Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  Whether or not she followed any of the nuances of the game (or was it a match?), Gladys thoroughly enjoyed watching another granddaughter demonstrate her prodigious talent, even on a Sunday, during church.

  That was the day that Gladys delivered her first high-five, as far as she could recall. Even as she reflected humorously on that new experience, she recognized how the new Gladys, young hips and all, made that possible, in ways that her toddling old self could never have imagined.

  Headed back home, after another victory, Katie seemed anxious to transition from soccer to lunch with her grandma. “It won’t take me long to shower and change,” she said, as breathless about time with Gladys as she was about her team’s triumph.

  Gladys looked at her wrist, spinning her watch around to face upward. It was only eleven o’clock. She shared Katie’s anticipation of the one-on-one time, but wondered what was on the little soccer wiz’s mind.

  True to her word, Katie made quick work of washing and changing, ready to go out with wet hair, once she persuaded her mother that she wouldn’t die from it. Gladys stayed clear of the conflict, waiting in a sheltered place, out of the line of fire. Finally out the door and in the old Malibu, Katie wasted no time in revealing the cause of her urgency.

  “I’ve been dying to get a chance to talk about Bethany since we got home yesterday,” she said. “I sent her a friend request online when you and Mom were getting supper ready. I’m really hoping she answers me.”

  Still a bit foggy about how these things worked, Gladys asked a question. “She’ll see a picture of you when she gets the request, won’t she?”

  “Yep,” Katie said. “I even changed my main picture to be one that looks the most like I did at the concert yesterday.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  Gladys wondered aloud, about something she regretted as soon as she said it. “I hope her mother doesn’t block her friends on the computer.”

  Katie wasn’t as worried. “She said ‘yes’ to mom. I’m thinking Bethany’s mother is less likely to block me. She doesn’t know me at all.”

  With a better set of facts, and a vast experience in such matters, Katie felt as if there was a good chance of a connection. That was good enough for Gladys. Later, she would get Katie to help her make one of those online requests to connect with Bethany, as well. But, right then, she wanted to concentrate on the granddaughter who sat in the seat next to her, Katie’s feet just reaching the floor when she sat up straight.

  Katie’s favorite restaurant was a salad bar on a grand scale, one that served other comfort foods, such as macaroni and cheese, and cream-of-anything soup. The sheer healthiness of the food, vegetables arrayed in defense of arteries and muscles, added a feeling of therapy to the usual restaurant atmosphere. It was physical therapy for the digestive system. At the ripe old age of eleven, Katie knew nothing about that. She just liked the salads that she could craft out of the vast pallet of options, varieties of ingredients impossible to match at home.

  This lunch venue was yet another option that worked only after Gladys’s healing. Katie wouldn’t have to carry her grandma’s tray, and Gladys wouldn’t have to limit her experience of the grand selection, just to keep her limping mileage minimal. Unfamiliar with the options, and much slower than Katie at discovery and decision, Gladys benefited from the company more than the food, as it turned out.

  As Gladys sipped a strawberry lemonade and listened to Katie crunching away like a herd of ravenous deer, she noticed two men sitting several booths away. They looked to be about forty years old, young men, by Gladys’s count. Their conversation seemed muted and serious, but they were too far away to know what they discussed. The second time she looked their direction, Gladys accidentally made eye contact with one of them.

  He was a stout man with dark hair that looked like it needed some grooming. The slight pucker to his face spoke of tolerating his lunch companion, whose back was toward Gladys. After they each looked away, breaking that eye contact, Gladys knew that she had a message from Jesus to deliver to that man. She didn’t know yet what it was, but she was getting used to this sort of rough draft request from Jesus, the details being filled in only at the moment when they were needed.

  Merrily grazing from one side of her plate to the other, Katie missed that connection between Gladys and her next target. She was chatting about desserts; not about selecting between them, but taking a more inclusive attitude on the subject. They both knew that Gladys wasn’t going to rein in that plan. Gladys felt such liberality was justified, in part, because she had watched Katie spend hundreds of calories running around the soccer field that morning.

  During the lengthy dessert course, Gladys realized that she had better go talk to that young man and his friend before Katie finished, certain that the men would leave soon. Katie glanced up and then followed her grandma’s gaze.

  “You have a message from Jesus for them?” she said, getting used to the way this worked.

  Gladys chuckled. “How do you know I wasn’t just looking for a date?”

  “Grandma!” Katie scolded her with exaggerated disapproval, not yet comfortable with that aspect of her own near future.

  Gladys just laughed some more and excused herself. “You go ahead and finish. I should talk to them before they go.”

  Katie nodded, though a part of her proposed postponing dessert, in interest of witnessing her grandma astound another person, with what she could hear from her invisible friend. Katie and Gladys had talked online, when Gladys’s computer was first working properly, about Jesus no longer being visible to her. But Katie seemed to grasp the notion that he had simply stayed inside her grandma, and not really gone away. She had been absorbing all of this, not asking lots of questions, and not drawing any firm conclusions.

