Sharing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 3)

by Jeffrey McClain Jones

  The physical contact with his warm and living body gave both of them chills. Jesus laughed in response to their mutual shudders, though no one said anything about it. “This is good enough for me,” he said. “You’ve heard all my best stuff already anyway.”

  This time both Kayla and Jason laughed. Neither of them had worn this situation long enough for it to fit comfortably yet, so their laughter was only halfhearted. Each in their own way, was struggling with Jesus’s carefree and flippant attitude.

  Kayla tried exploring what was bothering her. “So you just want to hang out with us, telling jokes?”

  Jesus shrugged slightly and looked solidly into Kayla’s eyes. “The way you say it doesn’t sound as good as the idea was in my head.”

  “But it’s so rare to have you with us like this,” Kayla said, a bit defensively. Jesus’s teasing really was funny, but she wanted to get past it to the important stuff about this visit.

  Jesus leaned back so Kayla and Jason could see past him. Their eyes met in a flicker and then they returned to Jesus.

  “Do you trust me?” Jesus looked from Kayla to Jason and then leaned back again.

  “Yes,” they said in weak unison

  He carefully reached his arms up and wrapped them around both of them, pulling them closer. That maneuver made especially Jason feel like a little child, not an entirely unpleasant feeling. But this position looked more natural to his diminutive wife.

  “You know, of course, that I’m always with you.” Jesus didn’t ask a question really, but he did pause for them to respond.

  They nodded. Jason slid farther down in his seat to get more comfortable with this little group hug.

  “When I’m with my friends, I enjoy every moment of it, even if we’re not doing or saying anything important.”

  For Kayla, this dug into a deep place in her heart. The intellectual notion that Jesus would count her as a friend had carried all the weight of a butterfly in a children’s church song. On the other hand, the warm human being holding her close was the kind of person she would love to have as a friend. More than that, she felt that he had chosen to be her friend, not that he had accepted an invitation from her.

  Beneath the simmering revelation of this feeling, was an experience from Kayla’s childhood, when she tried to win acceptance among the popular girls in fourth grade. She aimed high with her birthday invitation list that year. Her mother didn’t know that the list included mostly girls that Kayla wished were her friends. The little nine-year-old had thought she had discovered a shortcut to popularity, putting lots of pressure on her mom and dad for a stellar party. None of those A-list girls showed up, of course, and Kayla learned a lesson in social climbing. More than that, her young life reverberated with the impact of more evidence that she was not really likeable enough, not acceptable. The popular girls in school didn’t introduce this conviction, they merely reinforced it. Whether it was a calculated ploy, Kayla didn’t try to guess, but she felt that Jesus’s assumption about their friendship had scooped up a pile of that old pain and toss it over the side of the couch.

  For Jason, Jesus’s easy insinuation of their friendship provoked a bit of resentment toward a former professor, from his college days. That gray-haired eminence ended a long tirade about the irreverent nature of his students’ views of God, saying, “God is not your buddy.”

  Just as he reached the richest core of spite toward that professor, Jason noticed Jesus looking into his eyes. He knew Jesus was reading his thoughts. He also knew that, instead of finding reason for resenting his professor, he had revealed his own flawed heart.

  Instead of turning the knife of guilt that Jason had plunged into his own soul, Jesus simply said, “To some people, it just doesn’t seem important to have me simply as a friend. They need bigger ideas and deeper meaning. But love is really the deepest meaning.”

  Jason scowled, trying to sort through Jesus’s words. He suspected that a rebuke of his own critical heart toward his old professor lay among the mosaic tiles of that explanation.

  Kayla interrupted this silent lesson with a laugh. “You’re teaching us anyway, in spite of all your joking.”

  Jesus laughed right back. “Oh, busted!”

