To many people, this would have been a confusing twist in the conversation. But Jason was adept at debating such issues with friends and faculty. He was keeping up, but not sure where he had gone wrong. He could tell Jesus was offering a correction, even if he couldn’t tell what had been lacking in the way he used that catchy Christian phrase.
A text message buzzing on his phone pulled Jason away from pursuing that answer. He reached for his phone, stretching his leg to allow access in his front pocket. He looked at Jesus even as he extracted the device. Jesus recognized the question in Jason’s face.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Jason looked at the text from his boss. It was a plea for help with the support call queue. Jason was scheduled to work that day, but not this early. Again, he looked at Jesus, about to ask what he should do. But Jesus didn’t need an explanation of his dilemma.
“If you want to work, go ahead. I know you were planning that for today, along with finishing that last research paper.”
So far, this experience with Jesus was layer-after-layer of surprises. If he had time to prepare, Jason might have anticipated some of these jolts, such as Jesus knowing so much about him.
Breaking free from his most recent befuddlement, Jason turned to his phone and texted his acceptance back to his boss. Kayla came out of the bedroom, dressed now in shorts and a t-shirt, appropriate to the sunny day and to having a guest. The latter point was important to Jason, as Kayla could tell from his look when she paraded by in the towel.
“I feel like asking if I can get you anything,” Kayla said, pulling her hair into a ponytail as she stood looking at the guest on the couch. She laughed as Jesus turned toward her and smiled.
“Don’t even think about it, Kayla. I don’t need a thing. I just want to be with you.”
Kayla knew that Jesus was answering more than she had asked, but she was still feeling awkward about this surprise visit and didn’t pursue the loose ends in Jesus’s reply.
Jason was focused on getting his computer connected to the tech support site, lifting his headset as the Web site loaded. “It seems kinda rude to work with a guest here,” he explained to Kayla, “but he said to go ahead.”
Kayla shared Jason’s discomfort with that solution, but, having missed the conversation, didn’t feel empowered to challenge the conclusion.
“I’m perfectly content to watch you work,” Jesus explained. “You don’t need to entertain me or anything. Just do what you would normally do. We’ll get our chances to talk.”
Jason settled the microphone and single-ear headphone over his head, squishing down his spiky hair just a bit. He started clicking toward his first call. Kayla knew the routine, so she turned to the kitchen to clean up after breakfast. Jesus rose from the couch and followed her. Jason watched them depart the room as he accepted his first caller.
In the kitchen, Kayla and Jesus moved together in perfect synch, never having to stop and wait for the other, never grabbing something the other was reaching for. The step-and-sweep and lift-and-settle happened so smoothly that Kayla finally laughed. “You act like you know what I’m thinking.”
Jesus raised his eyebrows and smiled back.
Kayla closed her eyes and shook her head, having just traveled over that same pass that Jason had stumbled into. When she opened her eyes, Jesus had stepped closer and reached out for her wet hand. She startled a little and chuckled uncomfortably.
“I’ve always known what you’re thinking, even when you can’t see me doing it,” he said, tenderness lowering his voice.
Jason struggled to stay focused on his work, hearing the laughter and then the intimate tones just out of sight and just beyond the hearing of his one exposed ear. He was taking an older gentleman through the preliminary steps to allow a remote connection to his computer. The man’s suspicions about the arrangement were prolonging the call.
“This doesn’t seem very secure to me, but then what do I know?” the man, named Paul, conceded.
“Well, I work for the company that protects your computer from attack. If you can’t trust us, then who can you trust?” Jason knew this was a weak, shrink-wrapped answer, but it usually sufficed, and he was working against the clock, along with the distractions from the kitchen.
Kayla and Jesus settled into the process of washing and drying dishes. The old apartment hadn’t yet been equipped with a dishwashing machine, and Kayla and Jason were coping the old-fashioned way. With Jesus by her side, Kayla offered to dry, since she knew where all the dishes go when they’re ready to be put away. Jesus didn’t argue, but gave a little laugh at her reasoning. Kayla caught up to her new reality and grinned a sideways grin, when she realized her silly assumption.
“I guess I’m just revealing how little I think about what you know and how much you see about our lives.” Kayla lowered her head, contemplating the dish in her hand. She ran a pink and white terrycloth towel over the first of the plates Jesus had washed. “I think I’m just assuming that you’re too busy with important things to know where I store my plates.”
Jesus nodded slowly, rinsing another plate and slipping it into the dish drainer. “Yeah, most people assume that I’m just a bigger, smarter version of them, as if I can only handle one thing at a time. But, right now, I’m aware of Jason’s struggle with Mr. Horton, over there, and am also present with your mother as she prays for your brother, Peter.”
Kayla froze. She stood holding a towel in one hand and breakfast plate in the other.
Jesus helped her with a question. "Would you like to pray for Peter too?"
"What's happening with Peter?" She knew that he was having trouble on his job, she also knew that the root of that trouble was something in his personal life, something that had separated him from his fiancée, just as it had ended another prospective marriage a few years ago.
"I’m not free to tell you what's going on with Peter," Jesus said. "I have to be good at keeping secrets sometimes."
