And then another!
“Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness! Morning by morning, new mercies I see. All I have needed, thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!”
And yet another, mixed with his sobs and tears….
“Jesus. He meets you where you are. Jesus, he heals your secret scars. All the love you’re looking for is Jesus, the friend of a wounded heart.”
The chorus of the last song he sang over and over. He wept, not understanding, yet knowing he had to yield to the Spirit of God who brought each song to his spirit. He bent over, forehead touching the ground. Again, he sang the words; they needed to be sung. That’s all he understood. They needed to be said for some unknown yet very important reason.
“Jesus. He meets you where you are. Jesus, he heals your secret scars. All the love you’re looking for is Jesus, the friend of a wounded heart.”
“All the love you’re looking for...”
“All the love you’re looking for...”
“All the love you’re looking for....”
Chapter 44
T
ara, Jamie, and Amy stood silently at the entrance to the kitchen, all three slack-jawed.
When they had simultaneously gathered at the top of the stairs due to the singing they were hearing, Tara had told her children to stay put—that she would go down to look into the voice they were all hearing. But when Amy said, “He’s singing to Jesus,” she couldn’t think of a good reason to restrain them.
The three maintained a respectful silence as they watched and listened to Brent, who was apparently on his knees just to the other side of the kitchen island. They could only see the top of his head when it bobbed above the surface of the island every couple of seconds.
When the final refrain ended—a portion of a song that Tara recognized from her youth: A Friend of a Wounded Heart—so did the final bob of Brent’s head.
Remaining bent over and out of sight, Brent could still be heard through whispers. “All the love you're looking for… All the love you’re looking for… All the love you’re looking for….”
He must have said the phrase ten times or more before he became fully quiet.
Tara knew that any moment Brent would stand up. She didn’t want to cause embarrassment for him in the midst of this very intimate time between him and God, so she began to apply pressure to the chests of her children, indicating that they needed to quietly back out of the kitchen.
They weren’t fast enough.
Brent placed his hands on the surface of the kitchen island and stood to his feet. He saw Tara and the kids right away.
Slightly startled and obviously embarrassed, all he could do at first was stare. A look of “How do I explain this?” appeared on his face, especially in his eyes.
“Uhh.”
“No, Brent. Nothing for you to explain,” said Tara. “We’re sorry for intruding.”
“It’s okay,” he finally got out. “I umm.… Not really sure what to say just yet.”
“Jamie, why don’t you take Amy back upstairs? Go back to bed.”
Jamie produced a disappointed frown as he said, “Come on, Aim.”
Brent interrupted the departure.
“Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to leave.”
They didn’t.
“This is a little awkward,” said Tara, still scrutinizing. “Everything all right?”
Brent let out a heavy sigh. “I think so. Had a bit of an encounter with God.”
“I’ll say,” said Jamie.
“Yeah,” whispered Amy, a look of perplexed concern still registering on her face.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. Honest.”
Brent rounded the island and walked to Tara and the kids. He wrapped his arms around Amy and said, “This was a good thing. It was a really special time with Jesus.”
He looked up at Tara. “With Joshua.”
It took a moment for the comment to register, but when it struck, her eyes grew wide. “With Joshua?”
“Joshua?” Jamie was obviously confused. “Who’s Joshua?”
Tara slowly and quietly responded. “Joshua is Jesus.”
“Huh?” Jamie looked from his mom to his dad, then back. “I don’t get it.”
Brent stood and looked at his son. “Both the name Jesus and the name Joshua are variations on the name Yeshua, which is how his name was pronounced in Hebrew. Maybe Aramaic. Not really sure. Anyway, Joshua is a very important name to me.”
Tara instantly knew how to bring some light to the subject, at least for Amy. “Remember in the Chronicles of Narnia books what the lion was named?”
Amy answered straight away. “Aslan!”
“That’s right. Do you remember when you were little how you used to talk with Aslan in your prayers, knowing that you were really talking with Jesus?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, that’s kind of what your dad is talking about. Sometimes your dad talks with Jesus using the name Joshua because of something he was taught when he was young.”
“Oh. Okay.” She looked at her dad. “Okay. I understand. Joshua is Aslan.”
Brent chuckled. “Yes, Joshua is Aslan and Aslan is Jesus. The same person, different names.”
Tara looked at her husband. “I think I need to hear another Joshua story from you.”
Jamie piped in. “Yeah, I think I need to hear this story too.”
JENNA HAD BEEN sitting and listening midway down the steps while Tara, Jamie, and Amy stood at the kitchen entrance. When everyone moved into the living room to talk, Tara saw her right away.
“Jenna, coming down?”
The oldest of the three Lawton children yawned and nodded. Tara wondered if she was fully awake.
After they were all seated on various pieces of furniture, and with a single lamp lighting the room, Brent began to explain.
“When I was in my mid-twenties, back in the early 1990s, your great-grandmother died. She was very important to me. And she still is today. I might not ever have become a Christian without her prayerful influence in my life. And certainly, none of you would be here today if she hadn’t been a spiritual warrior for my protection.
