The most remarkable moment of that service came when Willow and Jamie were laying hands on a woman with a severely misshapen spine. Doctors had fixed the growth that bent her neck down from her head, but they had little hope of straightening out her twisted vertebrae. The fifty-something woman, with medium length blonde hair, was in severe pain even as she stood before them.
After Willow and Jamie, accompanied by Scott, had heard her story and prayed for her, Jamie looked at Willow and said, “I think you’re supposed to call out the healing.”
By this, he meant that Willow was supposed to simply declare it done, as if her words carried healing powers, not just insight into the future. She had been growing more comfortable with this way of healing, though Jamie couldn’t know much about that. There were a couple of videos online of Willow doing this, but Jamie couldn’t know this was a growth area for her and one that was seeing more and bigger results.
Without hesitating, not even to think that Jamie should volunteer himself instead of her, Willow nodded and then said, “I declare that this neck is under the rule of Heaven, which has no place for these twisted vertebrae. Let Heaven come! Spine be straight!”
With a sharp snapping sound, and what looked like a quick nod toward the floor, the woman received that healing. It took just a few seconds for the vertebrae to get aligned, the spinal cord to be relieved and her head to raise up to her natural height.
At least a dozen people were watching at that point late in the service, people in transition to and from receiving or giving ministry across the front of the auditorium. When her head lifted up straight, the woman let out a “Whoop!” A few others shouted like people startled awake, and one woman screamed. This second woman, a dark-skinned woman with black hair and black eyes, grabbed at her neck and started to weep loudly. As they discovered later, she had come for healing of fused vertebrae in her neck and felt them break free and straighten when she saw the first woman healed.
Willow grinned with all her might. Results like that fueled her desire to go for more, but also simply filled her with joy, perhaps sharing in the relief felt by those who were healed, and sharing in the father’s satisfaction at seeing his children set free.
Before that most dramatic dual healing, Willow had already sensed a higher success rate for healing than she was used to. She had pulled Jamie in to partner with her because of his prophetic gift, thinking they would be a powerful team. She wasn’t disappointed on that score, and dozens of people waited in line to hear from God through these servants. But their success at healing was remarkably greater than what Willow generally saw on her own.
Later, when they sauntered back to the bus at the end of a long day, Willow commented on the healings.
“I usually don’t see that much healing in my meetings,” she said to Jamie. This was not some sort of modest self-deprecation, but the beginning of a fact-finding mission. Willow would love to see more healings, and was keen to know how that night had been so successful.
Jamie hooked his thumb toward Scott. “That might be ‘cause o’ Mr. Yutzy over there. He was the healing go-to guy with us in Thailand.”
Willow had not heard Scott’s last name before. She saw him smile shyly and look away, as if he was used to being put on the spot by Jamie and wouldn’t be moved. She could easily picture this look on Scott’s face as a little boy, perhaps dodging some embarrassment caused by a parent. Then she wondered why she was thinking about what he would have looked like as a boy. She felt like Pandora, discovering every day new things that had come spilling out of her box, since she decided to accept her sexuality as an asset and not a liability. She was just beginning to see what it might take to manage that asset.
In the cold van, after eleven o’clock, lights flashing in and out of windows and cutting across each seat, Willow decided to try to learn more about Scott Yutzy, who was sitting in the seat in front of her. Even Jamie had settled into late-night silence, so she found an easy opening for her first question.
“So, Scott, what’s a nice Mennonite boy doing hanging around someone like Jamie?”
Scott laughed aloud, but lowered his volume immediately, given the lateness of the hour and the confined space. Jamie laughed too, glancing over his shoulder at Willow. Scott turned halfway around and leaned back against the window, considering Willow for a second, seated in the middle of the row behind him. One of the younger women in the group rested her head on the window next to Willow. She seemed to be asleep.
“My family was Mennonite a couple of generations back. But my dad sort of drifted from the faith and left us kids to find our own way. My sister ended up in a Mennonite church in Fort Wayne, but the rest of us are all over the map. My older brother is a Buddhist, much to my father’s delight. My younger brother was in Thailand with us. He’s at a church in California these days, planning to get married this summer, to a nice Pentecostal girl from Mexico.”
Willow grinned and tipped her head slightly, impressed at how far the seed had blown. Scott looked at Willow and decided to go for the deeper answer to what he was doing in the company of people like Jamie and Willow these days.
“I was on the mission field after college and graduate school,” he continued. “I’ve been looking for a chance lately to at least do some short-term stuff, since my son went off to college.”
“You have a son?” Willow said. She didn’t feel the need to play it cool with Scott, even if she had been wide awake and in broad daylight.
“I have a son, Daniel. He’s in school up in Oregon, a junior this year.” Scott paused to check with Willow, not wanting to sprint past any questions.
