Brother Word

by Derek Jackson

  “No, but it was the craziest thing—Nina had liked me from the eighth grade, but she kept that to herself. Everyone thought she was stuck-up or something, since she was from Trinidad and her mom taught at Louisiana Tech, but it wasn’t like that at all. She was just waiting for me to approach her.”

  “So I take it you both had a good Spring Break.”

  Chance sighed and leaned back in his seat. “Greatest week of my life. We were supposed to visit a set number of places every day—the Capitol, the White House, the Smithsonian Institution, the Mall, and all that, but Nina and I kept finding ways to cut those visits short and just spend time walking around, talking, and getting to know each other. We’d been living in the same town for four years, but all we knew was each other’s name.

  “When we got back to Ruston, we did everything together. You should have seen all the other guys’ faces when I showed up with Nina as my date to the senior prom. They all wanted to know what I had that they didn’t. And there was only one answer.”

  “And what was that?”

  Chance smiled. “I had . . . Nina. And I was the happiest man alive. After graduation, she had the grades to apply to any college she wanted, but she got a four-year scholarship to Southern, in New Orleans.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I needed to stay close to my pop—his health wasn’t the greatest, and it was better that I went to Grambling, just a few minutes away from home. I visited Nina just about every other weekend, though. She came back every summer; those four years seemed like four weeks. Time flies, you know?”

  “When you’re having fun,” Lynn finished.

  “Yeah. After graduation, I took her to this antebellum estate in Natchez, a big ol’ house like right out of Gone With the Wind. I had rented the house from a guy I knew in New Orleans, just for us to have the whole weekend. That Friday night, swinging in a hammock right at sunset, I popped the question. She said yes, and we got married a few months later.”

  “You didn’t waste any time.”

  “Didn’t need to. We’d known we were in love and supposed to be together, I think ever since that Spring Break of our senior year. After the wedding, we moved into a house just outside Ruston—a big ranch set on ten acres of land that I inherited from my mother, Jacqueline. My pop lives on the same land now.”

  “Inherited? Your mother . . .”

  “She died when I was ten,” he answered quietly. “I think that was part of the reason my pop’s health began failing—when she died, a part of him died, too. But things were going so great with Nina and me. We were planning to have our first child when . . . when we got the news.”

  “News?”

  Chance blinked back the tears welling up at the corners of his eyes. He refused to cry in front of this woman.

  “Nina had just landed a job as a legal assistant for a law firm in Shreveport, and she was going in for a routine checkup, something she needed to do before she started the job. The doctors discovered a tumor on her liver.” He bit his lip and stared directly out his window.

  “Oh, Chance.”

  He nodded again, and a tear that he could not stop rolled down his cheek. He quickly wiped it away. “She was just twenty-five years old,” he said, also unable to control the trembling in his voice. “I kept saying to myself, how can she have this disease so young? It wasn’t fair! Not to me and certainly not to her!” He blinked back another tear that threatened to fall down his cheek. “And . . . and you bet I made sure God knew that, too.

  “But we had to face this, so we prepared ourselves and got ready to deal with the chemotherapy, radiation, whatever it took. We were going to see this through because we were both fighters and we weren’t about to let this take us out. We went ahead and scheduled the preliminary tests. But a few weeks before she was scheduled to start the chemo, she heard about a Floyd Waters meeting down in Lake Charles.”

  “Wait a minute, did you say a Floyd Waters meeting?”

  “Yeah. You’ve heard of him, right?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of him! He prayed for—um, I mean, yes . . . I’ve heard of him. I see him on television all the time, conducting healing crusades.”