  Straightening her blouse and jacket, and brushing off a few stray crumbs of cornbread, Gladys walked slowly, but purposefully, toward the two men. As she rounded one set of booths, the round-face man locked eyes on her. He seemed to be expecting her. This unsettled Gladys a little, but that just added an extra boost of adrenalin, to go with the sugar intake.

  “Hello, gentlemen,” she said. “I’m sorry to interrupt. But I believe I have a message for you.” She focused on the dark-haired one. “My name is Gladys, by the way.” She offered her hand and shook both of theirs. The other fellow, a thinner and more suspicious character, kept looking at his friend for a sign, as if he needed to know whether it was time to run for the door.

  They gave their names, which Gladys remembered initially as Bob and Ray. This bothered her, because it sounded like the names of an old-time comedy team she used to see on TV. But she had a message to deliver, whatever their names were.

  “You have a message for me?” the one she thought was Bob said.

  “Yes. From Jesus.” As soon as she said that, Gladys watched a sort of curtain fall over the man’s face. But it wasn’t the curtain of doubt that she had seen fall on others. Instead, he appeared to relax, to be relieved beyond words. This encouraged Gladys to speak boldly.

  “I believe he wants me to tell you that the person that you lost wasn’t taken away by him. He didn’t take her.” She delivered this with confidence, even though she didn’t know the depth of the impact it might have. She was learning to let Jesus take care of that part of this deal.

  She watched as the lower lip of that young man begin to quiver and his face to tip forward, as if it were getting too heavy.

  She continued. “He says he is right there inside you.” She pointed at his chest. “And he’s never gone away at all.” She paused, waiting for more, in spite of the fact that what she had said already seemed to be wringing all of the tense anxiety out of the stranger. “He has lots more for you to do. One failure doesn’t count for anything, against all that he’s offering.”

  With that, the man clamped both hands to his face, dropped his head to the table, and began sobbing violently. His friend stared wide-eyed, perhaps assessing whether he should dial 9
11, and, if so, what to tell them.

  Before the man’s head landed on the table, Katie had been on her way over to stand and watch her grandma. She slowed to a stop when she saw the emotional bomb go off, unsure that she would be welcomed. Gladys saw Katie out of the corner of her eye, and gestured gently for her to come on.

  When you reach a certain age, have cried out barrels of your own tears, and have lost track of what self-consciousness even feels like, situations like this are not nearly as incapacitating as when you are still trying to please, or impress, the people around you.

  Gladys put a hand on the man’s near shoulder and then squeezed into the seat next to him, so she could wrap that arm around him. As far as she was concerned, this was what Jesus wanted her to do, because, when she tried picturing him standing with her, that’s what he did.

  Katie stood awkwardly by the table. The other man, probably in a state of shock, slid over so Katie could sit next to him. She took the offered seat and then pushed all of the unused paper napkins on the table toward the weeping man.

  Seeing this, the one named Ray seemed to feel like he should say or do something.

  “Ah, Phil? Philly? Are you okay?”

  His response wasn’t very inspired. They all knew that. But no one was measuring such things right then.

  None of them had been prepared for this, so they hadn’t notice that all of the booths immediately adjacent to this one were empty. It wasn’t exactly private, but it could have been much worse. Ray was the first one to notice, as he looked around to see who had witnessed the outburst.

  Gladys prayed quietly over the one she now knew was named Phil. She listened for the voice inside her to direct that prayer, and relied on grandmotherly instincts to fill in the rest. This went on for a few minutes, during which Ray finally decided to finish off his lemonade, desperate for something to do, since he didn’t dare leave—what he desperately wanted to do. He knew much more, however, about the reason Gladys’s words bowled over his friend Philly.

  The part Ray knew, included that Philly had been engaged to be married, to a beautiful woman he had met several months before, when his grandmother was sick in the hospital. He knew also that Philly’s grandmother had recovered, but had still died, soon after that. Ray knew that his friend had lost two jobs during that approximate time period. The second firing came after his fiancée died of an exotic infection that she contracted from a patient in the hospital where she worked as a nurse.

  What he didn’t know, or understand, was that Philly had once walked and talked with Jesus, as if Jesus were a living person, right there in the room with him. Philly had, in fact, delivered healings and messages from Jesus somewhat like Gladys did. But, after healing dozens, even scores, of people, he wasn’t able to heal Theresa, his fiancée. After that, he stopped coming to his job at the church-based community center. He stopped going to church. He disappeared. Now he lived and worked in the suburbs, not far from this restaurant, a consultant working on a short-term contract. He had broken away from his hometown, Chicago, and his parents, as well as from Jesus.

  All of that stood behind the simple phrases Gladys obediently delivered from the heart of Jesus.

  Katie sensed Ray’s discomfort with the proceedings. She tried to fill him in. “My grandma can hear Jesus, so she can give people important messages when they really need it.”

  Ray looked at Philly, his head still bowed, but off the table now, wiping vigorously at his nose and eyes. Ray said, “Well, Philly needed something.” Clearly, Ray didn’t know what that something was, nor was he confident that Philly had received it yet. He was, however, grateful for Katie’s ease with what had happened, in so short a time, and in so public a place.