“So, it’s just the two of you?” Willow said. Again, she could have held back and tried to gather that information from Scott’s version of what he was telling, but she felt that he wanted her to ask, that he wanted her to know him. Over the decades of her adult life, Willow had often relied on her intuitions to keep her out of potential romantic relationships, she was just beginning to practice the opposite.
Scott nodded. Willow could see that he was looking past her, out the window to a view of Aurora, Colorado, as they wound past the salting of lights shining in the darkness. “Just the two of us,” he said. Then he took a breath and began to tell a story that Willow knew he had told more than a hundred times before.
“His mother died when he was just two. We were on the mission field, in Nigeria, just in our twenties. When it hit, we hadn’t heard of any meningitis outbreaks and just assumed it was the flu. We were just normal Americans, assuming we couldn’t catch anything worse than the flu. We weren’t close enough to a hospital at the time to get immediate care, even if we had known what it was.”
Scott checked in, looking into Willow’s eyes. This was part of telling the story, stopping to deal with the sadness of others whom his story had just invited into his and Daniel’s sadness. But he could see that Willow was attending to his feelings, listening to his words, and not overwhelmed with her own feelings. He took note of the difference.
“I wish I had known about healing power in those days. I just sat and watched her die, nothing I could do.” He checked with Willow again, and then just left his eyes there, engaged with hers. “But I don’t beat myself up about it. That won’t help. And Angie, my wife, would just reach down from Heaven and bop me on the head if I gave in to regret this late in the game.”
Willow smiled slightly. “Does she bop you on the head often?” she said, wrinkling her brow slightly with mock concern.
Scott breathed a little laugh. “No, I know better than to provoke her.”
Willow turned more serious. She considered how different her life would be if she had experienced the death of someone so close to her, someone she loved. Her life had been full of leaving, her natural father’s departure and then hers. If her mother had died during most of the previous thirty years, Willow wouldn’t even have known. Her father could be dead now, for all she knew. One advantage of staying unattached was not having to mourn.
Willow chuckled at the sudden intimacy of that question. She remembered late-night van rides with friends in the past and the way the armor comes off with the fall of darkness and the rhythm of the road. Then she had a thought drop into her head.
“I’ve been thinking about the three gifts of the magi today,” she said. “The third one was myrrh, a spice used in burials. I’m thinking you know a lot more about myrrh than I do.”
Scott tilted his head forward, off the window, as if to see deeper into Willow’s eyes, though they appeared only as an occasional glint from where he sat. “Yeah, maybe I do.”
Saturday Morning in Bed
That Tuesday morning, Willow awoke before her alarm, while it was still dark. She tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t. She decided, instead, to try to connect with an earlier experience of visiting her heavenly father. She had found, years ago, that she could return to a vision, or mental image, that inspired her. There she would find more inspiration, or redirection to something else.
What popped into her head lying there on a Tuesday, was an experience that felt like a lazy Saturday morning climbing into her parents’ bed and just joking and giggling like a little girl. She didn’t consciously remember doing this with her natural parents, but had, in therapy, connected with something like it, though not a clear or inspiring memory.
With little effort, her eyes closed and her head relaxed on her pillow, she transported to another place and time, one not bound by seasons or weeks. There, it was sunny, the sheets perfectly white, the room full of living light. And Willow knew that she was lying next to a huge adult body—huge compared to her four-year-old self. There was laughter mixed in with the light.
In that place, she met her heavenly father in his laughter. He laughed often and without constraint, never forced, always ready with a smile and a tickle. But he also knew that Willow liked to just lie still and look at the light, to feel him breathing, to feel a hand stroking her hair, no need to speak, to entertain or be entertained.
As so often happened when she transported like this, something changed from the last time she had visited. Someone new had joined the experience. She was suddenly aware of another little body in that bed, another bouncing, another giggling, another gasping for breath, another child in her father’s bed.
A snippet of jealousy clouded that sunny room for a moment, as Willow realized that she didn’t have her father all to herself. Even if her natural father had left too early for her to form memories of him, and her mother was rarely present in a way that fed her soul, Willow had never had to contend with a sibling, to elbow in for the scarce resources of love and attention. For this reason, her jealousy was small and unpracticed, but her heart had gone on alert.
The small animal grunting of a little person in that bed continued, even as Willow lay perfectly still and stiff. Her spirit stirred with the approach of that other child. He sounded funny to her. Somehow she knew it was a boy. Then she knew she had a brother in that father’s house, in that Saturday morning bed.
When a dark-eyed boy, with curly, dark hair climbed over their father and landed in a ball next to Willow, she lifted the top sheet to get a better look at him. In that moment, when she saw him and he saw her, she knew who her brother was. In her father’s house, who else would he be?
The boy laughed, as if amused by her discovery, her realization of the obvious.
“Jesus,” she said. It was not a question, not a greeting, nor a call to get his attention. She said it as she realized his identity.
He crawled toward her like a scampering squirrel and then plopped on the pillow next to her. “Willow,” he said, in much the same tone.
