“So all these things started happening around then?”
“No, it was really gradual. Like, I never saw anyone get healed for the first four or five years I was in Jack’s churches. But sometimes I would get ideas that I shared with others, what we call prophecies or words of knowledge. That’s all church talk just for different kinds of messages that God delivers through people.”
“What about healing? What changed that for you?”
“Oh, I think of it as two forces coming together really,” he said, stopping to sip his lemonade and glancing at a particularly rambunctious turn of play in the pool. For a moment, he looked as if he would get up and join in the fun. But he restrained that apparent urge. “The first thing was this little guy who used to work with Catherine Kuhlman and sort of communicated some of what she had for healing.”
“I went to this conference, really something like an old fashioned revival meeting, and I heard this guy, Jay Hamer, talk about some of the healing stuff he had seen in his ministry. Something inside me was saying, ‘that’s it, that’s what I want,’ even though the idea of a healing ministry was far from my conscious thinking at the time.” Looking again at the kids in the pool, he paused and then continued. “I figured I would get this guy to give me what he had, so I got in line for him to lay his hands on me. Actually, I got in line about four times. I’d get up off the floor and think, ‘I don’t feel different yet,’ so I’d go back for more. I think the last time he was just ready to call it a night so he put both hands on my head and said something like, ‘okay, God he’s serious about this, give him everything.’” Beau laughed at his memory of it. “I was out for a few hours. They shut off the lights and closed the doors, just leaving me there in a heap on the carpet.” He laughed some more.
“The second breakthrough was this dream I had one night, where Jesus came into my house and told me he had work for me to do and the tools for my work would be in my own body. When I woke up, my chronic back pain was gone. I got a dozen more small healings like that, just directly from God, in that first year. Those healings boosted my faith to heal others.”
“So you just woke up in the mornings and you were healed of something?”
He nodded. “That happened several times, with flat feet, an infected ingrown toenail, a curve to my spine and some carpal tunnel in my right hand, for example. But other stuff was healed during worship songs in church. I can still feel what it was like for my allergies to just disappear in the final chorus of one of my favorite songs. That was a blast.” He laughed at the memory of it, such that a tiny tear formed in the corner of one eye.
Anna just shook her head. “And none of these conditions have come back as you get older?”
“Who’s getting older?” he said, again with that look of mock horror. He laughed, but then straightened himself up, shifting to better posture in his chair.
Anna laughed obligingly, but Beau constructed a serious answer.
“God had put healing in me by healing me of every ache and pain and condition I ever complained of before that,” he said. “In recent years, the children have been praying over me and I’ve seen changes in my energy levels and even seen the effects of too much sun exposure completely taken away. Justine says I look ten years younger than I did ten years ago.”
Staring for five seconds of backtracking and absorption, Anna finally asked for clarification. “You mean you’re not only healed of all your ailments, but you’re even getting healed of normal aging?”
“Yeah, well ‘normal’ in the world as we know it is under the curse of the Devil. Normal in God’s Kingdom, like Heaven, is no more pain, no more sickness, and no more death.”
The halting shock in Anna’s responses might have reminded a neutral observer of a conversation over a satellite link, complete with time delay. When she recovered again, she said, “You think you might not die of old age?”
“Oh, I know I won’t die of old age. But that doesn’t mean I won’t die. And when I do, I fully expect to be raised from the dead by one of my family members. We have a deal that we’ll come back if we’re called.”
“‘Called?’” Anna couldn’t tell if he was teasing because of the big grin on his face.
“Sure. Jesus sent his disciples out with orders to heal the sick, cast out demons and raise the dead. The only problem with raising a Christian from the dead is they usually don’t want to come back from Paradise. But we made a deal that we would come back so God would be glorified after we get killed.”
“‘Killed?’”
“Oh, honey, you look like you’re seeing a ghost.” He chuckled. “I’m not dead yet,” he said and slid off into uninhibited laughter.
Justine came out of the kitchen door and headed toward them.
“Just in time,” thought Anna, when she spotted her. Then it occurred to her that this may not be a coincidence. Her face flushed, as her mind tripped over the implications of all that she was hearing.
“I knew you would do it,” Justine said.
“Yep, you were right, as usual,” Beau said in return. They smiled at each other briefly, with no shame or anger registering on either of their faces.
“Anna, how are you doing with all this?” Justine said, though she apparently knew already that the reporter was overwhelmed by what she had heard, like a weak swimmer in big surf.
That sympathetic question burst open a flood of responses from Anna. “I don’t know. How can it be?” She breathed rapidly. “I mean, I know something is different, I know something is happening here. But reversing aging without cosmetic surgery or supplements or whatever, and healed of every ailment and deformity, and planning to be raised . . .”
Justine knelt next to Anna and wrapped an arm around her shoulders as her guest began panting, as if heading for an anxiety attack.
“Peace,” Justine said. Beau rose and stood on the other side of Anna, just lightly touching her near shoulder.
