Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Jesus let go of her face and held out his hands shoulder width. “I love you this much,” he said.

  Kayla laughed. She used to play this game with her father, when she was very little. She played along.

  Holding her hands wider than Jesus’s, she replied. “I love you this much.”

  Then, like her father who was much bigger than her at the time, Jesus stretched his arms out to the fullest extent of his reach. In that stretch, his sleeves slipped up his arms, and Kayla saw, for the first time, the scars from the nails.

  And Jesus, knowing she was looking at those scars, said, “But I love you this much.”

  For a split second, she saw him as she had seen him in so many sculptures and paintings, in movies and in passion plays. She saw this same Jesus stretched out on the cross, his arms nailed open wide, and she knew that, in that posture of surrender, he was saying to her how much he loved her.

  It was Kayla’s turn to unleash the floods, to pour out compound emotions that lacked definition for their depth and complexity. She wept because of his love. But she wept more for herself, somehow. She couldn’t say how.

  Jason had finished his writing and stepped into the studio to see Jesus with his arms wrapped around Kayla, as she cried her heart out. Jesus gestured, with a quick flick of his head, for Jason to come and join them. Once again, she was surrounded by her men, but this time she would not stop weeping for a very long time. Only the first stages of dehydration finally slowed her down.

  Chapter 17

  Day’s End

  What time do you go to bed when Jesus is visiting? It was a weeknight. They both had obligations for early the next day. Wednesday was the day Kayla taught her class at the community college, and Jason had to attend his last lecture in two different classes. Still, Jesus was there, visible and perfectly audible, even as their hearing became muffled by sleepiness.

  Kayla and Jason were back on the couch; she was propped up by a pile of pillows, with her legs across his lap. They liked this arrangement, which allowed them to stay in physical contact and still see each other’s face. Some of their single friends seemed a little uncomfortable with that much physical contact, while trying to have a serious conversation. But they knew Jesus would be okay with it.

  Sitting in the recliner, his hands resting on the slightly worn spots on each arm, where generations of men in Jason’s family had rested work-weary hands, Jesus attended to every word they said, even the blurry ones.

  They had looped back around to Kayla’s conversation, which had prompted her catharsis, about wanting to be grown up so she could have a say in her life. When they approached that key memory of her parents deciding to put her dog to sleep, she noticed something.

  “You know, when we talked about this earlier, I could still feel that same old anger that I felt every time I thought about them deciding that without consulting me. But, just now, I don’t feel it.”

  Jesus looked pleased but not surprised. “That’s what much of the crying was about. You were letting go of your right to resent what they did.”

  “I didn’t even know it was happening.”

  “But you know now,” Jesus said.

  “Yeah, but shouldn’t I have like renounced something, or repented of something?”

  “You did.”

  “When?”

  “When you saw me on the cross. You were still carrying your resentment. You let it go, right where it belonged.”

  Though that transaction seemed more effortless than Kayla would have expected, she could tell that it was true, merely by the way she felt about it now. Clearly, she had let her parents off the hook at some point during that encounter, even if she didn’t have a video replay to prove it.

  “Hey, maybe you could do that with me and my parents,” Jason said. “Especially my dad.”

  “You’ll forgive him,” Jesus said simply.

  Jason scowled, searching for the trick in that statement. “He thinks I’m lazy ‘cause I wanna write, instead of running a business like he does.”

  “I know.” Jesus’s voice hummed with reassurance and calm. “And you probably shouldn’t wait for him to change his mind about that.”

  Jason snickered, as if Jesus were speaking ironically. “So, can’t you make me not care what he thinks, and not resent the way he belittles what I do?”

  Tipping his head slightly to one side, Jesus looked hard at Jason. “Only you can make that happen. I’ll be there to hold the door for you when you wanna go in. But it won’t happen until you’re ready. You need to build some self-confidence, so you know for sure that he’s wrong, before you forgive him for being wrong.”