  “Yeah, that’s the guy. I really didn’t want to go, because I’d heard some negative things about the man’s ministry, but . . . but it was the strangest thing—Nina started believing that God was going to heal her through this man. She’d wake up in the middle of the night, saying how she’d had a vision of Floyd Waters laying hands on her and healing her. She could be really stubborn when she wanted to, so there was no way I could tell her anything different. I mean, sure, more than anything I wanted God to heal her, but I didn’t . . . well, we didn’t grow up believing in all that supernatural, blow-on-folks and be instantly healed stuff, you know? Our church didn’t teach that either, but . . . but Nina kept urging me to take her, practically begging me to . . .” He bit his bottom lip, forcing himself to keep his roller-coaster emotions in check as he remembered how desperate his beautiful bride had been. How many times had he agonizingly wished that he could somehow trade places with her; wished that he had been the one sick instead of her? He would have willingly taken on any affliction, disease, or pain for her sake without even thinking twice about it. God, how he’d loved her!

  I . . . I would have died for her . . . and in a way, I have . . .

  “So without telling her family or our church, we went down there, and on that first night, Waters called for everyone believing to be healed from cancer to come to the stage. Nina just looked at me with those desperate, baby brown eyes . . . She . . . she was believing to be healed so bad . . . what else could I do? So I told her to go ahead and go up there.

  “When it’s her turn to stand before Waters, the man suddenly stops the music and the choir and tells everyone to be quiet. He asks Nina where her husband is. When she answers that I’m in the audience, he then asks for the husband—me—to come join them onstage. I . . . I really didn’t want to go up there, but the whole stadium is so quiet, waiting for me, I didn’t have a choice. And I figure if I didn’t go, Nina would’ve been crushed.”

  Lynn opened her mouth, as if she might say something, but Chance continued on.

  “So I’m up there, in front of hundreds of people, and Nina’s up there trembling and shaking and then . . . then I hear her begin to speak in tongues. We weren’t raised Pentecostal and I . . . I didn’t even know she could speak in tongues. And . . . and all the time, Floyd Waters is just staring at me, looking at me with eyes so clear and piercing it was like he was seeing right through me. I’d never seen anything like it before. Then he puts his hand on my head and announces that I’ve been chosen by God to bring healing to the nations of the world, that through my hands many shall be healed and testify to God’s healing power.”

  Chance took a deep breath, remembering everything as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. “Then he said that if I would but lay hands on my wife, she would be healed.” Another tear trickled down his cheek, but this time he didn’t bother to wipe it away. “Nina’s just standing there, shaking and trembling like she’s having a seizure or something. I didn’t think . . . I didn’t know what to do, but Waters tells me again to lay hands on my wife. So I did. When I touched her head, she fell backwards and onto the stage floor, and then everybody started shouting, the music started playing again, and Waters raises his hands and gives God praise for another healing.”

  “So . . . so she was healed?”

  Chance did a cross between a nod and a shrug. She certainly thought so . . . “She told me that when I touched her, a lightning-like sensation ran through her body, and she knew instantly that she had been healed.

  “After we got back home, Nina started telling everyone that she was miraculously healed, and that I had God’s healing power in my hands. At first, I didn’t want her to say anything because nobody knew where we had gone, but she was so . . . so happy. I’d never seen her so happy in all the time I’d known her. So I said
fine, if you want to go around testifying, at least go to the doctor and have this healing confirmed, but she wouldn’t accept that. Said it was a lack of faith on her part to do that; that she certainly was healed and she would never set foot in a doctor’s office again. Our church thought she was crazy, and so did her mother, Jucinda.” He whistled and shook his head. “Everyone knew Jucinda had a real bad anger problem, and that just about set her over the edge. But Nina didn’t care, and after a while I didn’t either. I mean, she was feeling more energetic, more alive, and more happy than she ever had. So who cared what people thought as long as she kept living and being healthy, right?”

  He paused for a moment.

  “But then . . . she died,” he whispered.

  “Oh, Chance . . .”

  “My beautiful bride, my beautiful Nina . . . died. She just passed away one night while she slept—I took small comfort in knowing that at least she didn’t feel any pain. Jucinda was outraged, and she demanded an autopsy be performed. The autopsy showed . . . that in fact Nina’s cancer had not been healed; instead, it had gotten worse after she stopped taking medication. The real miracle was that Nina didn’t feel the pain of the cancer, or if she did, she didn’t let on.”

