Of course, she had meant to forgive him all of those times that he doubted her, when she prayed and something unlikely happened. But she still remembered all of those times he had let her slip, instead of catching her at the end of a flight from one trapeze to another.
The hardest of these disappointments was when Kayla’s sister-in-law was pregnant, the previous summer. At eighteen weeks, her doctor was no longer able to find a heart-beat for the baby. When Michael, Kayla’s oldest brother, called her in Westchester County, New York, where she was staying the summer, she had felt helpless, listening to her big brother sobbing over the phone.
While Kayla worked a paid internship near Hoboken, New Jersey, staying with her mother’s cousin in Westchester, Jason had gone home to work in his dad’s window washing business, to earn some money before they got married. She called him on a Thursday night, with the news of the baby’s death. She complicated that news by sharing a feeling—a feeling that she was supposed to pray for the baby to live, and that it would happen.
A long silence stretched from Missouri to New York, over that cell signal, when Jason heard Kayla’s impassioned statement of faith for that miracle. She could tell that he was trying to figure out how to respond. It singed her heart to face that spiritual challenge all alone.
“I’m going to fast and pray for a week,” she said, somewhat defiantly, though that wasn’t the motivation that inspired her. After Jason’s muted support, she felt as if she had even more of a battle to fight, than just for the life of that unborn child.
She did fast and she did pray. One day at work, in the trendy gallery near the Hudson River, she nearly passed out for lack of nutrition. Kayla had never carried any extra weight and a total fast from food left her nearly malnourished. But, five days after she heard the sad news, Kayla received another phone call from Michael.
“He’s alive,” was the first thing Michael said, when Kayla answered her phone that night.
Not knowing that the baby was a boy, Kayla missed the connection at first. “Wait. The baby is a boy? And the baby is alive?”
“Yes! Vicky saw the doctor this afternoon and the heartbeat is back and strong.” Michael nearly shouted into the phone.
Kayla laughed with joy, and nearly passed out again, when the shock and relief landed on top of her empty stomach. When they hung up, Kayla cried and praised God; then she ate a pint of ice cream. After that, she called Jason.
“Wow,” he said, without any enthusiasm. “I’m glad everything is fine.”
Kayla took her turn at a silent response. She couldn’t believe Jason wasn’t excited. She couldn’t believe that he couldn’t believe. “It’s a miracle!” Kayla said, as if Jason had missed that part of the story. “He had no heartbeat, and now he has one. We prayed, and he came back to life.”
She waited for some acknowledgment from her fiancé.
He tried to be gentle. “What did the doctor say, about it being a miracle?”
After waiting a few seconds, as she decided whether she could avoid answering that question, Kayla opted for full disclosure. “Oh, they just said they couldn’t explain it. I’m sure they didn’t want to say they had made a mistake the first time. That would be an awful mistake to make. But they only know medicine, so they have no explanation.”
“Doctor’s make mistakes all the time,” Jason said. He left that sitting there, to see if it would grow legs and walk.
Kayla waited, in case he might be inspired to withdraw that line of questioning. After five seconds she said, “And God does miracles all the time too.”
Jason knew he would be signing up with the Devil’s side of this debate, if he said anything more. As far as making his point, he didn’t have to elaborate. And, as far as wounding his fiancée, he had no interest in turning the knife.
“I’m happy for Michael and Vicky.” Jason sounded pretty happy.
That wasn’t enough for Kayla. They both knew that, and didn’t discuss it ever again. But, there in the kitchen, with Jesus miraculously standing in plain sight, Kayla felt like Jason was an anchor weighing down her faith.
“He can’t hold you back,” Jesus said, knowing Kayla’s deepest thoughts.
Jason didn’t know those thoughts and wasn’t sure what Jesus was referring to. With the loss of whatever added energy he had for jealousy before this meeting, he wasn’t inclined to think the worst, even in the midst of uncertainty.
