by Joe Derkacht
Episode Fifteen
Zell planted the sacred clearing in tulip bulbs, and didn’t even wait to see the results before returning to her home in Jerusalem on other business. Nothing else—nothing fragrant in addition, as I had thought—just crimson tulips, exactly as Leanhar had envisioned, creating a field of red, as red as blood. If the open clear cut looked briefly like a moonscape, these few weeks later it looked like an upwelling wound upon Ranar’s face of green.
How appropriate, I thought, that the empty grove should appear to be a place of sacrifice, as though blood had been spilled here, reminding me once again of the Wounded. In all creation only one, the Crucified One, still bears His wounds, and through Him everyone crippled, everyone blind, everyone diseased or maimed or tortured was healed.
“It is beautiful,” Leanhar murmured to me. I nodded an answering yes, knowing that he meant both the field and the beautiful witness it bore to Christ’s sacrifice.
Leanhar had been right in his choice of tulips, and so was Zell, in refusing to interplant the tulips with more fragrant species. She said it was unnecessary, that the scents of the encircling forest and its myriad flowers were sufficient to overwhelm even the most grossly underdeveloped sense of smell. Besides, we did not yet know if our visitors even possessed a sense of smell. A few species didn’t, including some of those among the angelic.
“They’re coming,” Leanhar said, glancing toward the sky and again at the field of tulips.
He didn’t mean it prophetically. He meant the arrival of visitors was imminent. We had received a word of confirmation shortly after Zell’s departure, and now his far-ranging eyesight had evidently discerned the presence of a starship against the backdrop of the galaxy’s starry host. Taking my cue from the direction he was looking, my own eyes quickly located a vessel crossing the orbit of Ranar’s most distant moons.
Others of the angelic cohort joined us. Already, they were discussing the question of how long the ship would take to land. Once it was actually in a position above Ranar itself, would they orbit the planet for no more than a few hours? Or would it be days or even months? Could they even possibly reject landing, turn instead and return to whichever distant star they called home? Or would they not be satisfied until they touched down, struck their colors above the soil of an alien planet, called it their own?
As for Leanhar, he was satisfied, by long association with me, that our visitors would land in this very place—and do so very soon—as I believed. I hadn’t even had to tell him of my ancient dream, foretelling the event before the renewal of the universe. He was beginning to understand that I sometimes knew more of future events than he, and that more and more I felt at home in the universe created for those who co-rule with Christ.
“Shall we visit our visitors?” I asked Leanhar.
“Why not?” He said, turning eagerly to me. “Perhaps they need assistance.”
“They’ll have guardians, won’t they?”
He nodded, not having to answer with words. Of course. But then my question had been rhetorical. Seeing us rise, the other angels looked toward me for approval to accompany us. Together, with the angels stroking their mighty pinions, we soon left Ranar’s atmosphere behind, myself cosseted as always within the nimbus of the angelic embrace.
The vessel flown by our visitors shone as though with gold fire in the light of Ranar’s star, and twinkled like a diamond in the glow of the nearby moons. Even as Jesus had once stepped through the locked doors of the Upper Room, startling the disciples who had not yet grasped the reality of His resurrection from the dead, we passed through the walls of the great ship as if they were thin air.
The interior was more beautiful than any seagoing vessel’s on old earth. Instead of the gleaming metal and smooth vinyl surfaces I’d expected to find in a spaceship, tight-grained, exotic woods, polished to a high gloss to reveal remarkable depths, sheathed every bulkhead and deck. The variety of colors, for wood, was surprising, in a few instances equaling the luminescence of any Morning Glory blossom, and used to excellent effect with wonderfully detailed parquetry. Interspersed throughout the designs, all of them abstract, were what first appeared to be colored mirrors but upon closer inspection proved to be polished stone.
Leanhar and I exchanged glances. Whoever these people were, they were skilled craftsmen, certainly rivaling those skills and gifts I’d possessed in the old life. I knew immediately that I would love them, both for the medium in which they chose to express themselves artistically and for their obvious intent to glorify God.
Unlike the disciples of long ago, who were cowering in fear of the Temple authorities and their Roman overlords when Jesus miraculously reappeared among them, upon our miraculous arrival, the visitors were sleeping peacefully. Waiting to wake to the light of day like bees enwombed in the hive, hundreds of them were ensconced in a honeycomb of chambers. Machinery hummed quietly in the background. Upon closer examination, I saw tubing running between the chambers and back to the machinery. The room was not just one giant bedroom or bunkhouse; it was intended to keep our visitors resting safely in stasis until the day of their arrival.