  “Is he wrong?” Jason was still trying to pry some help out of his visitor.

  Jesus just smiled. For a second, that smile felt like he was avoiding the issue, refusing to help.

  But the longer he sat looking into Jesus’s placid face, the more Jason knew for certain that Jesus wasn’t worried about him. Jesus didn’t doubt him, didn’t fear for his future.

  As if they had still been talking during that bit of revelation, Jesus continued. “Besides, you had a breakthrough earlier in the day. That freedom will make it easier for you to actually get down to writing.”

  Weighing this before responding, Jason made a connection. “It was pretty easy to just sit down and write the conclusion to that paper, and clean up the loose ends. I didn’t have any problem with motivation.” He looked at Jesus with a wrinkled brow. “That was from my break down this morning?”

  “I said, ‘breakthrough’. Not ‘breakdown.’ ”

  Jason laughed. “Okay. Whatever.”

  Kayla was fading toward sleep. Jason watched her eyelids hit bottom and bounce back open a couple of times. At this point, it occurred to him that, when saints saw Jesus, they probably didn’t ask him how long he planned to stay. But this question seemed the most relevant topic of discussion just then.

  Jesus read his thoughts. “I’ll still be here in the morning. You can go to sleep.”

  Somehow, those words roused Kayla, wakefulness coming from Jesus pronouncing the word “sleep.” She had been wondering the same thing as Jason, of course.

  “You’re staying? You’ll be here in the morning?”

  Speaking a bit more firmly, his voice deepening, Jesus decided to make an important point, in spite of the sleepy state of his hosts.

  “I’m always with you. I will never leave you, either of you, or both of you, ever. You can count on that.” He waited for this to penetrate their sleep-addled minds, to the point that each wondered whether being there in the morning wasn’t just a figure of speech, or a play on words. Then he satisfied that concern as well.

  “I’ll be visible to you both in the morning, just like I am now.”

  Past midnight now, both Kayla and Jason nearly fell to sleep immediately upon hearing this reassurance. But Jesus seemed to think that the couch wouldn’t be the best place for them to spend the night, as young and nimble as they were. He gave each of them his hand and hoisted them to their feet, so they could stagger to their bedroom.

  They paused at the hallway, just before rounding the corner and losing sight of him, and said goodnight to Jesus, Kayla giving him a little wave of her free hand, clinging to Jason with her other.

  “Goodnight,” Jesus said, and turned as if to take up his place in the recliner again.

  In bed, a few minutes later, Jason corralled a last cogent thought. “What if he came in here to sit, while we sleep?”

  Kayla opened one eye. “Wouldn’t that be weird?”

  Jason literally laughed himself to sleep. Jesus was sitting in Jason’s favorite recliner in the living room, the one he inherited from his parents, who had inherited it from his grandfather. Wasn’t that kind of weird? But Jason lacked the wakefulness and energy to do more than laugh, rocking the bed gently as Kayla drifted off. He followed soon after.

  As peaceful as his passing into sleep was, perhaps the first time Jason had ever fallen asleep l
aughing, he still dreamt that night; and the dream seemed to be full of both the wonder and the consternation of the appearance of Jesus.

  In his dream, Jason was a boy again. He was wearing a cowboy hat that his mother had given him when he was eight. He had rarely worn that hat in his real waking life. But, in this dream, Jason was a cowboy, and he wore that hat to prove it.

  “What do you call this?” he was saying to someone that he couldn’t see.

  A voice replied, “It’s called a roundup.” It was a man’s voice, not one that he recognized. In the dream, that was not a problem.

  “What are we going to do with all of them when we round them up?” Jason said, in the dream.

  “Let them go, of course,” said the voice.

  This upset little Jason. Why should he have to go to all this work, just to let them go again?

  “This roundup is not to capture and kill the cattle. It is to take care of them, to give them medicine or vitamins, or something like that. You set them free to roam again, when you’ve taken care of them. It’s necessary to round them up, but then we always set them free.”