  When he finished wiping his face with the last dry napkin, Philly looked up at Katie, broke half a smile and then turned to look at Gladys. He was thinking how like Jesus it was to send a grandmother with that message. He couldn’t help missing his own Grandma Thompson at that moment.

  Gladys was regretting that her purse remained in the car, uncomfortable leaving it in the booth each time she went up to the salad bar or buffet. Philly had a faint smear on his cheek, that he had missed. Gladys forced herself to ignore that. She was still listening for instructions, uncertain how to follow that cathartic explosion.

  Philly seemed to understand her hesitation. He also felt that he owed Gladys an explanation. In about five minutes, he filled her in on the things in his life that fit exactly with the message she had delivered. Gladys appreciated this, not just to have confirmation that she was delivering the right message to the right person. She also enjoyed seeing how Jesus loved other people, just as he loved her.

  After telling his story, Philly released Gladys and Katie, not to mention Ray. “I’m okay now. I know what I have to do. At least, I know a few things that I have to do. There’s a pastor in Chicago that I should go see, and . . .” his eyes drifted toward the far corner of the room. “And I need to get back to hearing Jesus.”

  This seemed like the closure Gladys was looking for, so she smiled and started to slide out of the booth. But Philly stopped her, with what sounded like an afterthought.

  “What’s your name?” he said to Katie.

  When she told him, he asked an odd question. “Do you have a sore toe?”

  Katie didn’t think it was an odd question. “Yep. Turf toe. I have to stop playing soccer, or just keep letting it hurt. But I’m used to it.” Her voice tailed into resignation.

  “Jesus wants to heal it, right now,” Philly said. That was something he used to say a lot, but had almost forgotten.

  Katie looked at Philly more doubtfully than when he was crying with his face on the table. Then she looked at her grandma and smiled. Katie ducked slightly and spoke with a giggly voice. Looking at her foot and then at Philly, she said, “Hey, I’m wiggling my toe and it doesn’t hurt.” She turned toward Gladys. “I could always tell it hurt just by wiggling it against the tip of my shoe. It doesn’t hurt now. That’s awesome!”

  Gladys laughed. “That is awesome.”

  Philly and Ray laughed too, though anyone paying attention, would have noticed that Ray’s was the fake sort of laugh you concoct when you have no idea what’s going on.

  Gladys and Katie said goodbye to “Bob and Ray,” Gladys still working to correct her mistaken first impression. She carried with her an intense nugget of discovery, out of Philly’s brief description of his own experience of seeing Jesus. “I guess that’s a thing he does,” she said to herself.

  Back at the house in Naperville, Katie told her mom and dad about her toe being healed, by a man they met in the restaurant, a man that once saw Jesus just like Grandma did. She and Gladys reserved the experience of Philly’s message from Jesus, and him bawling his eyes out. They both thought that would be more than Patty would like to hear. They also felt like they were stewards of an intimate experience, someone hearing the very voice of God, speaking to the most broken part of his heart. That they would keep between the two of them.

  Chapter 27

  BEGINNING

  That trip to Naperville, with all that it contained and all that it opened, including discovering that Patty no longer had trouble sleeping, helped to fill in the picture of the new life Gladys started after she began hearing Jesus.

  She did get a thumbs-up from Bethany, and they connected covertly, much as they would eventually connect openly, when Bethany was old enough to choose for herself. A girl will, of course, choose to have a grandmother, whenever given a decent chance. Katie and Bethany gradually formed a bond that lasted their whole long lifetimes. In her later years, of which Gladys had many, the pair reminded her of herself and Leah. She still missed, but no longer mourned, that bright light from her childhood.

  At church, the women’s Bible study became the place to get Gladys to pray her special prayers over you. But the phone, her front door, and the Internet also provided those places of contact for women, and a few men, seeking a word of encouragement,
or direction, from God.

  Gladys’s story didn’t divide the Bible Church. She didn’t tell many people the whole story about seeing and hearing Jesus in her house. Instead, she just stayed busy showing them what it was like to have him living and speaking right inside of her.

  She eventually found, on the Internet, the story of the tragic death of a Chicago nurse, Philly’s fiancée, and was able to track him down through that story. She managed eventually to connect with him online, once she got the hang of that. Gladys monitored Philly’s progress at returning to his place in that Chicago church, and to that internal conversation that he had also learned from a living and breathing Jesus. As their relationship developed, Philly never got over the fact that Jesus actually ate with Gladys. They both laughed about how much that bothered him.

  It took over a year, but Barbara, from across the street, heard the same story from Andy over and over, heard him singing Jesus Loves Me long enough, and watched Gladys walk without a limp enough times, that she finally forgave her neighbor, for sins real and imagined. Andy visited Gladys in the interest of procuring cookies, on occasion, and always insisted on talking about Jesus when he did.

  And Gladys started slowing down a bit, once in a while, to allow a certain kindly gentleman at church to catch up with her.

  Standing in her kitchen, she did occasionally tell Harry something, if she got excited about the cherry tree blossoming, or the roast chicken coming out just right. But, mostly, she shared these things with Jesus, if no one else happened to be around at the time. Talking out loud when you’re home alone isn’t nearly so crazy, if you know that there’s someone there that hears you at least as clearly as you’re learning to hear him.