The REIGN: Out of Tribulation

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  “Yes, I guess you could describe it that way. The elements have met their master and we are his representatives. All of the elements must obey him, and cannot stay set in their ways, if he wishes them to be changed,” said the waitress and artist.

  “So, you just will them to be pliable and they obey you?” Baxter asked.

  “Yes, Baxter, that’s right.”

  Rodney had never eaten food prepared by the immortals and the concept struck him as curious. Only at his wedding reception did he discover that the immortals enjoyed eating and, in fact, enjoyed a good party. When the dishes arrived, Rodney could tell that none of the others in the delegation had eaten food from the immortals either. They all stared at the perfectly prepared foods of all sorts, including various proteins that tasted better than meat. The immortals had forsaken consuming animals, because meat consumption, for the people of God, had been associated with the sacrificial system. Because the King had come to Earth, and made obsolete all such sacrifices, the immortals observed the fact by no longer killing animals for food. Their mastery over the elements allowed them to formulate new foods that left no one missing meat.

  The mortals had each heard a meal described as “heavenly” during their lives, including in times when very simple fare seemed divine to a starving pallet. This food, however, stirred regret for ever tolerating that description applied to food prepared by mere mortals.

  Rebecca had to coax her charges to stop eating and renew their journey to the throne. Reluctantly they agreed, taking several portable food items with them for the remainder of their journey.

  Perhaps the food of the immortals added energy that they needed to draw closer to the throne, but, for whatever reason, they moved more easily than they had just before the meal, though they still made no better than a slow, straining pace.

  As Rodney had expected, the sun set, and then dropped below the horizon, before they were within a mile of the throne. Around the one-mile mark, two of the delegation members began to weep. A middle-aged, East Asian man from the northwest woods of Oregon, who represented the State Department, began to stagger and weep loudly without warning or apparent provocation. As he wept, worshippers would occasionally swoop in next to him and put an arm around him or talk softly into his ear. Usually this attention helped calm him and encouraged the pilgrim to continue his progress toward the throne.

  Though this trip had been planned as a diplomatic mission, Rodney realized at this point, the folly of such an undertaking. The invisible force that pushed them back, and broke their hearts, transcended the interests of nations and presidents. For Rodney, and all of his comrades, their arduous crawl had become a spiritual ordeal.

  A young blonde woman, Baxter’s liaison with the President’s office, began to wail and cry out as if her child had just died. She cried so intensely that it repulsed Rodney, at the same time that he felt both drawn to comfort her and to join in her mourning. The surging emotions inside him rolled through his heart like pounding surf.

  When they had traveled several hundred yards like this, Baxter began to roar in anguish, as well, falling to the ground and pounding on the pavement inconsolably. Though none of the others did the same, neither did they feel the least compulsion to comfort Baxter, or to try to pull him out of his catharsis.

  For, in fact, these volcanic emotions, pouring from the delegation, worked to cleanse their souls, to jettison burdens from their hearts. They each began to break free from fears that had fused to their personalities. Rodney began to shake, occasionally weeping silently and even crying out, as if in pain. After ten minutes of this, he stopped trying to resist and merely settled into mournful plodding, soaked in tears and sweat. Now Rebecca and her two assistants served as shepherds for the delegations, keeping them pointed in the right direction, as they stumbled forward, blindly obedient to a longing that each began to recognize as a hidden urge that had been concealed under the surface of their souls. The drive to see him who sat on the throne grew into an obsession beyond reason or self-preservation. In the midst of their emotional eruptions, they could not know that approaching this throne would not ultimately kill them, yet they pressed on, because of the gravity that pulled them into the orbit of the King, even as their bodies strained against an unnatural gale, that thrashed them from all sides.

  Still a few hundred yards from the throne, they could see little, except the light ahead of them. The mortals began to fail, exhausted by a long day of flight and, more so, by the purging of their souls that they now endured. As they collapsed to the ground one at a time, immortals would swoop in to give them water to drink, to rub their tired muscles and to coax them ahead, like marathon trainers.

  On his knees, his hands slack at his sides, Rodney wondered at this undertaking. Could it be that mortals simply cannot see the King and cannot even stand in his presence? Maybe they should content themselves with the intermediaries they had already met. With these thoughts spinning in and out of his consciousness, Rodney looked up to see Phil reaching down to help him up. As he regained his feet, his knees creaked with pain. At the same time, he noticed that Baxter held the hand of an immortal that he seemed to recognize, as well.

  “Rodney, you are almost there. You must do this,” Phil said, looking into Rodney’s eyes, with confidence that infected Rodney, if only for a moment.

  He thought, “I must do this or die trying.”

  Phil replied. “You will not die. He has no interest in killing you now.”

  Like a serious drunk, Rodney wavered and pressed forward, wrapping one arm around Phil and the other around Baxter, hoping for some critical mass to break through the resistance that now pressed him from all directions at once.

  A few minutes later, Rodney fell again, resting on his hands and knees. Small hands now grasped his shoulders on each side. He looked up and felt his mind slip further into a dreamlike state, his brain escaping from shock. His children grasped each of his arms and lifted him to his feet, strong beyond their size. Again he began to weep. Now he had lost track entirely of the rest of the delegation, though he could hear weeping such as only mortals endure.