But Jesus had a cryptic message for Jason, as well. “You know, you have it wrong. I am the jealous husband around here.”
Now Kayla and Jason both turned to stare at Jesus. Their glaze of disbelief had to allow room now for a splash of confusion.
Jesus didn’t need to hear an articulate question to know that they needed to hear more.
“My father has given both of you to me. You are my portion. You are my bride. But that doesn’t keep you from flirting with others, from longing for others, and from ignoring me every once in a while.”
Assuming that Jesus would be vanishing any second, Kayla blurted an ardent question. “What do we need to do?” Standing so close to him, she had to strain her neck to see his face. Jesus turned his face toward her with a kind little smile.
He reached up and took the outside shoulder of both Kayla and Jason, pulling them up next to each other, and pressing them together. Jason instinctively wrapped his arms around Kayla and she relaxed into his strong embrace. Jesus placed a gentle hand on each of their faces.
“This. This is what you have to do,” he said.
Kayla and Jason glanced at each other, checking for something more than their own bodies pressed against each other, in case “this” referred to something subtler. Then they looked back at Jesus, who just stood there smiling at them, touching them. He assessed them like an artist examining his work and enjoying what he had produced. Then he took a deep breath, satisfied that he had seen what he wanted.
“I’ll give you two a few minutes,” he said. “I’m gonna go into your studio and look at your paintings,” he said to Kayla. “It’ll be interesting to see them with these eyes.” He had turned toward Jason now.
The entwined and baffled couple watched as he turned past them and walked into Kayla’s studio, like a patron attending a showing at a gallery. Apparently, however, he didn’t need a guide. Apparently, he knew all about those canvases, just as he knew all about the artist.
Chapter 7
Making Breakfast
What do you do while Jesus goes into your studio to look at your paintings? What do you do while waiting for him in your kitchen? How do you decide what comes next, after Jesus says cryptic and profound things to you, pats you on the cheek and walks into the other room?
Kayla and Jason didn’t know either.
Of course, they had both just woken up, minutes before. But neither of them were prone to the sort of dream that included such clear images and even such a magnified sense of touch. Touching, and being touched by, Jesus was more intense than simply touching each other.
It now hit both of them that Jesus was in Kayla's studio. Simultaneously, they stepped toward the open door. Perhaps they might have tried to measure who was more doubtful, but neither could deny that they half expected there to be no one in that little room. But, there he was, studying a portrait of a little girl that Kayla had done over Christmas, back in Minnesota, the daughter of one of her mother's friends. Strangely, perhaps, Jason fell to studying the painting right next to Jesus, as if he could find something new in it, now that the Son of God was appreciating it. Kayla, on the other hand, was watching Jesus. She had never seen anyone study a painting like he did. Not only was he looking intently at the image on the canvas, but he was moving his mouth, as if he were speaking to the little girl. He would nod his head as if in response, and then would look deeper, as if his eyes could not only penetrate the surface of that image, but that he could travel beyond the painting, to the little girl herself.
Jesus turned to Kayla and said, "You captured her soul so beaut
ifully, and yet I can see you in it as well." He smiled at Kayla, a proud smile, satisfied and expectant all at once.
Jason wavered, quickly adjusted his stance to keep from falling over, and diverted their attention.
“Jason!" Kayla slid up next to him and wrapped a hand around his waist slowly, as if soothing whatever it was that rocked him.
“He hasn't had anything to eat," Jesus said, not moving, apparently not concerned. “We should get to that breakfast you were hoping for when you went to the kitchen.”
Jason looked pale. He didn't need to explain. The truth of Jesus's presence in their apartment had just pierced the veil of suspended belief that was protecting him from a fit of insanity, or so his mind had been telling him. But, is it insanity, if piercing that veil means encountering the truth?
