The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Moving up next to her mother, interested in seeing her face when she responded, Willow said. “Would you be able to buy a place? Or would you be renting?”

  Claudia startled slightly at her daughter’s wraith-like approach and her equally stealthy reply. “Oh, well, I guess you don’t really want me hanging around here,” she said, in search of a contradiction.

  Willow withheld the contradiction and held her latest written message between imaginary fingers. “I think it’s a bit late in our lives, Mom, for us to bend our separate selves to fit together full-time.” She pictured two trees she had noticed during a walk that autumn, trees that had grown up together. With no leaves to disguise it, she could see how they had accommodated each other over their time growing together, each looking like three quarters of a tree, without anyone needing to trim them to shape them like that.

  She paused, waiting for her mother to meet her eyes. “I would love to have you closer, and we could see each other many times a week, I expect. But I need to live alone to do all the things I do and be who I am today.”

  Willow didn’t mean to obfuscate, but her response baffled Claudia, who assumed her daughter was making excuses not to see too much of her. But she also heard the positive message, and accepted it as permission to proceed with her plan. That plan had hatched months ago, when she had received a birthday card from her lost daughter. Some research on the Internet filled in the picture. Stories and testimonies on various church-related Web sites made Willow sound like much more reliable family than the cussing cousins and squabbling siblings back in Kansas.

  So, Willow began the process of helping her long-estranged mother to find a small apartment nearby. A basement flat a mile away was the best they could do, rejecting a pair of two-story walk-ups in deference to Claudia’s advancing years. On high, dry ground in Colorado, a basement wasn’t what it might have been back in Kansas. At least, that’s what Claudia said when she tried to convince herself that a few steps down were better than a dozen steps up.

  “A lot less likely to fall and bust my head this way, I guess.” That was the extent of her endorsement of her new home.

  For Willow, a new phase in her life had started with a divine introduction. She appreciated the preparation.

  My Father, Really?

  Willow had been an integral part of a congregation in Palos Heights, Colorado, that had grown from eighty to eighty hundred members in her fifteen years with them. She held no paid position with the church. Wide swaths of ministry done in and by that church came from the hands and mouths of volunteers, faithful members with no particular title or position, like her.

  Because of her extraordinary ability to hear God’s voice and communicate that to people, Willow would often be called on to minister in meetings without warning or particular preparation. Though she didn’t have business cards, everyone who had attended the church more than a few times knew of her as a prophet. She didn’t deny the title, even if she didn’t wear it on her name tag.

  One Sunday evening, during a monthly service that generally featured mostly music and finished with prayer ministry of various sorts, the assistant pastor called Willow to the stage to offer supernatural words of encouragement and direction to the few hundred people gathered there. She tapped two of the young men who also practiced that ministry to join her up front.

  When she held a microphone, no matter the size of the group, no matter how many times she had done this before, her hands shook with nervousness. Most people were too far away to see those quivering hands, and her voice rarely betrayed nerves. The flow of messages further obscured those nerves from congregations large or small, meetings at her home church or far across the world.

  That particular Sunday, Willow and one of the young men, a tall college student even thinner than Willow, had finished delivering messages to a young woman who was a regular in that meeting. Willow turned next to a gray-haired man that she didn’t recognize, sitting along the aisle to her right.

  She pointed at him and waited for the middle aged man to lift his hand to his chest and raise his eyebrows to say, “Who? Me?”

  “Yes, you,” she said, with a smile. Dozens of people who had seen her in action before laughed lightly. Willow welcomed the pause enforced by that laughter because she suddenly saw a mental picture of a boy being thrown across a room. The violence of that image shocked her and stirred pages from her own painful past.

  She pressed on, as the man she had pointed out took a deep breath, preparing himself for the sort of thing he had seen her say to several people before him. But words would not form in her mouth. Nathan, the stocky blonde youth who stood to Willow’s right, saw her struggling and tried to fill in for her, sensing that she had drilled into something deep. But he was feeling some of the same revelation, and he, too, was unable to speak.

  Then Willow found her voice. “Here is what your true father wants you to know about your twelfth birthday party,” she said through a quavery knot of emotions in her throat. But, instead of words, she started to weep loudly. And, instead of pulling the microphone away from her mouth to conceal her stampeding emotions, she held it close and cried and wailed through the sound system, filling the room. As the echoes of unbounded mourning filled the room, the middle-aged man had begun to emit his own weeping and moaning. And, though the message was clearly directed to that particular man, others started to cry out and sob as well.

  The gray-haired man slipped out of his chair and fell to his knees, bowing toward the floor until his face was hidden in his hands. And Willow did not stop weeping.

  The pastoral staff of the church had developed such trust in Willow’s ministry that they simply stood by, allowing the release of deep pain to envelop the room. It was nothing anyone would have planned for the meeting, nothing anyone could orchestrate. The leaders continued to stand by and watch, if they weren’t also on the floor crying out in mourning.