  “Oh, Chance, I’m so sorry.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Jucinda never accepted the fact that Nina refused medical treatment. She thought it was my fault for taking her down to Lake Charles in the first place. She not only blamed me for brainwashing Nina about this divine healing stuff, but through her large circle of influence she made me the town outcast. Said she was going to make sure I paid for what I did to Nina, and if you knew Jucinda, you knew not to take her threats lightly. Everywhere I’d go, I’d get all kinds of whispers and dirty looks. When you’re living in a small town, everybody knows everybody, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I got on the first train out of there and spent some time in Longview, then back east toward Gulfport and Birmingham.”

  “You just knocked around in those places? I mean, you didn’t get a job?”

  Chance shook his head. “The same inheritance fund that had given me the house allowed me to kick back for a while. My family tree on my mother’s side dates back to a wealthy slave owner years ago. For whatever reason, this man willed his land and most of his assets to my great-great-grandmother, and it’s been passed down the family line ever since. What I was doing in those small towns was continuing my ongoing argument with God—I couldn’t deal with how He just allowed her . . . just allowed her to die.”

  “Chance, you can’t just—”

  “I know. I know, but that season of my life was hell to get through. And sometimes all you want is someone to blame, even if it is God. One day I came across one of Nina’s diaries, though. She had been so deep into this divine healing stuff during the time she was diagnosed with cancer, and she’d written about how she had visions of me laying hands on people in wheelchairs and seeing them walk, stuff like that. And I couldn’t shake what Floyd Waters had prophesied to me either.”

  Or what my mother had been telling me all my life, that God was going to whisper such special things to my life . . .

  “So for six months, I focused on praying and studying what the Bible said about healing. Then I started attending some tent revivals and small church services, looking to put into action the things I’d learned.”

  “You just went up to people and started randomly praying for them?”

  “No. It was . . . Well, let me explain it this way. I just felt led by the Holy Spirit to ask certain people—whether they were walking with a crutch, or in a wheelchair—if I could pray for them. And I didn’t meet anyone who refused prayer, especially after the prayers I was praying . . . began to work.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, the first time, I was at a small church in Vicksburg, Mississippi. There was an old man whose back was so bent over he was constantly looking at the ground. He’d been in that condition for years, but he still prayed daily for God to heal him. Other than Nina, I had never seen someone with faith as strong as his. I prayed the Word of God over him, laying hands on his back and commanding his spinal cord to come in line with how God created it, in Jesus’s name. As soon as I lifted my hands, he starts shouting and jumps in the air three times. When he landed that third time . . . his back had completely straightened out.”

  “My God . . .” Lynn whispered.

  “Yeah. To actually see that with my own eyes . . .” Chance just shook his head. “I felt a little like what Peter must have felt like, walking on the water. I stayed in Vicksburg for a while, but the word of mouth and attention got too much for me. I didn’t want to be some kind of sideshow attraction. And when some people I prayed for didn’t get immediately healed like that old man, they got upset and started calling me everything but a child of God. I got out of Vicksburg quick, taking the train east and just stopping in various small towns.”

  “What God is doing through you is awesome, Chance. But you just can’t keep avoiding whatever it is in your past that you’re running away from.”

  Chance shook his head. “Every time I think about that night in Lake Charles, when I laid hands on Nina . . . and nothing happened, I start going through that hell all over again. Why wasn’t she healed? How come I can lay hands on perfect strangers—people I will only meet once in my lifetime—and they get healed? How am I supposed to live with that irony?”

  “Chance . . . I know that has to be hard for you, and I don’t have an answer as to why Nina wasn’t healed. All I know is that God is using you right now to do things that make an unbelievable difference in people’s lives. My doctor told me I might never see again, and to have that fear weighing on your heart every single night . . . that’s going through hell, too. And what about that little boy who can now hear and walk? Or Pastor Smallwood? Or God knows how many others who have healing testimonies because you prayed for them?”