“When I was in my mid-teens, I had gotten involved in witchcraft.” He paused and looked at Amy. “Amy, witchcraft is very dark and scary stuff. It made me scared all the time. I also had very bad dreams every night because of it.”
He returned his focus to the rest of the family. “Those dreams were actually the same dream repeated over and over. My mom and dad would often come into my bedroom to shake me awake because I had either called out with fear or they had heard me crying. Not the best of days.”
Every member of his audience was paying deep attention—four sets of eyes staring at him, almost unblinking. Brent reflected for a moment that there were two sets that remained upstairs, which was probably a good thing, considering the content of his story. Elizabeth may or may not have been an eye-roller if she were listening, but he felt more comfortable talking to four people he knew believed deeply in Jesus.
“The dream consisted of me being in a pitch-black open area. I couldn’t see anything but old wooden railroad ties that lay scattered everywhere on the ground. I felt very alone, and there was absolutely no sound. I don’t know how long I stood in one place on one of those railroad ties. It seemed like I might have been there for years, wishing that I had a purpose, some reason for my existence in that place, but there was none.
“Then something astonishing occurred: a super-bright beam of light shone down like a white pillar far in the distance. I’m not sure how I could see that far away, but I could tell that the light was falling upon a potted daisy in a burnt-orange clay pot—like those we saw at Woolum’s Nursery back in the spring. In that moment, I knew that I had a mission: get to that flower. Then suddenly, something horrible began happening. All the railroad ties began to fall downward, spiraling in
to blackness. All around me, they began falling from sight. I knew that the one I was standing on was going to tumble away too, so I began moving as fast as I could toward the light. So many times, I almost chose the wrong piece of wood to leap onto next, because it would start falling. Several times, the lumber I was standing on began to shift, and I would have to jump to another that looked safe.
“I eventually made it to what seemed like a solid platform of the wooden ties, and resting on them was that potted flower. I raced to it and went to grab it, but just before I could, it tumbled away into the pitch blackness below. There wasn’t a single time in my dreams that I ever made it to the flower in time. I was heartbroken, scared, angry, shattered. All at the same time. Every time.”
Brent paused for a moment to let the story sink in. No one said anything.
“The combination of the dream, the witchcraft, and a few other things had me on a downward spiral that made me think that I wasn’t…”
Brent needed to say something for Amy’s sake that wasn’t going to sound suicidal. It came to him. “…that I wasn’t long for this world.”
With a soft, concerned voice, Jenna said, “Oh no, Daddy.”
Those three simple words warmed his heart. Tara took Jenna’s hand in hers as they sat next to each other on the couch.
“Well, that’s where your great-grandmother comes in. My mamaw. She had been praying continually for me. The Lord had told her to pray specifically for me. She knew something was wrong, and she wasn’t going to let the Enemy have his way with me. That’s when I had an encounter with my basketball coach, which led me to become a Christian. And that’s when all the nightmares and witchcraft and … well … voices in my head came to an end. God had set me free. And my mamaw became my hero.”
Brent thought a moment on how to approach the next part of the story.
“When your great-grandmother died, your Nana, Papa, Aunt Lydia, and I traveled to Kentucky for her funeral.” Brent made a quick decision not to get into the gruesome, painful way she had died. “I became angry at God for not allowing me to say goodbye to her. I felt that he owed me that. There were some other disappointments that I was dealing with too, so I kind of flew off the handle at him.
“I challenged God, shaking my fist at the sky: ‘If I had your power, I would do things differently and better!’
“Well, that night, while in bed at your great-grandma’s farmhouse, I got a visit. Or, rather, I was made to visit … him. I found myself face-to-face with a man that I instantly recognized as Jesus, although he didn’t look anything like I thought he would. He was a bit shorter than I and didn’t live up to the handsome pictures that everyone seems to paint or draw of him. But it was him, nonetheless. He told me that he was going to take me up on my challenge, that I was going to be given the chance to prove that I could do better at controlling circumstances in people’s lives than he could.”
Brent leaned toward Amy with a grin. “I wasn’t very smart when I told God that I could do a better job, was I?”
Amy grinned back at him. “Not very.”
“To make a long story short.…”
“A very long story,” Tara chimed in.
“Hey, now. A couple of years ago, when I told it to you, you didn’t want it to end.”
“I was younger then.”
Brent, Jenna, and Jamie laughed.
“An-ee-way.… Jesus told me that I could call him Joshua, because we were going to be spending a lot of time with each other and it would be less distracting if I weren’t thinking of him as the Creator God, Jesus. Joshua then equipped me and sent me on a three-part, three-night journey in my dreams to try to fix a situation in someone’s life and make everything work out the way that I wanted it to. I failed. Miserably.”
Brent sighed.
“So, that brings us to present day. For the past several weeks, the dream that I had as a teenager has returned. And again, it’s occurring every night.”
Jenna turned to Tara. “Mom, you know about this?”