They turned heads and looked at each other, lips pursed tight, eyes growing wider. And they began to laugh together. Willow had suddenly discovered that she liked having a brother, even in this intimate playful place with her father.
As soon as she accepted that thought, she felt strong arms scoop through the sheets. They rounded up Jesus, and then her, into a rolling wrestle of an embrace. The little ones kicked with glee, snickering at snuck-in tickles from expert fingers that knew just how hard and how fast to wriggle over ribs and into crooks of necks. Now three of them were laughing there. And the sheet launched up toward the ceiling and settled down again like a parachute come to ground.
When a few minutes of that rowdy play left her both tired and satisfied, Willow wanted to lie quietly again. Father had always let her do this. Would little Jesus cooperate?
The bumping tremors of hands and knees crawling on the bed finally ceased, and Jesus lay on the other side of their father, peeking across at Willow, who waited for calm and rest to return to her Saturday morning bed. And it did.
Again, her father stroked her hair, but this time he began to hum a melancholy and simple tune, one she had heard from him before, but in another context. Jesus contented himself with running his fingers through their father’s beard, gentle tips poking through the dense tangles and finding their way out into the open. Willow felt the soothing touch on her head and watched those seeking fingers move with the same gentleness.
She was happy to be there, and to be quiet with her father and with Jesus.
Then the bed began to move again. Again those little kid grunts and the whispery rustle of sheets over an active child interrupted her rest and overturned her happiness. Willow looked over at Jesus. He was still now, as if he too were attending to that new movement, that other child. But his face showed no fear, no annoyance, only anticipation and joy. He knew that everything and everyone he met in his father’s house was a source of merriment and pleasure. Willow was not entirely sure.
Again, the sheets mounded as the other crawler neared her spot in that big sunny bed, and again a boy’s face appeared grinning at her. He stopped and rested his head on their father’s chest, like a low wall next to them.
Willow recognized that face, but could not think from where. He looked familiar. Maybe he simply looked like someone she knew. After a moment of staring at each other, his eyebrows arching higher and higher while he waited for her to understand, or perhaps to get the joke, she did recognize him. Her first thought was that he looked just how Scott Yutzy’s son must have looked. Right after that she thought, “But how would I know that? I never met the boy.” Then her adult brain helped the little girl orient to what was happening. If she was a four-year-old, and Jesus not much older, then this could not be Scott’s son.
That third child was Scott Yutzy.
He rolled back against their father, clapped his hands and laughed. Jesus laughed too. But the father just turned toward Willow to watch for her reaction.
How can this be?
A distant voice, as if from another room, started to lecture on the meaning of seeing this particular person in bed with her, launching an explanation about the psychological meaning of... drone... drone... drone. It wasn’t her father’s voice, so Willow blocked it out, as easily as hitting the mute button on a remote. This was not a grownup place, with grownup meanings or grownup worries. This Saturday morning bed space was purely about being with her father, and Jesus’s father, and... Scott’s father too.
Given her absent father and her experience of sexual abuse, it took decades for Willow to relax into a vision of lying in bed with her papa on a sunny Saturday morning, tickling and wrestling and giggling, resting and talking and listening. Only recently had she stepped further into that relationship in which Jesus, as a small boy, could be included too. Adding another person, a mere mortal like herself, and one that she knew very scantily, was a stretch for even the spiritually limber.
Because she had intentionally excluded romance from her life all these years, Willow had little practice consulting her father about such things. Since the vision that included Scott was at least partly from the father, she understood that he was saying something about the potential relationship. Like someone trying to look at something on her own
nose, without a mirror, Willow couldn’t tell exactly what he was saying to her. She did better seeing into lives outside her own or into parts of her life with which she was fully reconciled and familiar.
This was new territory.
Vacation
After her incarceration, Willow started to think about how long it had been since she took a purely relaxing vacation. Her mother had been dropping hints, like pumpkin seeds in a new garden, about how nice it would be to travel to somewhere warm that winter, now that she had someone to travel with. Even if the presumption of those hints would have annoyed other adult children, Willow let that slip past.
Then one day she opened an email from her travel agent. That she opened the mail, which she generally would have treated as junk mail, was unusual. There she found a great deal on a cruise, if they booked one sailing out of Miami in just ten days. The only trick would be getting off work, but she already knew that most of her work was in low gear, as she waited for the new head librarian to get up to speed. When she prayed about the decision, she felt certain that she was supposed to take the cruise and do it accompanied by her mother.
To her surprise, the only remaining consideration was Scott Yutzy. They had collected each other’s phone number that late Sunday night—almost early Monday morning—and had exchanged some playful texts since then. This was really new territory for Willow. She deliberated for several minutes before hitting send on most of those messages. For a person who loved grace and living above the power of rules, she felt that she had to pay attention to rules that were mostly unwritten, as she decided how fast and how far to go into this relationship. She didn’t feel entirely comfortable with going away so soon after meeting him.
The Words I Speak (Anyone Who Believes Book 2) Page 19