  “I’m real happy for you, Lynn . . . and for those others, too. But I don’t know that it takes the place of the joy I felt being married to Nina.”

  “Chance, you said you weren’t raised in a Pentecostal church. When you were married to Nina, did you have any thoughts of having such a healing ministry?”

  He shook his head. “Furthest thing from my mind.”

  “Okay . . . and this is just a small place to start, but if that night in Lake Charles never happened, I may have still been blind today. And Pastor Smallwood may have been dead of a heart attack. And little Eddie Everett is still deaf and handicapped. All throughout the Bible, God used men who had not only incredible faith but incredible frailties, too. Moses stuttered and struggled with self-esteem issues, yet God chose him to be Israel’s deliverer. King David was described as a man after God’s own heart but he was also an adulterer, murderer, and a man who struggled with sexual lust his whole life. Elijah called down fire from heaven, but he also hid in a cave and wanted to die over a single threat from Jezebel. Jonah was disobedient and stubborn. Abraham and Isaac both lied about their marital status out of fear. Jacob was a—”

  “I get the point,” Chance cut in. “And I know what you’re trying to say. But that doesn’t mean my pain isn’t less real. I didn’t ask for this gift.”

  “I know you didn’t. You know, Billy Graham once asked a question of the Lord. ‘Why me?’ he asked. ‘Why did You choose a little boy from a farm in North Carolina to spread the gospel across the world?’ Chance, we don’t always know why God does what He does. But the fact remains—in spite of your questions and ponderings, He still chose . . . you.”

  THE SILVER STAR pulled into Savannah at just past seven in the evening. Lynn stood and stretched her legs before looking at Chance, who was still gazing out his window. It seemed he had been looking out his window the whole trip.

  “Are you getting off?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. But I’m catching a connecting train to Jackson, Mississippi, and then on to Ruston. You’re not going to follow me a
ll the way there, are you?”

  Lynn sensed that she was blushing, as she was still somewhat embarrassed at having purchased a ticket on a whim. But at least she’d met the mystery man, right? And at least she was in a better position to help him, if that was what God wanted her to do.

  “No. I should be getting back home. We’re organizing an important outreach effort this weekend, and I should be there. Chance, is there any way I can get in contact with you? I know you’ve told me you don’t want any media attention, and it wouldn’t be for anything like that. I just . . . well, I’d like to help you.”

  “Help me with what?”

  “It’s not good to carry that burden around without anyone to talk to, or pray with. You’ve been talking with me for the past two hours, and—”

  “It’s not like I had a choice,” he interrupted with a faint smile.

  “But you were willing to open up and share. And that’s important.”

  “What’s important is my privacy. How do I know you won’t give out my name to that newspaper reporter you’ve already talked to? Or that you won’t tell him what I’ve just been telling you?”

  “Chance, what you’ve told me today was said in confidence—you have my word on that. The reporter called me late Monday night and asked some basic, general questions. Then he twisted my words around to make it sound like I said something I didn’t.”

  They walked off the train and into the station, finding seats in the waiting area. While Chance excused himself to the restroom, Lynn went to the counter and checked on the departing time for return trips to Columbia. The next train was scheduled to leave in one hour. She returned to find Chance not sitting down, but standing by a window.

  “You have a fascination with the outdoors, huh?”

  He shrugged. “Me and my pop . . . we used to go fishing every Saturday when I was younger. Never caught much of anything, but sometimes we’d take our boat out for miles on the river, surrounded by water and trees . . . just the two of us. I stopped doing that after Nina and I started hanging out. Pop asked me once to go out with him again on the river, but I told him I was too busy.” He turned around from the window and Lynn was horrified to see he was on the verge of tears. How often did she see men cry?