  Jason felt relieved when he learned this. As soon as he did, he realized that he was in the basement of his childhood home, and the ones who needed rounding up were children, not cattle. One of the children was his father, who was both still his father and also a little boy playing in the basement.

  With the help of the invisible voice with whom he had been talking, Jason rounded up all of the children and sat them in chairs, and on the floor, in the family room, all crowded around to see or hear something, excited and beginning to quiet down. Jason began to lead this little meeting. He no longer wore his cowboy hat, but had his guitar, the first guitar he received as a ten-year-old. And he led the children in singing Jesus Loves Me. And then the dream ended, as far as he could remember.

  Chapter 17

  A Wake

  When Jason woke up that morning, he grabbed his smart phone from the night table next to the bed. There were a few texts waiting. Not entirely unusual. Their contents were more unusual than their quantity.

  First, came Donnie’s text from early evening: “Dude, I’m like totally free, like no worries. Nothing scares me. You rock!”

  Followed immediately by another text: “I mean Jesus rocks!”

  Then Donnie had added another just a few minutes before Jason picked up his phone: “I slept so peaceful. No nightmares. No scary thoughts or death stuff either. This is awesome!”

  Mixed in there was a text from Steve, sent just before midnight: “Gotta talk about what happened today. I’m like all over the place and can’t stop thinkin about it. Dude, this is messing me up.”

  After looking at those, Jason was hoping Steve had thought to text Donnie. It seemed like his other friend could help him out.

  Another text arrived early that morning, this one from a number Jason didn’t recognize: “Jason, this is Eduardo. Sorry if this is too early, or I shouldn’t have texted you. But I just got off the phone with Lucy. She’s coming home today. Doctor saw her and said she can’t explain how her pain disappeared. Scheduled for scans to see what happened. Thank you so much. Will text with dinner invite soon.”

  This conglomeration of responses to Jason’s day with Jesus made him laugh. He was witnessing the impact that Jesus left behind him when he showed up right in the middle of Jason’s life.

  Kayla woke more slowly, but wanted to check her phone, when she saw Jason laughing at his overnight accumulation of texts. She found one from her brother, one from her mother and another from Ella.

  Michael said: “Hey. Gotta talk to you about Peter. I got a feeling that he needs us, especially you, not sure why. Just this crazy feeling out of the blue.”

  Her mother said: “Dear. Heard from Peter last night. Sounds like God is getting a hold of him. I hardly know what to say to him. Maybe you should call.”

  Then came a late night message from Ella: “Kayla, I know I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, but just had to thank you for yesterday. I know we were weird about it, but really had a great talk after you left and feel lots of peace. Yay God!”

  When they exchanged news and perused the whole banquet that Jesus had brought them the day before, Jason and Kayla both marveled at the powerful wake Jesus had left behind him.

  “It was you two that left that wake,” Jesus said from just outside the bedroom door.

  Kayla startled and then dove under the covers. Jason guffawed at his wife’s reaction. Then he took a breath to quiet down and hear what Jesus had said.

  “Okay if I come in?” Jesus said, through the door.

  “Is it?” Jason said to the lump that was Kayla under the covers.

  She pulled the blanket off her face and nodded. As she hoisted herself up to a sitting position, and kept the sheet and comforter pulled up to her neck, Jason answered Jesus.

  “Yes. Come on in.”

  Of course, anyone entering the room like this would have been apologetic, a little awkward, certainly uncomfortable. Not Jesus. He stood at the end of the bed and smiled at them in a way that reminded each of them of lost grandmothers. He had the sort of joyous welcome on his face that they had seen most often from a grandmother waking them when they stayed over for a visit.

  Jason pursued the cryptic statement that had penetrated the door a few seconds ago. “You said that it was our impact that we were seeing in all those texts this morning, not yours?”