  That very modern reply cracked Jason up. The disorientation of this visible and audible Jesus was hanging him on the edge of hysterics most of the day. Other feelings and thoughts had held him back from that edge, but his hard laughter on an empty stomach reduced Jason to tears mixed in with his gut-bouncing laughter. Within a minute, he wasn’t sure whether he was laughing or crying, and had forgotten what got him started. Kayla just watched in wonder and concern. But she was looking at her discombobulated husband across Jesus, so she didn’t sink into anxiety about Jason’s emotional stability.

  Jesus carefully settled Jason’s head back onto the couch and slipped out of his seat. He motioned Kayla to take his place next to her husband. Jesus deftly stepped over Jason’s slouching form, and took up a place at the end of the couch, kneeling there and gently stroking Jason’s hair. This picture started Kayla crying. She felt like she was supposed to be helping with whatever Jesus was doing for Jason. But she was so moved by the scene of Jesus gently comforting Jason that she couldn’t focus a rational thought.

  Self-conscious even with only Kayla and Jesus watching, Jason tried to circle the wagons and contain this irrational outburst. But he heard Jesus humming near his ear, and his constraints slipped loose again. The purge continued. It bothered Jason that he didn’t know what was happening to him, why he was crying so grotesquely, so uncontrollably. Seizure-like sobs, heaving breaths and intermittent delirious laughter didn’t seem necessarily good, but Jason didn’t feel as if he was suffering either.

  Kayla was worried on several levels. Of course, she was worried that Jason was completely falling apart. His brick-like stability had been an asset that helped to win her heart from the beginning. What if that was going to change now that Jesus had come to visit?

  She also worried that some horrid wound from Jason’s past had just come to his awareness. She had joined in a prayer time for a friend in college, where the young woman in the center of that circle connected with some serious sexual abuse from her childhood. That catharsis looked something like what Jason was experiencing. Kayla hadn’t been aware of any similar experiences in Jason’s life, but she knew that traumatic memories often remained repressed and hidden.

  Always the ardent saint, pursuing what God wanted her to do, Kayla also worried that she was messing up her part of this experience. Was she supposed to be crying with Jason? She was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to be consoling him: “There, there, Jason. No need to go entirely insane just ‘cause Jesus is kneeling next to our couch.” She was a good wife. She wanted to help. But she had not a clue what was going on.

  Suddenly it occurred to her to ask Jesus. Before she formed the words into a prayer, or helpdesk request, Jesus turned to look at her.

  “He’s letting go of some deep wounds,” he communicated to her. “They entered his heart without words or explanation, and are leaving in the same way they arrived. It’s okay to not know the details. Just be with him. You can support me. Do what I’m doing.”

  “Deep wounds?” Kayla said aloud, not noticing that this was the first word anyone had said aloud since Jason’s meltdown.

  “Not to worry. It happens to everyone. And it doesn’t have to mean there was any dramatic trauma.”

  Jesus’s lips weren’t moving, and Kayla realized that maybe she too should not interrupt Jason’s catharsis, if that’s what this was. She just nodded in return, pausing briefly to wonder at how easily Jesus calmed her fears. He seemed so competent, so believable.

  For the next five minutes, Jason began winding down the volume and the vigor of his sobbing, until he had detoured into long vocal sighs, that ended in a little up note. Kayla was starting to worry again. He sounded a bit drunk. She reran the conversation from the time he came through the front door. Had Jason been d
rinking with his friends? She knew that the other guys were pretty undisciplined, and she had long worried that they might corrupt her man.

  Jesus inserted a thought into this downward spiral. “This is a different kind of drunk,” he said, “Like the people at Pentecost, who appeared to be drunk at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  Drunk? Pentecost? Kayla went to church all her life. She had paid attention to all the Sunday school stories, and listened to most of the thousand or more sermons she had heard. She had no idea what Jesus was talking about.

  Just then, Jason began to chuckle, then guffaw and cackle. He lay back with his eyes closed, most of his body slipping down off the couch cushion. Jesus seemed to be holding him in place with one hand in the middle of his chest. And Jason laughed. He laughed and laughed for another five minutes.

