“Yes, this is true,” Naddy agreed. He got up to help as Joshua and Keith started picking up boxes to clear away dinner.
“And Paul also said, All things edify not,” Joshua continued. “What might not be harmful, per se, might also not be something that strengthens us. It doesn’t break us down, maybe, but it doesn’t build us up. We have to keep letting God build us up, getting closer to him, not figuring out how far away from Him we can get, but still be ‘okay’, whatever that means. I don’t think we’re ever okay if we have to keep saying, ‘Did that push me over the line? Did that go too far?’”
“This is wisdom,” Naddy nodded as he sat back down beside his wife. “Very well, Sophie, you are right. No more Monte Carlo. God must fund our digs some other way from now on.”
“Oh, Amu!” Talia cried, jumping off the couch from where she had been sitting under a quilt with Joana. She wrapped her arms around his thick neck. “God will provide. I know he will!”
“Monte Carlo?” Keith echoed. Aunt Sophie rolled her eyes.
“Now, what else do I need to do to purify myself?” Naddy demanded, leaning forward and extending his huge hands to Joshua.
“To – purify yourself?” Joshua repeated.
“Yes, yes.” Naddy’s head bobbed up and down. “I have recently gone through not only a near-death experience, but have been castigated for – what was it, Talia? – For ‘playing with defilement’. So I give up the gambling. Now what else is playing with defilement? Do you think I should give up pork? I am already circumcised.”
“Wait, wait,” Joshua protested, holding up his hands. “I’m not sure where you got this ‘playing with defilement’ idea from, and maybe I don’t even need to know, but it sounds a lot more serious than the external things in your life. Sin comes from our own nature. It’s not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of him.”
“Dad’s right,” Keith chimed in. “The Scriptures talk about that all the way through. We’ve got to purify our hearts, or, rather, let God do it, because of course we can’t do anything. Jesus said to the Pharisees that ‘they could scrub their cup on the outside til it shone’, is what my grampa used to say, ‘but on the inside, they were still wicked wolves, grabbing for what wasn’t theirs’.”
“Of course! Of course!” Naddy lurched out of his seat. “They are not mine! I have dug and chased and pursued as if they were mine, and they are God’s!” He fell down on his knees with a great crash. Everyone jumped. His big hands thrust high in the air. “God, forgive me. I have reached out my hand for what is yours! Purify my heart, and take away my greed. Make me worthy to help quench the thirst!”
Keith wanted to know more about that outburst, that quest of Naddy’s to stop playing with defilement, and what in the world he had mean by saying, “help quench the thirst.” But it was already late. The Doctors Ramin apologized and got ready to depart. Joshua made them promise to return with Talia for breakfast.
“You are a rich man, Joshua Bradley,” Naddy murmured as they stood by the front door. “Rich in faith, and in family.”
“I am.” Joshua put his arms around his children.
Chapter Twenty-one – Everything’s Changed
Keith came back from a run in the morning through the kitchen. Naddy and Sophie sat in the living room with coffee cups, and his father stood between the kitchen and living room, shaking his head as Talia hummed around the making the place smell wonderful. She shooed Joshua away and he finally sat down across from Naddy and Sophie.
“C’mon, we invited you for breakfast, not to make breakfast,” Keith exclaimed. “You cannot be making that bread again. It took you hours.”
“No, of course not. These are just some potato pancakes Amu likes.”
“Tell me how you make that great coffee,” Keith begged.
“You better ask Aunt Sophie. She taught me. But I just add a little salt, some cinnamon, and some cardamom.”
“What’s cardamom?” Keith asked.
“Sometimes it’s smoky, sometimes it’s minty. It makes coffee taste less bitter. It’s an Indian spice that they also use as a medicine.”
“So medicine doesn’t have to taste bad to be good.” Kevin grinned and inhaled his cup. “Are … are you Persian, too?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, pure Persian?”