How many years, I wondered, had they slumbered here? How many light years had they traveled, and from which star within the galaxy?
“Where are their guardians?” I asked. I was frankly a little surprised they had not yet revealed themselves and greeted us. Could they be ignorant of the protocols? “Why aren’t they here to waken them—?”
At that moment, the guardians appeared, two of them stepping through the bulkhead just as we had moments beforehand. They were angels very much like my own cohort, differing mostly in dress, fashions reflecting the culture of those asleep here, I surmised. As on old earth, angels had often interacted with humans in garb reflecting the culture for the sake of mutual identification and empathy. A third guardian leaned in—his massive head and neck most immediately evident—a gate guardian much too large for either the room or the ship to hold him. Glancing, like the others, in my direction with avid curiosity, he greeted Leanhar in an angelic tongue unknown to me, before asking a question in the same language. It didn’t matter; the intent was clear. He wanted to know if I was the planetary steward. When Leanhar replied in the affirmative, he asked another question. Was it true I was one of the Overcomers?
Since the intent and meaning behind words is most easily discernible in spiritual languages, I had no trouble following their conversation. Human languages, and the languages of other corporeal creatures as well, I am sure, are much more difficult to learn than angelic tongues, though naturally with a redeemed brain to facilitate learning, no language—human or otherwise—takes more than a couple of days to learn with complete fluency.
Leanhar smiled, replying with a gentle jibe for the gate guardian, who had introduced himself as Bo’el: Could the angel with a thousand eyes not see for himself? Of the others, he asked if it was possible they had not heard the stories of the redemption of the children of men, of how the Father had adopted them as His own?
In response, they seemed to goggle at me. Even more, they were startled when I laughed.
“I’ve waited for your arrival since before the redemption of the universe,” I told them. “What’s taken you so long?”
They gabbled excitedly like children for a few moments. Was it possible I really meant what I said? It seemed beyond comprehension. What was to happen to them, now that their service to their charges was complete? Had other races arrived from throughout the galaxy before them? They’d accompanied the M’hah-hu-uuu for precisely one day short of 5,300 years in their crossing of the stars and still not encountered any other peoples in all that time. Where was the great gathering of the galaxy’s inhabitants to be—if not here, if not now?
Leanhar and I exchanged glances. So many questions! In reality, the M’hah-hu-uuu guardians were not much different than what I myself was like in those first days, weeks, and years after arriving in
the New Jerusalem. Certainly, they were like every angel I’d ever known, deeply curious, forever seeking to further explore and apprehend the mysteries of Elyon and His infinite ways.
Like myself, though, and like Leanhar and our cohort, who labored with us throughout much of Ranar’s transformation, these newly arrived guardians must also be patient to receive their answers.
“The old chapter is about to close, and a new one to open,” I said, speaking to Leanhar and my own angels as well as to the new arrivals. “Which is at least clear to me, if not to all of you.”
Leanhar nodded his head in a knowing gesture. The others, including our own attending angels, listened raptly, waiting for me to continue.
“I don’t say that because the Spirit is whispering it to me, but because I recognize the Father’s hand in this.
“Tomorrow,” I said to all but Leanhar, “will be 5,300 years to the very day since Leanhar and I arrived on Ranar to begin our work. Tomorrow, I am sure, the M’hah-hu-uuu will elect to make planetfall. God is truly all in all.”
“Amen,” they said in agreement, wings vibrating with anticipation.
“Still, many of your questions must await the new chapter El Elyon began writing before the foundations of the universe—whether the old or our renewed one.”
“But when, Steward John?” The gate guardian asked. The brightening intensity of the glory surrounding him, the spiritual wind I felt generated by the beating of his wings, his earnestness, his passion to know, were abundantly palpable.
I answered him with a question of my own. “You’ve waited all these millennia. Can’t you wait a few more days?”
Perhaps it was my mention of days, rather than years or decades or millennia, that satisfied him, or perhaps it was simply his own recognition of Yahweh’s divine plan. I didn’t know. But when I turned to my own escort and instructed them concerning the slumbering M’hah-hu-uuu, and then gestured for their guardians to accompany Leanhar and myself to Ranar, they followed without protest or obvious qualms.