  Jesus gave a knowing nod, as if granting Jason his skepticism. “I can see why you question me on that. It is a hard line to draw…where you begin and I end. It’s easy to get it confused about who exactly did all of those miraculous things.”

  Instead of clarifying anything, Jesus just loaded up a queue of questions. But, before, Jason could lift the first one off the runway, Jesus explained more.

  “You have to remember that I live in you, and you live in me. It’s not gonna be easy to separate who did what, under those circumstances.”

  Jason knew his New Testament scriptures, including the Gospel of John, where Jesus had said that part about being in his disciples and them being in him. So he understood the reference. What Jason wanted to say in return, lodged in the back of his throat, or maybe behind that.

  Kayla spoke up and bailed him out. “Well, we couldn’t have done it without you,” she said.

  “And I couldn’t have done it without you,” Jesus said, gesturing toward both of them. He obviously wasn’t going to concede anything here.

  A glance at Kayla let Jason know that she wasn’t inclined to fight this out with Jesus, and he knew it was time to get rolling for the day, so he just smiled and nodded. It wasn’t the gesture of one who knows he’s right and doesn’t want to press his point. It was rather from someone who suspected he was wrong, but didn’t feel up to having that proven conclusively just then.

  Jesus turned toward the door. “I’ll let you two get ready. How about oatmeal today?”

  What was more bizarre than Jesus showing up in their apartment? Having Jesus take over breakfast preparations perhaps.

  The transitions in and out of the shower, the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen, ran as usual, with the one exception of Jesus humming away in the kitchen, doing something very aromatic with oatmeal. “Simply the best,” was all he would say, when they asked what was in it. “I have a friend who is a master at oatmeal,” he said when pressed.

  They both ate more that morning than usual.

  After that, both Jason and Kayla were off to school. Jason would walk, just enough time to make it on foot, and Kayla would take the car to the community college on the north edge of town, a few miles away.

  Again, Jesus duplicated himself, in order to stay with both of them. Joining Kayla in the car, he even buckled his seatbelt to make it more comfortable for her. And he simultaneously walked with Jason along the partly sunny sidewalks.

  They strode briskly past the football stadium and through campus, to the big graduate school building, w
ith its bright white pillars that looked like they were made of marshmallow cake frosting, when the sun broke free for the clouds.

  Jason was running a hundred questions through his head, deleting them as fast as they came into focus—questions such as, “You ever been in here before?” A day into this experience, he was still adjusting to his very unreal reality.

  “Don’t worry. Just relax. I won’t do anything to destroy your reputation in here today. But you need to remember not to talk to me out loud. That’ll be on you,” Jesus said, sounding like one of the Jason’s classmates.

  Jason started to laugh but turned his voice down, when he noticed a couple of students approaching the doors from the opposite side of the stairway. He thought of pretending that he had his phone on Bluetooth, with a humorous podcast playing, but decided against carrying out such an elaborate fraud to cover for something he wasn’t even sure anyone noticed.

  Minutes later, Kayla was pulling into the parking lot at the community college, parking near the middle of the large expanse of asphalt, since she wasn’t regular faculty with a special permit. It was early enough that she wouldn’t have to walk half a mile from her car to the front doors, as she might later in the day. Her class started at 10:00. She was twenty minutes early, which wasn’t very early, given that she had to make sure that everyone’s workstation was setup. Cleaning crews, or other classes, accounted for all kinds of rearranging of the easels and tables in her classroom, a room shared with several other faculty, during the week.

  Reaching her backpack out of the back seat, before climbing out, Kayla caught a proud look on Jesus’s face, where he sat in the passenger seat, waiting for her.

  “You always look at me like I just did something spectacular,” she said, as she stood up next to the car, glowing at Jesus across the roof. She hadn’t noticed how had passed through the door, and wasn’t the sort of person to focus on such logistical details.

  Jesus reminded her of another logistical detail. “In my eyes you are spectacular. But you will probably want to get used to talking to me without your voice.”