  It certainly seemed longer to anyone who was thinking about time, but Willow’s amplified tears lasted about a minute. She handed the microphone next to Justin, the tall college student with her. He began to call out the wounds and violations of others in the room, not by name, but in sufficient detail that individuals already weeping or curled up on the floor knew that God was hearing their pain and was stepping right into it with them.

  No two Sunday nights were the same. And people remembered that one for months. But the leaders of that meeting would call Willow and her students to that stage and that microphone again and again, their courage fortified by conviction that it was God doing these things, from beginning to end.

  A Visit with Roy

  While her mother returned to her place in the flatlands to pack up and arrange her move, Willow took the time to follow a push she had begun to feel lately, to visit an old friend. Roy Carstens was a former Bible church pastor Willow had met when they both travelled with the healing ministry of Steven Rayne, the year Willow turned twenty. Roy had been her unofficial pastor ever since. But even unofficial pastors have to retire sometime. Now, she was stepping up his front stairs on a social call, time to catch up with an old friend and counselor. Over ninety years old, Roy had earned both rest and veneration from many former disciples like Willow.

  Roy had accidentally begun to heal people in his Bible church a few years before his expected retirement. The invitation for people to come forward, for the elders to anoint them with oil, after the instructions in the Epistle from the Apostle James, had seemed a refreshing attempt at biblical literalism. When the church elders agreed to try it, they had no expectations of any significant success at actually healing anyone. When one after another of the congregation received healing at the hands of the round-faced pastor, the elders decided early retirement would be the best solution to that problem.

  “Funny how healing people can be a problem for folks,” Roy once said.

  That year with Steven Rayne and his wife Deanne had helped leverage Willow free from the chains of her childhood, by numerous mean
s. Not least of these was discovering a conservative church pastor that she could trust, that she would trust with her very life.

  Most of the time he had travelled with Willow and the others, Roy was not accompanied by his wife, Charlene. Though devoted unshakably to Roy, Charlene didn’t share his boyish wonder at the healing miracles he had witnessed and even performed. His forced retirement strained their finances and Charlene’s comfort, even as it freed Roy to follow a shooting star into a year of healing ministry. When he returned to domestic life, he heard God urging him to start a new church. Not until age eighty-five did Roy retire once again.

  Roy, who had seen Charlene off to Heaven two years before, still lived in Iowa City, where his new church thrived under younger leadership. Willow flew from Denver to Cedar Rapids and drove to Roy’s three-bedroom ranch house on the east edge of Iowa City, near Highway 6. Willow had managed to fly between December storms, but a powdery dusting of snow had started when she picked up her rental car. Dark at five-thirty when she arrived, Roy’s front porch light was on, a yellow bug light left from warmer days.

  “Well, there she is,” Roy said, when he met Willow at the door. He stepped back more spryly than Willow had expected, given his age and a list of health issues he had fought over the years. Roy had been a ruddy two-hundred and fifty pounds when he met Willow. But now, more than twenty years later, he had faded to less than two hundred and lost an inch or so of height. It had been a few years since Willow had seen him face to face, and the memories of the first version of Roy obscured more realistic, recent memories. His gaunt, sagging face and wrinkled hands startled her so that she had to strain to hide her reaction.

  “Roy,” Willow said, as she stepped inside the warm living room and embraced her old friend. “So good to see you. I feel I’ve been away far too long.”

  “Oh, I won’t argue with you there, but I’m just glad to see you now. Come on in and let me take your bag and your coat.” Again, his vigorous movement caught Willow’s attention. She didn’t resist his effort to lift her bag from her hand, focusing her own hands on getting unwound from her scarf and coat.

  “You seem to be doing well,” Willow said, trying not to betray her surprise.

  “Lots of benefits to starting a church and teaching ‘em all to heal people,” Roy said with a wink, as he reached for her coat. Willow silently scolded herself for neglecting that possibility, something she wouldn’t have done at her own church.

  This was the first time Willow had visited Roy since Charlene’s death. But she knew it wouldn’t be awkward between them, two single people staying in a house together. Roy and Willow thought of each other as family, with Roy something between a father and grandfather for Willow.

  Looking around casually, as Roy set her bag on a bed just beyond her view and hung her coat in the closet next to the front door, Willow gathered the impression of a man at rest. When she collected this perception she did so with more than a culturally conditioned “woman’s perspective.” She was reading Roy the way she read people who came to her at the end of a church service, where she waited up front with others to impart some message or blessing from God. And Willow didn’t feel the need to cover her spiritual probing. Roy knew this was what she would do, because this is what she did. Like an master musician listening to a piece, he could not ask Willow to turn off her ability to absorb more from what she saw and heard in the spirit than anyone he had ever met.

  Between Roy and Willow, this reading went both ways. Even as he carefully shuffled from one mundane task to the next, Roy was praying for insight that would help Willow, direction for even the intimate reunion of two old friends. Neither of them ever found a time or situation where God would prefer to sit it out and remain silent.

  But this time, Willow actually gasped as she discovered something about her old friend that shook and foamed and burst out of her, with little warning.

  “You’ve been asking the father to take you home,” she said, standing stiffly, staring at Roy as he closed the closet door and also froze in place.

