“I know,” Gladys said, sympathetically, “it was strange for me too, but I was feeling desperate. So I had him touch my hand.” Here, she showed the very hand that was involved, as solid evidence for her story, “I told him to tell the pain in my hips to go away.”
“What?” The look on Barbara’s face, a messy mix of consternation and disgust, made Gladys wonder whether the truth was worse than the fantasy Barbara had constructed.
“We don’t believe in anything like that,” she said, presumably speaking for herself and Andy.
“Ah, well, I, ah, tend to agree with you there, to an extent, really . . .” Gladys could still sense Jesus next to her, but was straining to keep her focus forward on Barbara. This combination made it hard for her to form coherent thoughts, let alone sentences.
Barbara swirled together the mother bear attack with her anti-Christian disgust and assembled her own nonsensical sentence out of it. “Well, that’s all, or none of that, that we can tolerate from you . . .” and she retreated out the door.
Barbara left without a full explanation of what actually happened, but the fierce pair of fears that had sunk into her like fangs, chased her from Gladys’s door and out of Gladys’s life, as far as she was concerned.
Gladys heard Jesus sigh heavily, as soon as the sound of the storm door slamming dissipated. She looked over at him. Like Barbara, she had to wrestle two beasts just to stand in front of Jesus. Shame at her dishonest retreat from the truth battered her like a strong winter wind. Anger at the new experiences Jesus had thrust into her life stung her like freezing rain. She shrank half an inch from the new height her healed legs had afforded her. But her hips and knees still felt no pain.
Jesus spoke right through that storm, without even raising his voice. “You have a longing that you never expected would be fulfilled. If you turn away from me now you will still have the longing, but not the way to fulfill it.”
This sounded, again, like he was speaking in riddles. Gladys stopped where she was, rather than figure out how to untangle those words.
“I don’t want to see and hear you like this anymore,” she said wearily.
In response to those solemn words, Jesus disappeared.
Chapter 9
QUESTIONS
Though Jesus stayed invisible over the next three days, true to her spoken wish, Gladys’s healed hips and knees stayed with her. She did notice pain in her knuckles, which she had known was there before, but which had been overshadowed by the pain in her lower extremities. Even if an accuser at her ear said otherwise, she knew that Jesus had not left her hands in pain as punishment for sending him away. She didn’t really send him away, did she? He was still there, somewhere. Wasn’t he?
When she woke up the next morning, after the incident with Barbara and Andy, she assessed the damage, the consequences of her actions. She had infuriated Barbara for different reasons than her neighbor had thought, but Gladys had stacked and mortared a wall between them, either way. Was it worth it to be free from all that pain?
With her tortoise-like pace upgraded to easy and painless movement, Gladys felt disoriented. Add to that, the experience of hearing and seeing Jesus and then telling him to stop it, and the final product was confusion that approached paralysis. Out of that confusion, she decided to make an appointment with her pastor, to confess and get some clarity on the meaning of it all.
It was Tuesday afternoon at three o’clock, when Gladys sat in the little waiting area outside the pastor’s office, at the Bible church that she had attended since soon after moving to Union City. She had been there longer than the pastor, Jim Heskett. Pastor Heskett had passed the search and interview process just three years ago, when the venerable pastor, who had founded the church, retired.
The office door opened and a couple stepped out into the waiting area, focused behind them, saying their thanks to the pastor, and not noticing Gladys. She felt instantly like an intruder on the close of whatever session they had finished with Pastor Heskett. The church secretary returned to her desk, after a break of some kind, and said her goodbyes to the couple, people in their thirties who looked familiar to Gladys, but whose names she didn’t know. The Sunday morning attendance had topped four hundred lately, and some of the newer couples under age forty were still strangers to Gladys.
Jim Heskett was in his early forties, built like a football player who had stayed in relatively good shape. His medium brown hair had been recently cut, perhaps in preparation for the coming special Sundays. His hands were wide, his fingers stout and his manicure immaculate. He looked like a man who used to do physical labor, but hadn’t for many years. His deep blue eyes and pale eyebrows seemed boyish beside a modest nose. His ruddy face was clean-shaven, as usual.
“Mrs. Hight,” the pastor said with a smile and an outstretched hand, as the swirl from the previous session and the secretary’s return began to settle. Gladys rose from her seat painlessly and shook his hand.
“Call me Gladys, please,” she said.
“Then you will have to call me Jim,” said the young pastor.
She had never met with this new pastor one-on-one. The old pastor had taken care of arrangements for Harry’s funeral, the most intense contact Gladys had ever experienced with any clergy. As she followed Jim into his office, she began to doubt the wisdom of confiding such strange personal events to a man she hardly knew, and one so young. She held her purse in front of her, clamped by both hands, her head down, focused on the seat that the pastor offered in front of his desk.
“You want something to drink?” he said, before sitting down. “Karla can get you something, water, coffee . . .”
“No, no thanks. I gave up coffee a couple a years ago, to settle my nerves,” Gladys said. She felt like that slipped out, a small gush of extra information. This worried her. What was she going to say to this young man about her strange visitor and the way she reacted to him?