Briefly, Kayla imagined the long list of secrets that Jesus would have to keep, for the sake of the privacy of all kinds of people.
"Yes, I do want to pray for him," she said, in answer to that earlier question.
At this point, Jason's voice interrupted. "I know this is rude, with a guest and all, but, if I'm really supposed to go ahead and work, it's hard to concentrate with you two talking over there."
Kayla guessed that, from where he was sitting at the other end of the living room, Jason was not hearing everything they said, but probably just enough for curiosity to keep him from attending to the mundane matters of software troubleshooting.
Jesus motioned toward the studio, and Kayla waited, as he dried his hands on a towel and stepped in that direction. To a neutral observer, what happened next raised the extraordinary experience to a new level. Just as Jesus reached the small hallway between bedrooms and bathroom, he peeled off and returned to that seat on the couch. At the same time, he followed Kayla into the studio. It was like making a copy, the original continuing on with Kayla, and the reproduction landing in the living room. Jesus managed this trick without either of his hosts perceiving it, avoiding more stunned stares and petrified pauses.
Instead, he brought Kayla back to where they had left their conversation. "Okay, go ahead, I'm listening," he said, in a voice gentle enough to avoid disrupting Jason in the next room.
Kayla looked at Jesus with her constant consternation now at about half-strength. She was confused and trying to hide it. Prayer was something she was supposed to know about, and Jesus was standing there in front of her confusing the matter. Maybe he wanted her to talk more about her feelings, before she actually stopped to pray. So she tried that.
"I just want to pray that he gets through whatever this is. I have my suspicions, but nobody has told me what he's struggling with," she said.
Jesus reached a hand up to her face so unselfconsciously and confidently that Kayla barely noticed, like it was just an extension of his smile. The moisture and warmth of the
dishwater was still on his skin, his real and human skin.
"You're taking a good attitude toward this, go ahead and intercede for him," Jesus said, selecting a different word for prayer, one so familiar to Kayla that she didn't notice the subtle help he provided in the change.
Nodding very slightly, Kayla closed her eyes and began to bow her head.
Jesus interrupted. "What are you doing?"
Kayla, once again laboring to hide her confusion, looked up slowly, her long lashes gracefully sweeping upward and her dark blue irises casting toward the corners of her slightly squinted eyes.
She answered his question. "I'm getting ready to pray."
"But I'm right here."
Now her eyes were locked on his face. He was clearly correcting her, but showed no impatience or frustration in his inviting eyes or his ready lips. Kayla resisted a sudden urge to kiss him, shaking herself just visibly and trying to stay on task.
It was Kayla's grandmother, her mother's mother, who had taught her how to pray. Grandma Wright was the head of the missionary society at her Christian Missionary Alliance church, and she made certain that the Gospel was preached at home, as well as abroad. One summer day, when Kayla was visiting her grandma all by herself—the first granddaughter born into that family, and a welcomed treat to her matronly grandmother—Grandma Wright had read Kayla a children's story about Jesus dying for her sins. Kayla still remembered looking up at her grandmother, now deceased, with a question about that story, a question clustered together with so many other questions, that the little four-year-old was struggling to get a grip on the one she wanted.
Grandma Wright asked her own question, instead, looking down at her beloved granddaughter seated on her lap, seeing her wonder and curiosity mixed with a little fear. "Do you want to ask Jesus into your heart, so you can go to heaven like Grandpa Wright, and all of the rest of the family?"
Of course, the four-year-old wanted to stay with her family, and wanted to meet Grandpa Wright, of whom she had no clear memories. But she didn't know why she was being asked such a question.
"All you have to do is pray. Praying is just talking to God."
"Just talking to God," Jesus said.
Like a harmony fitted into a familiar melody, Jesus had added his voice to her grandmother's instructions. Kayla felt as if he had returned to the memory with her, instead of just standing there waiting for her to comprehend what he was trying to tell her.
She repeated that phrase, "Just talking to God." She smiled like someone just getting a subtle joke.
Jesus refocused her thoughts. "Peter."
His reminder awoke her fears and her hopes for her second oldest brother, the middle of the siblings.
Jesus seemed to reply to those inarticulate swirls of concern. "Yes, I will help him. I will offer him a way out, just as I had hoped to, just as your mother is praying."
"But..." Kayla began to protest.
"I heard your heart." He slipped his hand down her neck to the left side of her chest, where her heart was beating fast.
She raised her right hand to cover his, still warm on her bare skin. She received that touch and held on. It began to penetrate beyond her skin, beyond her physical heart, into her unsettled soul. And she began to cry for no reason that she could articulate. But it was a deep purging. Her chest heaved and Jesus reached around her with both hands to press his own chest to hers. Amidst the mix of physical sensations saturated with deep emotion, it felt to Kayla that his chest was echoing the sobs convulsing hers, that her gasping breath was reverberating beyond her own slight body.
Jesus spoke after a few minutes. “You have been running after me for years, Kayla. What did you think you would do when you caught me?”
Now they were no longer interceding for Kayla’s troubled brother. They were not even simply embracing, there in Kayla’s studio. Standing on the butcher’s paper stretched over the floor to protect the wood from paint spatters, they were completing a transaction, a union of lost lovers, a return of a wayward child, who didn’t even know that she had gotten lost.
