he was attempting to juggle his own brain, separated into at least three parts, and a little bit slippery. But his mouth said, “That works,” without waiting to perfect his circus act.

  Kayla just smiled with satisfaction that Jesus 3D was as awesome as she would have imagined. For the moment, her awestruck wonder was having an easier time than Jason’s systematic theology. But Jesus was there for both of them.

  Chapter 9

  Hanging Out

  Though they probably don’t know, or particularly care, Jason and Kayla’s generation didn’t invent the idea of hanging out, they simply raised it to a mainstream occupation. Of course, theirs is also the generation that first benefited from parental experiments with quality time. The conjunction that followed, hanging out and spending quality time sounds like a contradiction to earlier generations, the casual mismatched with the intentional. But Jesus had no trouble conforming to the social expectations of two twenty-somethings.

  Sparing them the awkwardness of accompanying either of them into the bathroom, Jesus stayed with them when together, or with the one who was fully dressed and feeling presentable, when that was an issue.

  Emerging from the bathroom, after showering and getting dressed, Jason paused again, to contemplate Jesus’s choice of wardrobe for this visit.

  “Would you prefer this?” Jesus said, reading Jason’s thoughts again. Instantly, his attire changed to business casual, a sort of techie Jesus, a pony tail and beard, combined with skinny jeans, a t-shirt and loose flannel shirt. “Or this?” Jesus tried again. His quick switch took on a more formal, sophisticated style. A tie, jacket and slacks looked odd to Jason.

  This visit left Jason struggling for a footing somewhere between delirious and disoriented. Jesus’s quick change trick was pulling him toward hysterical. He was, however, trying to repent of his critical thoughts about how patronizing that costume was, as if Jesus was still a carpenter living in Nazareth. Jesus addressed these thoughts.

  “When I appear to people, I am there to communicate with them. I speak their language, both with words and with visual cues…and even a costume.” Jesus said this last word with some extra emphasis, but not the spicy sarcasm that Jason might have heard from one of his friends, in a similar situation. Similar situation? Was there one?

  As he nodded his acknowledgement, Jason felt as if he should bow and ask forgiveness for judging Jesus. He heard Kayla turn off the shower and pull back the curtain, as she reached for her towel. The bathroom door stood open an inch to allow for air circulation. This distracted him from his resolve to repent. Jesus responded anyway.

  “You don’t have to bow and grovel,” he said. “Repentance is just stopping and going a different direction.”

  Jason knew the basic definition of repentance, that it wasn’t falling on the ground and groveling in sorrow for sin. He wondered why Jesus felt the need to remind him of that definition.

  “Because you weren’t applying it to yourself,” Jesus said, in answer to those mute wonderings.

  “What do you mean?” Jason spoke aloud, though he might have wanted to explore the silent communication method, if he wasn’t so curious about what Jesus had just said.

  “You know that repentance is not groveling, but you still feel the need to do it when you realize you’ve sinned. You feel as if you’re an exception. Your abstract faith is more generous than your real practice of faith.”

  Jason shook his head, wise enough to know this alternate perspective was not simply an idea to consider, but a crucial correction. Kayla came out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel wrapped around her torso and another containing her hair atop her head. Jason liked to tease her about that towel hat, but just now he was wincing at his wife being nearly naked in front of Jesus. He started to speak up, but her jolly grin, and wave at both of them, slowed his response time and she passed out of sight, into the bedroom.

  Shaking loose from that distraction, Jason returned to what Jesus was telling him. “You’re saying I’m being harder on mysel
f than I am on others?”

  Jesus nodded. He motioned for Jason to take a seat, planting himself on the couch and waiting for Jason to land in his favorite recliner. It was a hand-me-down, but fit him perfectly, and had become his favorite reading spot, as well as a place to nap. As Jason settled, Jesus answered. “It’s not just a matter of inconsistency, being harder on yourself. It reveals that you don’t truly believe all that stuff about grace and forgiveness. You feel the need to earn forgiveness, by the depth of your sorrow or the abasement of your ego.”

  Jason stared. Though he had not expected this visit, of course, this piercing analysis surprised him on numerous fronts. “Did you come here to correct my faith?” The question was impetuous, but he wasn’t fully sure whether he resented such correction, or whether he craved it. What he resisted, he thought, was being caught off guard.

  “I love you just the way you are, and love you too much to leave you that way, right?”

  Not only had Jason heard those words from the pulpit at his home church, from the lectern at school, and in popular Christian books, he had said very similar things in debates about grace, as well as in an eighth grade Sunday school lesson he had taught the previous year. Again, Jesus didn’t use a snarky voice to make his point, but his even tone and bright smile couldn’t keep Jason from realizing that the quote was not entirely sympathetic.

  “But isn’t that right?” Jason said, crossing his right leg over his left, his white sock foot resting on his opposite knee, and his right hand wrapped over his ankle. It was a subtly defensive posture. His worldview seemed to be under attack.

  “It’s true that I love you just the way you are.” Jesus gestured with both hands toward Jason, as if to demonstrate a product he had to sell. “But it might be emotionally confusing to follow that so closely with a push to change who you are.” Jesus adopted an inquisitive tone. “Is that so you can be more loved? Or is it just saying that it’s a good idea to seek improvement, even though you know you’re already loved?”