Jesus broke them out of their mute stares and shallow breathing, heading out the door and toward the kitchen. “Pancakes, I think,” he was saying. “Been a long time since I made pancakes. But I got a recipe from an expert, just recently, and these will be great.” He smiled at the dazed pair that followed him into the light-filled kitchen. That light had become a bit more dispersed, the sun rising and no longer printing a patch on the floor. Instead, the shiny tile floor seemed to gather light from out of the air and waft it into the eyes of the three inhabitants of that room: one energetically beginning to rummage in the cupboards, and two still stupefied.
“Have a seat,” Jesus said. "I'll take care of it.” He seemed entirely unperturbed by the confused young couple who should be hosting this guest, as far as Kayla's mother was concerned. Her mother had just made an appearance via a recorded track in Kayla's head. Jesus had preempted that call to guilt, however. And inertia had landed on them with a weight greater than the whole apartment building. Kayla sat in a green vinyl chair and took Jason's hand, where he sat next to her. They weren't even sitting in their usual seats, something that only started to bother them as they watched Jesus expertly pulling together all of the ingredients, and kitchenware, needed for his task.
Jason stared, fascinated by the professional deftness of Jesus’s movements, like he was on one of those cooking reality shows—Divine Chef, perhaps. There was none of the double clutching, hesitating and rethinking, that unconsciously went into any normal person’s cooking process. Jesus’s masterful ease in their kitchen left a deep impression, like pressing a fork to your palm for fifteen seconds. He was at home in that familiar room, as if it were actually his kitchen.
A framework, nailed together in years of church, his undergraduate studies, and now graduate school, stood all around Jason’s transfixed observation. The word was incarnation. The experience was Jesus working deftly in the kitchen. Glancing to his right, just briefly, he could see that Kayla was also thoroughly engrossed in Jesus’s every movement. And then, looking back at the man in first century garb whisking together the batter for the pancakes, Jason wondered at why he wasn’t saying anything. Shouldn’t Jesus be teaching them, correcting them, discipling them?
“I’ll let you two get a bit more settled with my unusual appearance, before we get into the heavy teaching topics,” Jesus said, while he waited for the oil on the square griddle to reach the perfect temperature. He scooped up eggshells, capped off the milk, put away flour and powdered sugar, in hardly more time than it took him to answer Jason’s thoughts.
Kayla, not aware of Jason’s exact thought process, said, “Oh, that’s okay, take your time.”
Though that sounded calm and accommodating, Kayla looked much more like a woman waiting for the doctor’s test results, than she did someone waiting for her personal chef to pour the batter for the first pancakes. She stared, wide-eyed, as Jesus sidestepped to the refrigerator and pulled an orange from the fruit drawer, as well as the tub of margarine. Setting those to the side, he opened the freezer and pulled out a box of frozen breakfast sausage. At that point, Kayla knew the version of pancakes for breakfast that Jesus was making. This was the one she made for Jason on his birthday, the breakfast in bed sort of special treat. This was not her mom’s old-fashioned pancake breakfast, or the one they got at Dino’s diner over on Washington Street. Jesus’s choice of just those touches seemed important, but Kayla was still staring into the headlights of this approaching vehicle, and unable to dodge one way or another, even inside her head. So she couldn’t say just how it was significant.
Jason glanced at the round plastic clock that hung on the wall above the table, then scolded himself for even thinking about such mundane things as his last research paper, and his work hours for the tech support line. He came as close to slapping his own hand as a rational adult dares. But, then, rational was a concept that was getting a very long stretch that morning.
Swinging away from the stove, the counter, the fridge, Jesus set the plates and margarine on the table. He wiped his right hand on his robe and then ran his fingers through Jason’s hair just the way Kayla loved to do. Jason stared up at Jesus. Kayla giggled.
For Kayla, there was a playful quality to Jesus’s interactions, though he impressed her as a very deep and serious person. She smiled at herself for evaluating him, as if he were some professor she was meeting for the first time, categorizing him in order to contain, and to posture herself against. His would be a class she would love to take, she was thinking, when that professor comparison entered her thoughts. Cooking with Jesus. What department would that be in? Home economics? Was that even a department in the twenty-first century?