Kayla didn’t have to answer Jesus’s question. She knew that. She also knew that he had been waiting more expectantly than she had.
She felt him sigh his satisfaction at finally having been caught.
Chapter 10
Drawing Nearer
When Jesus and Kayla had headed for the studio, and Jesus peeled himself in two, it seemed to Jason that Jesus had let Kayla go on without him, and had come to sit and watch him work. Intent on trying to help another caller, Jason reserved judgement about whether he wanted to be watched by the man in sandals with his legs crossed and his long white robe draped over the crossbar of that crossed leg.
“I’m going to take control of your computer now,” he was saying to a Mrs. Carstens. Like most of his customers, she was an older woman, well into her fifties he guessed.
“Okay, you just let me know what you want me to do,” she said over a clear phone connection. Jason could hear her sigh in resignation.
Adjusting himself in his seat, using the computer mouse with his right hand, he clicked through the screen introducing the remote connection, and saw the computer desktop of Mrs.
Carstens’s misbehaving PC. A photo of two young children with dark eyes, dark skin and giggly smiles greeted him. This part felt a bit like an invasion of privacy. He had remoted into a number of computer screens littered with shortcuts to pornography sites. Sometimes he learned more than he wanted to know about a particular customer.
Jason guessed that he was looking at Mrs. Carstens’s grandchildren.
Jesus wanted Jason to know more. “Those are her grand kids, as you guessed. They’re not so happy right now as they were when they smiled for that picture.”
Jason was scrolling and clicking through computer menus, following a rote pattern for changing settings that would likely clear up the complaint that prompted Mrs. Carstens to call. Without replying verbally to what Jesus said, he glanced to his right, where the visitor sat, and Jason wondered why he had been fed that information.
Jesus answered the unspoken question. “You will get through this pretty quickly, and then you could tell her something for me. She needs some encouragement.”
Now Jason was fully focused on Jesus. He muted his microphone. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I want you to talk to her for me.”
“But I’m working here. I don’t think that would be approp…” He stopped himself when he could see that he was about to correct the Son of God.
Unmuting the call and continuing his clicks through the settings and configuration screens, Jason found what he had expected. He disabled some programs that were conflicting with the antivirus software. He unchecked some boxes, with four quick clicks, and closed that window. Normally, this would be a brief call that would put him ahead of his quota. But Jesus clearly had some other agenda.
Nervously, Jason glanced again at Jesus. His look was a passive acceptance of the awkward adventure Jesus seemed to be proposing.
“Okay. Tell her that you know her name is Loretta, and that she lost someone very close to her this past month.”
With the call muted again, as he clicked his way out of Mrs. Carstens’s computer, Jason asked, “How am I gonna bring that up?”
“Just tell her that you believe I’m giving you this information so you can encourage her.”
That didn’t sound like much more than Jason already knew. What he was hoping for was some magic phrase that would make it entirely understandable that he was suddenly talking about Jesus, instead of antivirus software. Jesus didn’t seem to know those magic words.
Jason took a stab at it, confident that the call was not being monitored by anyone at the overworked computer company. “Uh, well that should fix your problem. Is it okay if I restart your computer from here, Mrs. Carstens?”
“Oh, of course. It was that simple?”
“Yes, it’s a very common cause of the problems you descr
ibed.”
“Oh, sure then. Yes, please finish up whatever it takes.”
“Thank you. And, well, I hope you have a great day.” He paused, trying to wrap his head around what Jesus had instructed. It sounded important, and he feared what it would mean, if he didn’t go through with it.
In response to the inexplicable silence, Mrs. Carstens took the initiative to end the call. “Oh, thank you. You have a good day too. Goodbye.”
Jason double clutched and then blurted, “Uh, wait! I mean. I think I have something else to tell you that’s personal. I mean, not about your computer.”
The two seconds of silence which followed started Jason wondering if Loretta Carstens had hung up before that bizarre interruption. He was mostly hoping that this was the case. But then he heard her take in a breath. “Oh. What is that?” she said.
He had lost the handles for what Jesus had told him, but when he opened his mouth to begin, he heard Jesus prompting him.
He spoke, following Jesus’s prompts. “I have this feeling that Jesus has a message for you. He told me your name is Loretta, and that you had a terrible loss this last month. He wants to encourage you.” Jesus spoke this in short pieces and Jason repeated it almost smoothly.
“Oh,” she said again. But this time it was an exclamation of discovery that arched up and ended abruptly.
Jesus continued. “Your daughter is with me, and she is taken care of. She feels no pain now. And I am interceding with my father for the provision needed by your two beautiful grandchildren.”
Jason proved to be a very good ventriloquist dummy, repeating his master’s words in a fairly natural cadence. His emotion, however, was more confounded than comforting. He was as surprised as Loretta at the revelation, and didn’t hide that surprise from his voice.
Now he heard sobbing over the phone. He really hoped the call was not being monitored, or that the recording wouldn’t be sampled later for any reason. Making the customers cry was not included among the company’s computer support protocols.
Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3) Page 9