As he rounded the desk and took his seat, Jim opened the meeting. “So, tell me what you wanted to talk about.” He leaned forward, both elbows on his desk, his forearms flat on the blotter. That posture gave him the look of someone anxious to know what she had to say. It didn’t help Gladys’s resolve to not gush information.
“Well, I had a very strange experience, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it, to try to understand it better for myself.”
“That’s an intriguing introduction,” Jim said. His eyes stayed locked on Gladys’s face, and he seemed even more anxious to hear her story. But Gladys became aware, in that look, that he didn’t know her any better than she knew him, in fact it was the opposite. One gets to know a few things about a preacher, if you listen to his sermons and lessons two or three times a week.
But she plowed ahead. Beginning with the sounds in her house, backing up to acknowledge her fears about losing her mental sharpness, and then into the first appearance of Jesus in her living room, Gladys just let it all come out. “I was too surprised to even react, I think. I just couldn’t believe my eyes, but what else did I have to go by? There he was, standing there looking at me, a stranger in my house, but me not the least bit scared.”
Jim took a deep breath at this point and then decided not to stop her story yet. “So what happened next?”
Gladys let out the rest of her experience, like a fisherwoman letting out more line to get her bait to the proper depth. And finally, after the story of the healing to her hips, to which Jim reacted visibly by sitting up straight all at once, she skidded her ride to a stop, right where she told Jesus she didn’t want to see or hear him anymore.
The ten-second silence after she finished, could just as well have been five minutes, for the impact it had on Gladys’s brittle nerves. Even as she let the words roll out of her mouth, like ball bearings from a tipped bucket, she battled regret over spilling all of that information, so much of which made her sound completely nuts. At least, that’s what some part of her brain was telling her. Too bad that part didn’t know where to find the hand brake, t
o stop her mouth from going on and on.
Jim smiled, finally, and started to ask questions. “So, when you saw him the first time, you didn’t feel any kind of fear?”
“That’s right. And, even when it was happening, I was sayin’ to myself, ‘this is strange, you should be scared.’”
Nodding slightly, he continued. “And did you feel like you were sort of out of control of the situation, when it was happening, like the world was just spinning by?”
Shaking her head, first slowly and then with more certainty, Gladys said, “No, not at all. It was so much like having someone over for a visit, just like talking to another person, except, of course, he knew so much about me. It was really like talking to myself, in that way.” This observation alarmed Gladys, but Jim didn’t seem worried by it.
“I’m also interested in the fact that he just disappeared as soon as you told him to,” Jim said. “He didn’t try to talk you into letting him stay where you could see and hear him?”
“Not at all,” Gladys said. “And I been thinkin’ about that too. Part o’ me says, ‘why didn’t he insist on him staying?’ I mean, if he loves me and all. But, then, he’s not one to just play games like people do, sayin’ one thing and not really meanin’ it, or not taking other people seriously for what they say. So, I guess, I’m okay with him goin’ when I told him to, though I’m havin’ lotsa second thoughts.”
Jim’s questions each seemed surprising to Gladys, if not quite as surprising as her story was to the pastor. She was getting a calming sense that he, at least partly, believed her. This settled her voice to a more natural and open rhythm, much better than that nervous gushing she was worrying about at first.
“Well, I gotta say I’ve never heard anything like this happening in this country. You probably remember the Crables, the missionaries, telling about Jesus appearing to Muslims and convincing them that he’s real and that he’s God’s unique son.” He paused and saw Gladys nod vigorously. “Well, that sorta makes more sense to me in the context of the Muslim world.” He paused here and then continued, as if arguing with himself. “But, then, wouldn’t we benefit from a visible appearing once in a while, to really convince us? I mean, if we’re really honest, none of us is as convinced as we should be, right?”
Gladys appreciated that Jim seemed to be working through this unusual story right there in front of her, like one of those restaurants where they prepare the food where you can see it. She wondered if the old pastor would have been so open.
Jim seemed to sense her thoughts. “I guess you can see that this has caught me by off guard, and I’m having to stretch to fit this into what I believe.” He stopped there, his head bobbing very slightly as he processed his new reality, which included a long-time church member claiming that she heard and saw Jesus physically in her house.
“I know you’re worried about dementia or Alzheimer’s, Gladys, but your story doesn’t really sound like that to me,” he said, smiling and thinking a second. “Though I do have to say I’m not a professional, when it comes to those things. Still, I have sat with lots of elderly folks who struggle to keep their thoughts straight. Your thoughts seem plenty straight to me, even if your experience is hard for me to believe.”
Gladys didn’t know what to say. She felt a bubbly gratitude for the level of affirmation and acceptance she was hearing from the pastor, but she still had questions, some of them disturbing.
“You know, I’m sure you’re gonna find this hard to believe,” Jim said, “but I think you should see a guy I met up at the retreat center, north of town. His name is Father Bob. Yes, he’s a Catholic priest. And if you tell anyone in the church that I sent you to see him, I’ll deny everything.” He sounded serious for one second and then burst a short laugh. “But, really, I think he’s had more experiences with things like this and can be more helpful to you than I can.”