“That’s right,” was all he said. And Anna felt a warm bliss, like when a doctor or nurse injects a powerful drug into a patient’s I.V. The injection of peace swept through her body and stilled the hamster wheel in her head.
When her thoughts fell into line, stepping rationally from one to the next, Anna thought of the contrast between her hosts and the other celebrities she had visited. The similarity in their public appearance masked a deep contrast in their personal reservoir of character. Justine and Beau looked just like actors, with their tightened this and injected that, toned by professional trainers and spa treatments. But the celebs behind the front door of most Malibu mansions revealed an acid leak of fears and frustrations with their lives, once she dug in. The stars always looked confident on the red carpet, on the screen or on the stage. But these odd church folks didn’t have to fake it. They didn’t even have to try. And the result was unedited honesty that, on paper, would make them sound totally bonkers. Yet they seemed the sanest people she had ever met.
Anna started to standup. A sensation, like some large invisible creature pouncing on her from behind, triggering her flight instinct. But, when it landed on her, overtaking her, it arrived less like a predator and more like a sudden memory. She burst out weeping, as if recalling a lost relative, a lost home or lost love. Yet she couldn’t identify any object to this sudden sorrow, a rush of tears beyond even the day she learned her father died. Even as her emotional gauges all swung into the red, she felt a relief, a purging.
Justine just held on through the sobbing spasms and smiled. Beau just said it again, “That’s right.”
Digging Deeper
For Sara, these last few days of her senior year had begun to drag and stagnate. The days of anticlimax sapped her energy for even attending school, for the first time in her life, as if she had been holding off that so-common urge to play hooky all these years and surrendered just at the end.
On top of that, the story about Jenny’s mother being healed of cancer hatched a feeling of betrayal that had been incubating in some hidden corne
r of Sara’s heart. Her parents’ faith had always sufficed for her, as long as she didn’t have to think much about it, or even argue in its defense. Now, she felt no compunction to defend it, but rather an—almost animal—instinct to attack it and see if it could survive a predatory challenge to its fitness, its very right to live. Was this just boredom? Was it a forced rite of passage, from her parents’ faith to her own? Maybe it was even more than that, maybe it was a bugle call to take up arms, to choose a side, instead of merely resting behind battle lines defended by others.
At lunch, the Monday after her confrontation with her father, Sara sat with Jenny Washington and Kim Crenshaw. Kim had remained silent at the cheerleader party, uncomfortable discussing church things among her school friends. She attended Ken Bennington’s Assemblies church. Quietly, Kim harbored admiration for Beau Dupere, because of a dozen stories of healing she had heard attributed to him. Several of her relatives had attended his healing services and some of them had been freed from pains or afflictions as a result.
Sara chewed inattentively on her tuna sandwich, trying to figure out how to raise the topic without throwing gasoline on any hidden embers. Kim helped her out.
“I’m glad to see you two are still hanging out together,” she said, to Sara and Jenny, opening her little carton of skim milk and unwrapping her silverware from the paper napkin.
Sara seized the opportunity. “As far as I’m concerned the only thing that happened Friday night was that I figured out how clueless I am about this healing stuff.” This clearly constituted an apology, acknowledging Jenny’s accusation at the party.
Looking at Sara while she sipped diet cola through a straw, Jenny sensed Sara jumping beyond the peacemaking surrender of Friday night. “So what changed your mind?” she said.
Sara dropped the corner of her sandwich and wiped her hands on a napkin. “I talked to my parents that night, and they had nothing to say that answered my questions. I assumed they had better reasons for attacking Beau Dupere. It really felt to me like my Dad was stretching to come up with a reason to hate the guy.”
“You think they really hate him?” Kim said. She was looking at a boy at the next table who had turned toward them when Sara mentioned Beau Dupere.
Sara shrugged. She paused to tug at her braid on the back of her head, which hadn’t felt right all day, as if she’d woven it unevenly that morning. “My dad practically accused him of being a Devil worshipper last night.”
“Ooooo,” Jenny said, wincing at that sour note. She had always liked Sara’s parents, but that had been in the context of nice questions about school and cheerleading, lobbed at her by Dixon or Kristen.
That boy at the next table turned all the way around now, his feet behind the bench on which he sat. “My dad claims Dupere is the Antichrist,” he said, with typical teen skepticism twisting his voice around that last word.
Sara looked at the intruder, turning her head ninety degrees to do so. She had seen that junior boy around, he played on the football team, though he spent more time on the sidelines watching the cheerleaders than hitting people out on the field. Her almost graduated persona, however, allowed for interaction with the lower castes in the school now.
“Antichrist?” she said.
“Yeah, the people at our church are always talking about who might be the Antichrist, like saying it’s the Pope or that it’s the President. Now my dad says it’s Dupere ‘cause he can do miracles.”