“Yes.” Talia stepped away from the potato pancakes and looked up at him. “Why? Do you think that’s weird, that I’m not Heinz 57 American? I was born on the Caspian Sea. My father was born in the US, but my parents traveled a lot. I lived off and on in America until it was time to go to college. I went to different boarding schools in Europe, and I’ve been trying to learn English that nobody would laugh at.”
“You don’t even have that much of an accent. Natalia – isn’t that Italian or something?”
“Natalia’s not … the name I was born with.”
“What’s your Persian name?”
“The language is Farsi, and my name was Tahmineh,” Talia replied, after hesitating. “We were not always Christians. Tahmineh was in honor of the god Ahura Mazda, so my parents changed it to Natalia, which celebrates the birth of Christ.”
“Wow. I feel like I’m meeting you all over again,” Keith said softly.
“I didn’t lie to you, really,” Talia protested. “I mean, I didn’t mean to.”
“No, it’s fine. It’s okay. Uh-oh, I think your potato thingeys are burning.”
“Oh, no!” Talia ran back to the stove, scraped frantically, but ended up dumping the blackened mess in the sink and running the garbage disposal. “I’m sorry. I hate to waste food.” She started another batch and stood over them with maternal vigilance. Keith feared she was also afraid to look at him.
“I distracted you. And I’m sorry I upset you. I don’t care that you’re Persian. I mean, I think it’s cool. Do you have special marriage customs? Do your aunt and uncle have a guy picked out for you back home?”
“There is no back home. We never lived in a traditional Persian community. Anyway, I’m too old to get married to any self-respecting Persian man,” Talia laughed.
“What do you mean, too old? Like, you’re not allowed to get married? You have to stay single or something?”
“Of course not. But no Persian man would want me professing Christ, either.”
“Wow, I thought Persians all died out with … you know, Babylon or something.”
“No, we are still around. Why are you asking all these questions about me getting married?”
“I wondered, that’s all. I was born here, and I haven’t been much of anywhere. My grandma and grampa came to this town when dad was a baby. It’s a good place, even for Persians.”
Talia laughed. “I’m pretty sure at this point Aunt Sophie would kiss any man who asked me, as long as he is a Christian. She’s sure I’m going to die alone. Uncle Naddy … he chases men away if they look at me twice. He can be very fierce.”
“I bet he can. Hey, since I’m rooting around in your personal life, who would tell your uncle that he was playing with defilement? Who talks like that?”
“An honorable man,” Talia said wistfully.
Keith didn’t know what to make of her tone. “So, are they still going on that preliminary trip you talked about over Christmas? Wow, I didn’t realize how close that was getting.”
“I’m not sure,” Talia murmured. “I’m not sure we’ll be going anywhere, even for the school trip. Everything’s changed.”
“What do you mean, everything’s changed? Most of the kids already applied for their passports. They’ve got all the fundraisers scheduled. We’re going to have a riot if you tell them the trip is off.”
“We can’t go looking for the testaments anymore, Keith. They aren’t ours to find. They aren’t anybody’s until the time comes to quench the thirst.”
“Talia, do you have any idea what the kids and their parents will say if you call that trip off? You can’t do that. I mean, I get it, that we can’t p
ick up these Testaments and walk off with them even if we do find them. Countries have rules about artifacts. We’ll just take a look.”
“I have to talk to Amu about it,” Talia murmured. She set the pan of potato pancakes off the stove and ran out of the kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-two – “Such Important Papers”
Monday, Principal Bradley arranged a special assembly to have Naddy and Sophie talk about their archaeological finds and some of their experiences abroad. Naddy walked all around the auditorium, alternately terrifying kids and getting them spluttering with laughter. The two of them had a thousand stories and cases of facsimile artifacts. Naddy showed them five slender scroll cases hidden in a very long and deadly-looking lance, which became the scariest part of the whole assembly when he hauled off and threw it toward a panel he had set up against the back wall, where it hung quivering.