  She continued. “You’ve been asking, but he has been refusing, and you’re getting frustrated with that. But that’s because you don’t know what he has for you here still.” Willow slowed her breathing and tried to relax into the flood of revelation that rose inside her.

  She tilted her head a bit, as if listening, even as she spoke. “You don’t realize that there are others just like Charlene still here on this Earth. They’re waiting for you to minister to them the way you ministered to her.” This confused Willow, as she spoke it. Was the spirit telling Roy he would remarry? But that seemed not to fit into this whole picture.

  Willow pressed on, like a reader anxious to see how the story ends. “It’s not that you will have the same relationship with these others who are still alive. But these are women of your generation, and perhaps some men too, who have suffered in their lives and are still captives to their fears, as Charlene once was.” She slowed down again. “You have to stay, Roy, you have to stay here a little longer so you can free some more of them.”

  Just when she thought she was at the end of the message, a new surge of emotion and new pictures and words welled up in her. Roy seemed to know there was more. He stood waiting.

  “There are so many in the world,” she said, and then she corrected. “No, in the church, who are in slavery, and they don’t know that they weren’t born into slavery. Like women who were actually free women in the slave days of this country, but who were captured by slave traders. There are women in churches across this country who are bound by their fear and their pain. And they think this is what they deserve. They think that the dry and moldy bread they have to eat is God’s provision for them. They think that their bruises and their cuts from the slavers’ whips are God’s punishment that they deserve. They have forgotten that they were born to be free, they were born to be daughters of the king.”

  Willow had begun to shake and now fell to her knees, but she didn’t stop speaking, even as tears began to spatter the hard wood floor in front of her. “It’s not just individual women, it’s not just individual daughters of the king, it’s the bride. The bride of the king is in bondage. She is in chains. She lives in slavery to the enemy and the people who work for the enemy. She has forgotten that she is supposed to be the bride of the mighty king. She thinks she is just a slave girl, the church thinks she is just a slave girl, meant to suffer under the power of her oppressors, under the power of the evil one.”

  Words failed here, as Willow witnessed images, scenes of bondage, of powerlessness, of surrender to evil. She wept violently, her voice still engaged, though without words, her sobs like little shouts. Her head shook, her hands, held helplessly in front of her, shook. And she rained tears on the floor.

  Roy stepped forward and lowered himself to his knees, slowly, with a little pain. But he didn’t notice that. He just saw Willow caught in a vision that was too much for her to bear. And it reminded him of when she was just a teenager and overwhelmed with things she would learn about people they met. She seemed to be a girl again, mourning her own captivity, her own suffering under slave traders who subjected her to the merciless demands of the devil.

  Wrapping his arms around her thin bones, Roy began to weep as well. He could feel the pain inflicted by Willow’s words, and he could feel the writhing of her exposed soul, open to seeing and hearing what most people refused to see, or could not bear to believe. And Roy wept in relief, as well, no longer clutching resentful questions about God’s refusal to grant his deepest desire. Now, he found that his desire to depart had evaporated. He wanted to live on, because he knew what he was going to do, and what God was going to do with him.

  Roy held on, shaking with Willow’s sobs for over a minute, before self-consciousness and personal boundaries awoke in the shy woman. She pressed her hands gently against Roy’s wide chest and he released her. She stood first and help the old pastor to rise to his feet as well. Then they looked at each other and just sh
ook their heads, almost mirror images. As opposite as they appeared in the flesh, for a moment, they were twins in spirit.

  Three Years a Slave

  Later that night, they both laughed at the peculiarity of their reunion, at least the first few minutes. The conversation through the dark hours lacked the angel feathers of those opening moments, but filled each of them with warmth and joy.

  When they did turn to seriously examine the things Willow had been compelled to say, perhaps to the unseen forces arrayed around that meeting place of two great souls, Roy reminded Willow of that which she need not be reminded.

  “Isn’t it interesting that the spirit would speak through you about a young woman in bondage to the devil,” Roy said, over the steam of a mug of decaf coffee and sweet cream. He had won no awards for diplomacy in the time Willow had known him, but he knew he needed no such skills for the dear woman sitting on his couch with her twiggy legs, in black leggings, folded beneath her.

  She sipped her mug of dark tea moderated by milk. “God is the inventor of both irony and beauty,” Willow said simply.

  Roy laughed. He appreciated the wisdom that fell from her branches at just the slightest breeze. Unlike most people he knew, Willow’s wisdom was not only the legacy of a long and hard life. Even at the age of nineteen, she had what people call an “old soul,” and her spiritual insights had intimidated the veteran pastor back then. In fact, Willow used to intentionally, if subconsciously, wield her double-edged, two-handed insight to keep people from getting too close. Though she didn’t want to intimidate anyone, she did want to maintain a safe periphery around her. When Roy first met her, Maggie Wilshire was the only one who lived inside that defensive perimeter. But Steven Rayne, his wife Deanne, and Roy all earned a pass into those close places, inside her wisdom and inside her soul.