Tara nodded. “Yes. We’ve met with Pastor Jonathan about it too.” She looked at Brent. “Keep going, hon.”
He nodded. “It’s really been weighing heavily on me. I often wake in a sweat, panicked. That happened again tonight. I rolled out of bed and came downstairs to get a drink of water. But I could feel the Holy Spirit calling me to prayer. So, that’s what I did. Next thing you know, I heard a voice I recognized.”
“Joshua,” said Jamie.
“Joshua. He told me some things that were not easy to understand, some things I’m going to have to write down and try to make sense of. But he also gave me some promises to hold onto, some that involve my three beautiful children.”
Brent felt a hesitation in his spirit to not go any further regarding what he’d heard Joshua say about his son and daughters prophesying.
“What are they?” asked Jamie.
“I’m sorry, but I’m feeling as though God is holding me back from revealing those.”
“Aww, man.”
“Suffice it to say, God holds all three of you in high value, and he is going to use you. I’m not sure how or when, but it’s going to happen. And if it’s got anything to do with why I’m having these dreams again, God is probably going to be using the three of you soon. Maybe he has already started. I don’t really know.
“One thing that I do know, though, is that you need to—all three of you—press into God.” He looked at Amy. “That means that you should start talking with God more and more and loving on him. Let him know that it’s all right for him to use you to accomplish something special.”
“You got it, Dad.” She looked up. “And Joshua.”
Everyone laughed. Brent leaned over, grabbed his youngest, and set her on his lap before continuing.
“Okay, so there’s one thing to add to the story that’s important. In the dreams I had when I was a boy, I had on blue pants. In the dreams I’m having now, my pants are white. It’s too obvious to be something insignificant. I can never remember any details about a shirt. I may be in something short-sleeved. But the pants? Important, I believe. So does Pastor Jonathan. And second, in today’s dreams, I’m able to catch the flower by diving off the beams into the darkness. I no longer feel scared, even though I’m jumping into a darkness where I cannot see the end of it. I feel overjoyed and at peace.
“So, there you have it. You are all in the know.”
ELIZABETH QUIETLY CLOSED her bedroom door and walked back to her bed. She felt intentionally excluded from the story Brent had just told. It also sounded as though only his kids were going to receive promises of some sort from Joshua, if Brent had truly had an experience with him. And … it was becoming pretty apparent that she wasn’t as important to the rest of the family as she had hoped.
Chapter 45
E
lizabeth tried to sleep. Over and over, she tried.
Her pillow had taken a beating with her inability to settle her mind. Twice, she had accidentally awakened Kyla and had to soothe her back into her own rest.
Her scrambled thoughts just would not abate. They were a mishmash of good and bad rationale. The biggest problem was that she couldn’t tell which of her trains of thought were the truth.
Two weeks earlier, her dad … wait, should she begin calling him Brent again? She sighed. He had told her about the dreams he’d had when he was in his twenties—the story about a Jesus figure named Joshua who had sent him on some sort of … she didn’t know—otherworldly?—mission to save the life of a girl named Elizabeth. This, though, was the first she’d heard about a dream that had to do with railroad ties and a potted flower.
That, of course, didn’t mean Brent was trying to keep something from her. It just meant that this dream—this story—didn’t have anything to do with her. That she understood, anyway.
No, it wasn’t that which had kept her awake. It was that she’d been excluded from an intimate fam
ily gathering. This was why her thoughts had begun playing tug-o-war with her heart.
She would have very much wanted to be a part of the impromptu gathering at zero-dark-thirty in the morning. She wouldn’t have cared about being awakened out of a deep sleep. Instead, she would have been so grateful! Her heart would have been captured by their thoughtful love and inclusiveness.
On the other hand, the stories of the nightly dream Brent had in his teens, and the one he was having now, were inarguably his to tell to whomever he wished. And it did seem as though Jamie and Jenna had been told about them only because Brent had inadvertently awakened them while being loud in the kitchen.
What was mostly messing with Elizabeth’s mind was a single question: Would she have been included in the conversation if she, too, had walked down the stairs to see what had been going on? If she had, would Brent have become silent, downplaying the whole ordeal, because she wasn’t a true family member?
But she had not gone down the stairs to join the others, though absolutely nothing had prevented her from doing so. And there was no proof at all that Brent would have steered the conversation a different direction if she’d been with them.
She knew that her thoughts and feelings were irrational. There was absolutely no logical reason for her to be worried about the family rejecting her in any way.
She sighed.
But that was just it. The attempts to rationalize her internal dialogues weren’t at all logical. Only emotional! And her emotions were desperate for something solid to cling to, because rejection had been a life-long reality, a nightmarish path of sinking sand.
For two years now, she had been on a new path of inclusiveness that had finally begun to feel firm and safe. Tonight, though, that pathway felt as though it was on the verge of collapsing beneath her.
And why was that? Because her new family had just provided evidence that she wasn’t as valuable as they had been letting on, presumably because she didn’t share the same last name or come from the same gene pool.
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