  At times, the laughter was contagious, and Kayla would slough off her worry, to laugh along with Jason. But just like the tears, she didn’t know where the laughter was coming from. And just like before, she didn’t think to ask Jesus. Worry seemed comfortably familiar, and explanations impossible.

  After the laughter, came silence. It was almost like Jason was having a dream, a very pleasant dream. His eyes still closed, his face responded slightly to some happy thoughts, or maybe glorious revelations; Kayla couldn’t tell which. Still she didn’t know what was happening to him, and was beginning to get a bit impatient with Jason. “Get done with this already,” she was thinking. Then, when she remembered that Jesus could hear her thoughts, she apologized demurely.

  “It’s okay if you wanna get supper ready,” Jesus said, a patient smile squinting his eyes and softening his mouth.

  “Oh, yeah,” Kayla said aloud. And she got off the couch and went to work in the kitchen. She couldn’t remember whether it was her turn to cook, but she was glad to violate the schedule in order to move on to something that she understood. She was pretty hungry after all.

  While Jason continued to make his contented little noises, with Jesus in attendance, Kayla pulled the ingredients for tacos out onto the counter. When she found that she had no tortillas, nor taco shells, she shifted to making taco salad. Half a bag of tortilla chips would have to do. She pulled a couple of pans out and set them on the stove, the gas burners clicking until blue flame engulfed one little burner and then another. She started ground beef cooking in one pan and opened a can of refried beans for the other. She made a second trip into the refrigerator for and onion, cheese and sour cream.

  Neither the counter space between the stove and sink, nor between the sink and the wall, were big enough for any meal that involved more than two or three ingredients. She chopped onions on a small acrylic cutting board designated for that task with a letter “O” carved in one corner. That reminder was engraved by her slightly obsessive husband. Kayla just laughed whenever she saw that rough letter in her carving board. She didn’t remember the eye-rolling conflict that prompted this precaution.

  As she chopped with her mother’s old broad-blade knife, Kayla thought back to her afternoon with Frank and Ella. Though she hadn’t expected to tell them anything about her visit with Jesus, she was disappointed that when she did tell them, they lurched away, as if escaping a fall into a bottomless abyss. Actually, seeing Jason now barely pulling himself away from the edge of hysterics made their caution seem justified.

  For a moment, it had looked as if even Frank might begin to cry. His hands shook such that he put his pallet knife down abruptly, in order to conceal it. The combination of Kayla’s very unlikely insight into Frank’s early experience with Jesus, and his current sense that something was different in the air—a difference not accountable by the change in seasons outside—had fractured Frank’s usual commanding exterior. For a moment, he didn’t seem to be in control. And it even looked to Kayla that he recognized that felling. But it all lasted just for a moment.

  Kayla formed the impression that Ella’s spooky response tripped a defense alert in Frank. He didn’t want to go where that mystical tone in his wife’s voice seemed to be headed. Again, Kayla could sympathize with that feeling, given the gushing mess Jesus had made of her normally sober husband.

  Shaking her head, as she added the onions to both pans, back in her kitchen, Kayla wondered where all this was leading. For a few seconds, she watched the little piles of chopped yellow onions sizzling in the shortening. Waking herself from that borderless speculation, she chopped at the ground beef and then at the refried beans, breaking the beans from their can shape, into something that looked more like food.

  Kayla still struggled to grasp Frank’s ability to sense Jesus’s invisible presence. She had no idea he had ever pursued a deep and spiritual faith. Part of Kayla noted a lesson in judging people by their exterior, like the old facades in western towns, meant to project an image that bore no direct correlation to what lay inside. Only, in this case, what lay inside of Frank was apparently much bigger than what he showed on his confident and cynical face.

  A big sniffle from Jason brought Kayla fully back to the present. She turned to look at the scene in the living room, somewhat used to the site of Jesus, even as he retrieved a box of tissues for her husband. This caught her funny bone. She laughed, as she turned to chopping lettuce and tomatoes. She dropped any expectation that all that awaited them that evening was dinner and a movie, or homework or painting. With Jesus there, anything seemed possible.