  David and Olivia took turns talking to him, uttering encouragements.

  “You have come this far, Daddy, you will make it the rest of the way,” Olivia said, in her small voice full of confident maturity.

  “We will help you,” said David. “We will stay with you.”

  In this way, they conveyed him forward in the great orb of bright light. Rodney reeled when he saw immortals running toward the source of that light and then diving upward, as if sliding across the surface of a huge glass bubble that contained the light.

  “He is expecting you,” David said into his father’s ear. Then he gestured toward the center of the light. A tunnel seemed to open through the brightness, a pathway through the impenetrable force, by which he could finish his journey.

  The next moment, Rodney felt as if he were six years old again. He sat on a dock at the manmade lake that his father and he often fished. This day, however, Rodney, his mother and his sister had been at the beach, while his father was water skiing with a friend from his workplace. At the end of the day, Rodney’s mother stood behind him, holding his little sister’s hand. The skiing boat had dropped off his father near this dock, and he swam, and then walked, toward his family. But suddenly, his father grimaced, his sunburned face turning instantly pale.

  “Oh, I stepped on something sharp,” he said, speaking through clenched teeth.

  As Rodney relived this scene, he knew that he was seeing much more of it than he had remembered in his adult life. He saw the look of pain on his father’s face, he heard his mother asking if he was cut and how bad it was. Then he saw his father haul himself out of the water and onto the dock, placing his left foot on the worn white wood. Dark red streams of blood flowed off his father’s foot, turning pink on the dock and dripping through the cracks.

  Then Rodney heard himself screaming, he felt himself turn to run away, bouncing off
of his mother, who had let go of his sister and was rushing to help her husband. That scream did not come from Rodney’s conscious memory of that event, but from the tiny casket in which it had been buried inside him for over forty years.

  When the small, six-year-old Rodney reached the end of the dock he fell on his hands and knees. He sensed his sister approaching, as if to help him up, but his instinct to resist her became nearly violent as he launched to his feet like a sprinter at the starting block, flailing his sister away. He ran to the car, the old green Chevy, and wrenched the back door open. He lay down on the seat and wept bitterly, bitter from the gruesome wound he had witnessed, but also from his own blind fear of that bleeding trauma.

  The shame he felt, even as a six-year-old boy, shocked by his father’s wicked injury, now lay on him like the weight of a dead body which he could not move. Then, as soon as Rodney felt the palpable presence of that shame, he felt it ripped away and cast aside.

  Someone in bright shining clothes stood before him, vanquishing the crippling shame that Rodney had hidden from himself. Such conquering power pressed against Rodney, that he now feared this mighty stranger who had rescued him. And he remembered what the immortals had said about the angels being so frightening. He imagined that he was seeing such a messenger of God with his own eyes, and that messenger pointed into the light, clearly directing Rodney to the King.

  Later, when he returned home, Rodney tried repeatedly to describe what happened after that, but he could not tell it the same way twice. Once he described intense brightness, loud, symphonic thunder and a crushing weight, as if the King consumed him with power. Then he told of resting, as in a lover’s embrace. He said that he saw the face of the King and yet could not describe him. He felt the hand of the Lord, but remembered no describable feeling emanating from that powerful hand. He knew he had no right to be in that place and yet felt entirely welcomed. He remembered falling on his face repeatedly, but did not remember being raised to his feet a single time. He felt as though he experienced this entirely on his own, yet remembered standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the delegation, recalling their faces wet with tears.

  Then he sat in the café once again, draped in a chair, feeling drunk, watching the sun begin to rise. His fatigued mind recalled that they had planned an agenda, had scheduled meetings and debriefings. With this thought in his head, he began to laugh, hysteria taking over for just a few seconds and then subsiding again, until he sat silently listening to some kind of bird that he had never heard before.

  Sitting there, staring blankly toward the throne, he saw singers rubbing their hands together and stomping their feet, creating a rhythm and harmony by generating vibrations from their superhuman strength and then adding their voices to the crescendo that lifted his soul beyond his spent body.

  Rodney fell asleep face down on the table.

  Gaps in his memory lay where his journey home should have been. He stood at the Des Moines airport, managing to stay on his feet, and content to focus on this alone as his goal, while he waited. Daniel and Emma appeared in the sedan, pulling to a stop a few feet away. They stared at him, trying to figure out what had changed, what had happened to him, how he had changed so that they almost didn’t know him from just a short distance.

  Emma maintained eye contact with him as he smiled wearily and then leaned into her embrace. Daniel stood aside, carrying Rodney’s bags, and ready to help if Rodney couldn’t stand any longer. Emma serving as his crutch, he paced slowly to the car.

  As Emma drove toward home, she looked at him frequently, trying to find a connection. Rodney leaned his head back and rested, but turned toward Emma and managed a tired smile. She recognized that smile and found comfort there. Her husband had returned. He had been unmistakably altered, but he had returned.