“Who’s going to search a soldier for copies of the forbidden Scriptures when he’s got that in his hand?” Naddy thundered. “Nobody. Many, many Roman soldiers accepted Christ. Whole legions. Many helped preserve the Word and spread it during horrifying persecutions. Many were martyred for their faith.”
“But isn’t it bad to lie to people?” a young student asked. “You said they hid the Bible in that spear thing. Wasn’t that lying?”
“My child, come here,” Naddy invited, sitting down on the steps to the platform. The boy didn’t move at first, wide-eyed, probably wondering if the huge, hairy man had more violence in him. After a moment Keith got up and walked over to the boy.
“Doctor Ramin was at my house this weekend, Den,” Keith said, holding out a hand to the boy. “He won’t hurt you. C’mon.”
Den looked up at Keith. He could swear he saw, Well, yeah, because you’re big, written all over the boy’s face, but at last he put his small hand in Keith’s and allowed him to lead him to the steps. Naddy laid his hand on the boy’s head.
“Do you have a sister, my little man?” he asked.
“I have five sisters,” Den said, and heaved a huge sigh.
“Oh, well, then, perhaps this is not a good question to ask you. I may need to find someone else.”
Den seemed to find he wasn’t so afraid of the big man who could stick a spear in a wall. “You’re not going to find anybody who has more sisters than me,” he protested.
“I am certain that is true!” Naddy laughed. “Well, then, suppose a bad man came to your house and said, ‘Where are your sisters?’ Would you tell him where they are?”
“No. I would tell them to run and hide.” Den puffed out his little chest and clenched his fists.
“Oh, so you would not tell this man where your sisters are?”
“No, not if he wants to take my sisters away.”
“I see. But what if he said, ‘You have too many sisters. Give me three of them.”
Den shook his head violently.
“Then how many of your sisters would you give up? You have so many.”
“He can’t have any of my sisters,” Den insisted. “I take karate. I would fight him.”
“Why is that, my brave little karate student?”
“I love them,” Den replied.
Naddy walked back to the spear, yanked it out of the panel, and carried it to where Keith and Den stood by the steps. He twisted the spear and drew out the facsimile scrolls rolled up inside. “These are my sisters,” he said fervently. “They are my brothers. They are my mother and my father. I love them. The bad men cannot have them. I will hide them, and I will fight, and I will die, to save what I love. Do you understand now?”
Den stared at him with huge, solemn eyes. “But it’s just papers.”
“Not just papers,” Naddy said. “It is the Word of God. It is truth, love, peace, power – it is the voice of One who made all things, loved us, died for us, and calls out to us to come to Him.”
“Oh,” the little boy breathed. “I didn’t know they were such important papers.”
Naddy tousled the boy’s hair, and Keith took him back to his seat. Someone caught his eye, a stranger in the back of the auditorium. The blonde woman looked oddly familiar, but he couldn’t place her. She prowled the walls with a small but expensive-looking videocamera trained on the platform. A reporter? Maybe Naddy and Sophie are more famous than they let on.
As Keith approached the high schoolers, he saw students begin to rise out of their seats. Ten, twenty – forty-five strong, the entire Bible as Literature class stood up and started to clap. They cheered.
“Yeah! It’s the Word!” They started to chant. “Truth, power, purity, love!” they repeated the words three times and quickly sat down.
After the assembly, Keith looked around for the reporter but she had vanished. He didn’t have time to think more about her, but ran to get Naddy aside. “Talia said the trip might be off?” He hissed. “Did you see how excited those kids are? How can we tell them we’re not going?”
Talia pushed her way through the crowd. Keith thought she might be trying to stop him from asking this question, but he had to know. Naddy dropped a huge hand on Keith’s shoulder.
“The trip is on, of course.” Naddy waggled his big beard. “But I go with a different heart, so the results might be different. The work may be much, much harder, and perhaps very disappointing. Are you coming, also, for the preliminary trip in two weeks? Of course, you must, because you have the oh-so-important science meeting in the spring.”