  Chapter 15

  Treasure Hunt

  They ate their supper, of which Jesus partook moderately. Though he didn’t say anything about it, Kayla guessed that he was being careful not to impose on their modest means. The irony of having to provide food for Jesus was still beyond her grasp, even as a point of humor.

  A lull settled around the table, after the last of the tomatoes, lettuce and cheese had disappeared. There would be some meat and beans leftover. On full stomachs, those high protein leavings took on the unpalatable negative connotation of leftovers. When he was hungry for lunch that week, Kayla knew that old food would look as good as new to Jason. They both rose to clear the table, and Jesus followed their lead.

  As they gathered dishes and scraped bits into the garbage can, Jesus offered a proposal. “How would you like to play a sort of game tonight?”

  Both Jason and Kayla stopped their gathering and scraping, and checked to see Jesus’s expression as he proposed this. He did say “sort of game,” which made it seem likely that he wasn’t proposing a go at Monopoly or Uno.

  “It’s called a treasure hunt,” he said, in response to their stunned stares. This additional information didn’t cure those stares.

  “I know you’ve heard of a treasure hunt of sorts, but this is a bit different. I’m going to show you how some of my friends play this without being able to see me. I’ll go invisible, but keep talking to you both, so you can hear me in your minds.”

  Kayla had to level the plate in her hand after nearly losing a crumb of hamburger onto the floor. Jason laughed. He was still in a loopy mood from before the meal. A game that presumably required leaving the apartment didn’t sound likely to help with finishing his hermeneutics paper, but Jason wasn’t focused on that just then.

  “Sure, let’s see what it’s like,” he said, much like he might have if one of his buddies offered to teach them a new board game.

  “I think you’ll enjoy it,” Jesus said, looking primarily at Kayla. Usually, when one of your friends says those words, you only know how valuable that prediction is, based on the character of that friend. With that in mind, Kayla expected that she probably would very much enjoy this new way of doing a treasure hunt.

  They both changed clothes quickly, adjusting for the cool night air settling onto the plains. Jesus waited politely in the living room.

  “Driving or walking?” Jason said, when he emerged from the bedroom just behind Kayla.

  “Driving, if you don’t mind,” Jesus said.

  Once they all three settled into the car, Jesus in the back seat, he reiterated
one of the conditions of the game. “I’m going to go invisible for this part of the evening, so you can get used to hearing me without actually seeing me.”

  Jason saw Jesus disappear in the rear view mirror. Kayla looked back a moment too late. She couldn’t see anything in the twilight of the back seat.

  “I’m still here,” Jesus said, using the airwaves and their ears, as far as they could tell.

  “Now I’m going to switch to just sharing my thoughts with you, so you can get used to that for the future.”

  Of course, they had assumed that this was a temporary visitation, not a new normality. But neither of them had clearly imagined life after their encounter with a walking and talking Jesus. Their invisible guest seemed to be looking forward to that impending change already. This stirred a sadness in both of them, especially Kayla, not yet ready to even think about this experience ending.

  Jesus answered their feelings. “Don’t worry. I’m not going away tonight. This is just for the treasure hunt.”

  Kayla breathed a relieved sigh, as Jason started the car.

  “Where to?” Jason said aloud.

  Into his mind came the thought, “Head to the drug store on Calvin Street.”

  Kayla said it aloud. “To the drug store…”

  And Jason finished the thought, “on Calvin Street.”

  They looked at each other, Jason having to break eye contact to steer out of the parking lot.

  “So you’re giving us both the same information?” Jason said, addressing Jesus.

  Kayla said, “He is.” Confirming the same thought that had landed in Jason’s mind.

  When they arrived at the drug store, Jason pulled into a parking space. “Park here?” he said, not sure how detailed he needed to be in his compliance.

  They both felt that the parking place was fine, not even receiving any specific words, just a feeling. Kayla nodded once and Jason smiled at the confirmation.