  At home, though Emma encouraged him to sleep, he chose instead to sit in one of the rockers on the porch, urging her to stay with him. He rocked and held her hand. She began to suspect that what she saw in her husband was not merely exhaustion, but some newly discovered state of mind. This intrigued her, so she tested this thought.

  “You seem so peaceful,” she said.

  He sighed deeply and looked at her. “I’m tired, but I think I’m not so tired as I assumed at first. I’ve slept for hours and hours. Something is missing, but it’s not just rest that’s missing. Some sort of struggle that used to always work inside me has gone away.” He stared at her trying to judge whether he was making sense.

  Emma patted his hand, releasing him from the obligation to fill in the spaces in his explanation. He rested his head on the back of the rocker and smiled, more sure than ever that he had found the perfect wife.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  When Daniel listened to Rodney try to describe the journey to the throne, through the massive crowd of worshippers, he thought about the theater gatherings of viewers, congregating to watch Jerusalem over the Internet.

  “It makes it seem pretty pitiful to sit around watching it in a theater or someone’s living room, but it also makes it seem sort of worth it, if it’s really so overwhelming as all that,” he said.

  Rodney smiled. He was not as aware of the growing movement as was Daniel, but Pete had commented on some neighbors who had rented a storefront, so they could gather with others to watch the Jerusalem worship. Daniel also knew of others around the country doing the same thing. He had chatted with old friends online, who had become devoted to watching the worship for hours every week.

  Daniel and Tina had been at Troy’s house recently when three or four of the people there tried to join in the singing, imitating the intonations of the immortals, which filled the room fully enough to dampen the sound of the mortals’ awkward imitation. Daniel and Tina had looked at each other, trying to decide how uncomfortable the mortal parroting should make them. When they discussed it later, they concluded that they felt uncomfortable about trying it themselves, knowing they couldn’t match the awesome sounds of the immortals, but agreed that they should not discourage anyone else for risking an attempt.

  Three days after Rodney’s return, Daniel mentioned this to him, as they worked together installing better storm windows on the house.

  “It made Tina and me feel weird, but we aren’t gonna say anything if someone else wants to take a shot at it,” Daniel said, firing one last nail.

  “There’s an old saying,” Rodney replied, “something about imitation being the highest form of compliment. I also gotta think that, if it’s right for the immortals to worship the King, then its right for us to do the same.” He finished his nailing, as well, and climbed down the ladder.

  Rodney continued, after a moment of thought. “I guess I need to think about whether I should be making more of a conscious effort to worship the King right here, even if I can’t see him.”

  Daniel followed Rodney toward the front porch, beginning to inventory his own feelings about worshipping the far away King, wondering whether doing so without the benefit of the Internet feed would feel more natural to him. He thought about some of what Troy had told him about the immortals interacting with him through the video stream he watched.

  “This guy Tina and I know, who does this in his house with the 3D video feed and all, says they come to him out of the video, into his house, to sing over him.” He wanted to see if Rodney believed this to be possible and thought the answer might help Rodney with his own musings on the subject of worship.

  Rodney stopped and looked at Daniel, weighing the seriousness of the inquiry and Daniel’s level of belief in the story. “You trust the guy who told you this?” he asked.

  Daniel nodded, remembering when he had decided to trust Troy, and still feeling comfortable with that choice.

  Rodney thought a moment, then said, “Doesn’t that sound like something the immortals would do? Using our technology to connect to us, even though they don’t really need it for themselves?”

  That was how Daniel had seen it when Troy first told him.

>   Rodney continued. “It seems like the immortals are endorsing that online worship, then, if they’re responding to it with actual visits. Does this guy seem like he’s benefiting from their visits?”

  Daniel nodded. “Definitely, I’ve seen obvious changes in him and he says it’s ‘cause the immortals come and fix his brain, singing him to sleep.”

  Though Rodney didn’t make any changes in his life that January, regarding worship, he did continue to consider whether he should be doing something different. In early February, he and Steve met at a café that had opened in one of the abandoned storefronts downtown. Because it was next door to one of the Jerusalem viewing sites, Rodney asked Steve what he knew about it.

  Rodney asked, “I know you’re doing that thing where you talk to God, but have you tried watching the Jerusalem worship at one of these places with the realistic sound and video?” He picked up his cup of coffee, enjoying drinking a different brand of coffee than the kind that had been plentiful in town during the war.

  Steve swallowed the bit of pastry he had been working on and took a sip of coffee. “Marney and I’ve been going to the one in the theater a couple of nights a week. I like to just sit back and relax, but some of the folks have been getting more active with dancing and singing. That’s pretty hard to do, of course, but I’ve seen one guy who can almost keep up with the immortals.” Steve stopped, took another bite, uncertain whether he had answered Rodney’s real question.

  Rodney looked out the window onto Main Street and wondered aloud. “What I experienced in Jerusalem makes me sure that I should change my life in some way, but I’m not really clear about how. I was thinking about those worship gatherings, but not feeling completely comfortable with it.”

  Steve nodded, swallowed again and brushed crumbs off his fingertips onto his plate. “Marney was saying we should see if we can get a setup for our house, so we could be more uninhibited when we watch. Maybe you can come over and try it at our place.”