Sara twisted her torso to make looking at the guy easier. She was still trying to remember his name, picturing his last name in white letters on the back of a blue jersey. She recalled his number, forty seven. His medium length brown hair, round blue eyes and small mouth with thin lips barely distinguished him from a score of other underclassmen, as far as Sara’s memory was concerned.
“When did they go from saying that he didn’t really do any miracles to saying that the reason he does miracles is ‘cause he’s a Satan worshipper?” Sara said, bending her gaze from the guest speaker back to her friends.
“That’s a good question,” Kim said. “Maybe it’s so that the people who claim to be healed by him aren’t made out to be liars. It’s like a political move to get the people on your side.”
The unnamed boy nodded vigorously at this, his hair falling over his forehead with the movement. “Yeah, that’s what it is. Politics.”
Jenny shook her head. “Not for me, it’s not politics. It’s my mother’s life. Why would the Devil want to heal my mother of cancer? Doesn’t the Devil want to hurt people and kill them?”
Sara could think of some reasons the Devil would want to heal an evil person, but she knew better than to introduce that angle right after Jenny made the issue personal. Sara really did like Jenny’s mom, and was pretty sure that the tall athletic attorney wasn’t evil, even if she was a lawyer.
Sara noticed that the conversation had begun to catch the attention of more people than she was comfortable including in a discussion about God or religion, so she turned back to her tuna sandwich. Jenny saw this and turned in as well.
“You wanna come talk to my mom about it?” she said.
Sara thought about that, weighing the awkwardness of such a meeting against how much difference it would make to her. She realized that she already doubted her parents on this and didn’t need to hear any more about Jenny’s mom. She believed Jenny and Kira, and that was enough. Her own mom and dad had sealed her doubts about them with their weak performance Friday. This cafeteria conversation had added more fuel, raising her suspicion that this was just another case of Christians hating each other for reasons that she couldn’t justify, or even explain.
“I don’t think I really need to talk to your mom,” Sara said. “I think the next thing would be for me to go see for myself. I’m gonna look for videos online that aren’t made by people trying to make Beau Dupere look bad. Then maybe we can find out if he’s doing any meetings around here.”
Jenny and Kim both perked up at this last idea.
“I know where to look for his schedule,” Kim said. “I’ll see if there are any dates or places we can do.”
“It shouldn’t be too hard to find,” said Jenny. “But you’ll have to get past all the hater sites first.”
Sara liked the sudden coalition with Kim and Jenny, two girls whose faith had remained as unnamed as her own for all the time she had known them.
What Just Happened to Me?
After two interviews at the Dupere home, Anna felt as if she knew what to expect from them, even if she didn’t understand everything they said or did. She definitely didn’t understand the emotional tremors they were setting off in her own life.
The only person she could think to debrief with, regarding these experiences, was the religion editor at the paper. Anna had been given the story as a contemporary issues piece involving a wealthy celebrity. No one even thought to hand the story to the religion editor.
Marla Kato was about twice Anna’s age and seemed far too serious for after work drinks or hanging out together, as Anna did with several of the other reporters and editors, especially the singles. But Marla’s Zen-like solemnity counted in her favor when Anna had to decide who to consult about what was happening to her. She didn’t expect Marla to be fully sympathetic to the Duperes. But she hoped that Marla would at least be able to help her categorize her experiences with them.
At five o’clock on Friday, quitting time on the day after deadlines for the weekly paper, Anna stopped at the glass door of Marla’s office. She started to knock but found the door open a crack and gave it a gentle push. “Marla, are you in?”
A desk lamp was still lit and Anna could see Marla’s purse on the chair next to her desk. As she debated whether to wait, Marla rounded the corner of the cubicles in the open office space to Anna’s right, her head not high enough for Anna to see her before that.
“You looking for me?” Marla said, her lowered eyebrows witnessing to the rarity of this visit from Anna.
Anna
laughed, her nerves escaping in the halting puffs of air she caught in her throat. Her eyes danced all around Marla during this tension releasing laughter. But she finally focused on Marla’s playful challenge and met the religion editor’s deep brown eyes. “Yep. You caught me.”
“You wanna come in? I was just wrapping up for the day,” Marla said, easing her stout frame past Anna.
“You have a few minutes?” Anna said, trying to intuit Marla’s response to this late intrusion.
“Sure. What’s it about?” Marla headed straight for her desk chair, waving her hand at the chairs across the desk as she passed.
“Well, I don’t know if you were aware that I’m doing a story on Beau Dupere . . .” she said, in what she knew was a mutant question.
“Beau Dupere,” Marla said as she sat down. “Oh, yes—now that you mention it—I did hear that you were working on that. But I thought of it more as a celebrity piece than a religion story, I guess.”
Anna snickered, still stretching her nerves. “Yeah, well it’s been sliding from the one to the other for me, sorta.” Again, she knew that her discomfort at the topic was handicapping her verbal abilities, which, of course, made her more nervous.
If You Really Knew Me (Anyone Who Believes Book 1) Page 11