Jason wasn’t the only one who hadn’t eaten anything yet. Kayla was giddy, not only with the world-view shattering visitor in her kitchen, but also with low blood sugar. Jesus was working quickly to take care of one of those problems.
Just then, Kayla noticed that Jesus was humming as he nursed the first four pancakes to life. After a few more notes, she recognized the tune. A few seconds more and Jason was humming along. She looked at her husband, a bit more objectively now. She had never seen him drunk or high, but she imagined he would be something like this docile young man leaning on the kitchen table for support and humming along to a familiar worship tune. If this was a dream, she decided, it was the best dream she had ever had.
Kayla leaned forward, so she could reach her left arm along Jason’s right, their forearms together, hands clasped. She leaned into his shoulder from behind, lips resting on his white cotton t-shirt. He just glanced at her and smiled. They both understood the other in that moment, no need for words, just two hearts having the same experience and enjoying every movement.
The sound of a spatula across the griddle and onto the Pfalzgraff plate came next, Jesus turning toward the table with steaming cakes stacked and ready to eat. He lay the plate between them and said. “Does anyone want coffee?”
The problem with graduate school in theology, is that one learns there how to analyze every good and perfect thing. Analysis is no substitute for wonder and gratitude.
Why was Jesus asking if anyone wanted coffee? Didn’t he know already? How could he know that they had oranges, that there was breakfast sausage, and not know if they wanted coffee? Or was this one of those kenosis experiences, where he had emptied himself of his divine abilities in order to be present with the mortals in this rented kitchen in a Midwestern college town?
Jason didn’t exactly process all of this in the brief moment before answering the beverage question, but this dissertation of thoughts did preside over the silence that filled that moment.
Jesus launched another little boat of thoughts, however, as he heard Kayla’s “yes, please,” on the coffee and Jason’s thoughts on incarnation. “Remember that time you cooked Jason breakfast at your parents’ house, the first time he visited?” Jesus paused to look at Kayla with a wry grin, spatula still in hand.
Her eyes brightened and Kayla leaned back, crossing one leg over the other and covering it with the spring-colored cotton robe. In her memory, she wore her brother’s old football jersey, which reached to her knees. The shirt-as-dress look she favored had
its roots in stealing shirts from her big, athletic brothers, when she was a young teen. Fortunately, in a way, Kayla and her siblings had conformed in size to the gender of their parents—Kayla the petite cheerleader, in stature at least, and her brothers the hulking football players.
Jason came home with her for Spring break her senior year. It was the serious meet-the-parents visit, but Kayla felt a slightly perverse urge to lavish Jason, as if they were escaped on a vacation alone, caressing him and glowing at him like a newly-wed. A homemade breakfast just for him, before the rest of the family—central time zone people—got out of bed that Saturday, was one of those caresses.
The misfit grin on Jason’s face as Jesus cooked breakfast— bestowing thin sliced oranges and sausage now—recalled that Minnesota breakfast more vividly for Kayla. But she also remembered how the two of them had gone beyond their agreed boundaries on physical intimacy during that visit, and an acidic regret rose in her chest.
“That’s your enemy distracting you from what was good, with something about which you’re still feeling vulnerable,” Jesus said.
Kayla and Jason both said, “Huh?” Jason awakening from the process of preparing his pancakes just the way he liked them, lots of margarine and little syrup, and Kayla returned from the edge of that precipice of self-condemnation.
“Sorry, that was a bit of a trick I played on you there, Kayla.” Jesus stopped again to fix her with that penetrating eye contact.
This time it made Kayla feel slightly vertiginous.
“You see, I know you still turn toward guilt and shame about that first visit to Minnesota,” he said. “And I just wanted to take you to the memory without the guilt. You don’t have to pretend that it didn’t happen, but it doesn’t have to taste so bad anymore.”
Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3) Page 7