“Father Bob?” Gladys said. She had known Catholics all her life, of course, but only on a social or business basis. She had never discussed any matter of faith with one, especially a priest.
Jim explained. “I really think he’ll have some direction for you, and some help interpreting what it means. And maybe he’ll have something to say about whether it was okay for you to tell Jesus to stop showing up at your place, or whatever.”
Perhaps the pastor had not totally accepted her story. But, clearly, he was not inclined to say she was crazy. He offered no alternative explanation for what she experienced, leaving her only with the obvious one.
She thanked him and then sat patiently as he closed their meeting with a prayer that struck her as rather generic.
On the way out the door, Gladys stopped at the reception desk to pick up the phone number and address of the retreat center. Gladys glanced behind and caught the pastor watching her walk out the door. She resisted the wild urge to waggle her hips as she had when she was first healed. Instead, she just walked out the door looking at the address in a township north of Union City. It occurred to her then that meeting with a Catholic priest was about as unusual for her as having Jesus show up in her house.
Gladys had scheduled another appointment for the next day, this one with her doctor. She was thinking that her level of activity with the bad hips was less stress on other things, like her heart. She had regretted the way her hips and knees kept her from exercising. Now that she had the option of being more active, she wanted to get an expert opinion on how much she could do, or how best to start getting more fit. Of course, it also occurred to Gladys that it would be some fun watching her old doctor trying to cope with her painless hips.
In order to see the doctor the next day, she agreed to go to the convenient care center in town first, to get x-rays of her hips. That’s where she headed from the church office. In her fifteen-year-old Chevy Malibu, which Harry had purchased without her, when it was two years old, she drove down Main Street to the convenient care center. Harry didn’t like having Gladys around when he negotiated a deal, because he felt that she gave too much away, with her off-handed comments and compulsive openness. She didn’t argue. Gladys had a hard time not feeling like she was cheating someone out of their livelihood, when she negotiated a lower price for herself. Harry was heartless about such things, and always got a better deal where bargaining was an option. With only sixty thousand miles on her old car, Gladys didn’t expect to have to negotiate for a new one any time soon.
She drove a little bit faster than before her healing, less distracted by the pain. If it weren’t for a back seat full of guilt, she would have been feeling happy and free. She wandered into trying to figure out if this, “Father Bob,” would be able to help her not feel so bad about telling Jesus to go invisible. Wandering further still, she considered whether she should stop thinking of, “Father Bob,” in quotes.
At home that night, standing in the kitchen, washing dishes, Gladys glanced out the window to see a pair of robins hopping across the back yard. Without a moment’s thought, she called out, “Hey, Harry, two robins in the back yard. Spring is here at last.” Realizing what she had done, Gladys laughed uncomfortably, set the plate she had just rinsed in the dish drainer, and looked out the window more soberly.
It was just an old habit, not a sign of dementia, that she called out to Harry when something exciting happened. She knew that. But that urge to call out to someone reminded her of the decision she had made to break from her companionable experience with Jesus. Gone was the apprehension that he might do or say anything at any given moment. But gone also was the loving smile and steady conversation of one who seemed to know everything about anything that mattered to her, past, present or future. That was a lot to send away.
Chapter 10
BLAME
The next day, with her x-rays preceding her to the doctor’s office, Gladys strolled into the reception area, where Maureen had reigned supreme for the past ten years. Maureen was standing behind the desk, a much younger woman sitting at check-in.
“Hello, Gladys,” Maureen said
. She stared at Gladys as she approached the desk and Gladys returned the “hello.”
Maureen was one of those ageless women, neither heavy nor thin, still wearing her auburn hair in the same mid-length, schoolgirl style as when she started that job, her angular nose and cheeks reminding Gladys of a sculpture of an Indian maiden she saw when she was a girl, in Nebraska
“You look like you’re feeling pretty good,” Maureen said. “I can’t even see you limping.”
“No more limping,” Gladys said, allowing a mischievous smile. “My hips are good as new, and knees too.”
“What do you mean? Did you get surgery down in Illinois without telling the doctor?” Maureen knew Gladys had kids in Illinois, which explained that logical leap.
“No secret surgeries,” Gladys said, still smiling. “Did you get the x-rays from yesterday?”
Maureen turned to a pile of large white envelopes and pulled one out from near the top. “Yep, here they are. I guess the doctor will be able to tell what’s going on from these.”
Gladys noticed that the girl at the check-in desk was looking at her from about thirty degrees off to the side, as if she was trying to figure something out. But all she said was that she needed to see Gladys’s insurance card to make sure they had the latest information.
As she retreated to a seat where she would wait to be called to the exam room, Gladys caught the attention of Stephanie, the nurse. Rushing from one patient to another, Stephanie stopped at the desk to pick up a chart and noticed Gladys walking smoothly toward the chairs on the other side of the waiting area. She waited for the old woman to turn around to confirm that it really was Gladys.
“Well, Gladys, you’re walking much better than the last time we saw you in here,” said Stephanie.
As Gladys sat down without a grimace or hesitation, she said, “That’s a fact.” The triumph in her voice added to the surprise of all three women looking at her now from behind the reception desk.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 8