“Two weeks? It is two weeks, isn’t it?” Keith sank down on the platform steps as Talia finally burst out of the crowd at his side.
“What’s wrong?” Talia demanded. “Are you okay? Amu, what did you tell him?”
“I only reminded him that the preliminary trip is in two weeks,” he answered. “Talia, what is wrong? You do not wish to go?”
“Of course I want to go … but I thought … We were practically told not to go, weren’t we?”
Keith stood up. “Told not to go? By who? And why?”
Naddy rubbed his hands up and down Talia’s arms. “Precious one, a wicked old man with a selfish heart was told not to go. Now, God be praised, his heart his clean, and humble, and ready to serve, not to grasp. Do you understand that whatever happens, I go only to help prepare to slake the thirst?”
Naddy and Sophie accompanied Talia and Keith to the Monday Bible as Literature class. When Keith introduced them, the class gave them a standing ovation.
“Stop! Stop!” Uncle Naddy thundered. “This is praise that belongs to God. Look at this.” He took a leather-wrapped parcel from his many-pocketed ‘adventurer’s vest.’ Carefully opening it, he spread the linen cloth inside and showed them a shining golden plate with characters pressed into it.
“This is called the Pali Canon,” he explained. “These are sayings of Buddhism. It is an imitation, but they have created gold plates of these writings.”
“That is awesome!” “Gorgeous!” “Wow!”
Sophie produced a second gold page. “I’m sure you’ve all heard of the Book of Mormon. This is a replica of what they say the gold plates Joseph Smith translated looked like.”
“Oh, yeah! We went to a Mormon temple and saw those! Way cool!”
“Yeah, it’s like Bible Bling!”
“Now consider,” Uncle Naddy said, after they had displayed a few more examples of religious writings inscribed on gold plates. “Why would someone etch the words of their religion onto golden plates?”
“Because it’s pretty!”
“So people will know how valuable it is.”
“These are good reasons,” nodded Uncle Naddy, “but the real reason is that gold is one of the few metals that does not corrode. It does not rust. It does not decay. As much as is possible for this world that is fading away, gold is eternal. The Scriptures even say the streets of Heaven are gold, clear as crystal. We have no such gold on our frail, sin-cursed earth. But we have the gold we have, and many religions have attempted to preserve their words on this material in the hope that they wi
ll become timeless.”
“Cool,” said a bunch of voices.
Aunt Sophie projected an image on the screen. Keith remembered the shots from Talia’s phone that she had showed when she returned from Greece.
“Talia tells us she showed you these pictures of the bag we found while diving off the Greek island of Naxos,” Naddy explained. “And you have seen the images of the golden scrolls the bag contained. This metal we believe is not gold, but an ancient material called orichalcum. It is a combination of copper, gold, and other metals that can be stronger than steel. We are hoping that soon we may be granted a chance to study this scroll, and that it will lead us to one of the greatest treasures of all time – A complete copy of the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, etched on orichalcum. We believe that these golden testaments are located somewhere in the Levant or Anatolian regions.”
Sophia projected maps of the areas up on the screen. “In two weeks Ms. Ramin and Mr. Bradley will accompany us to gather more information for the class trip in the spring. Our goal is to be able to see and study these Golden Testaments, and to share that viewing and study with you.”
“Yes!” The class said the word with one voice.
Chapter Twenty-three – “So Reassuring”
Monday morning the following week came, and the collection of Bibles, study notebooks, and handwritten verse cards sat ready in the teachers’ lounge. Keith had to admit that it had shocked him when their own pastor had announced the need from the pulpit on both Sundays, and last night, at the end of the evening service, had stepped down and handed his Bible and a stack of notebooks to the astonished Principal Bradley. People were still bringing materials in to school the next morning.
The Great Thirst Boxed Set Page 12
