If you’re just joining us… you might want to catch up by reading Part 1.

Part 2 - In The Upper Room

“Dude, that’s awesome!”

“Then you don’t think the whole thing sounds a little bit cheesy?” Dillon looked across the table at his friend. Mark was Dillon’s opposite in almost every way: Dillon was somber, Mark was enthusiastic. Dillon was tidy; Mark was a slob. Dillon liked the consistency of the corporate coffee house franchise; Mark preferred the chancy hot tea from the locally owned Indian tearoom. Dillon often wondered when Mark would grow up; Mark thought Dillon needed to relax. They were the best of friends.

“Cheesy? No way! I’ve got chills just listening to you!” Mark extended his hand to illustrate and he was not exaggerating. The hairs on his arms were standing straight up. “Visions and voices AND a meeting with an angel; you must be so stoked.”

Today, they met after work for coffee. It was Monday afternoon and Dillon, telling his story for the first time in the clear light of day, felt awkward and uncertain. He stared down into his coffee mug as if the dwindling foam on top might morph into the face of the Blessed Virgin at any moment. He was clearly uncomfortable with Mark’s synopsis. Those words could just as easily have been in a psychiatrist’s notes. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

“Sorry, pal,” Mark grinned, “That’s not my area of expertise.” He sipped his tea and grimaced. “I’m just here to encourage you and maybe help you interpret the signs.”

“Interpret?” Sometimes, Mark really pushed Dillon’s buttons. He started to deny the need for any outside interpretation, but his insecurities had been gnawing at him all weekend. Church on Sunday had been a surreal melodrama of religious rituals that left him utterly cold after his experience on the mountain the night before. His friend’s patronizing smile made him want to scream.

“Hey, don’t get all worked up,” Mark replied, sensing his friend’s defensiveness. “I just mean that sometimes it helps to have someone on the outside of your skull offer possible scenarios to validate the experience. You might as well have ‘DOUBT’ tattooed on your forehead. I just don’t want you to disregard this as a figment of your imagination. It’s too important.”

“Sorry,” and Dillon meant it. “It’s just weird to say all of that out loud. It felt so real but it sounds so insane.”

“It’s ok, you’re just all caught up in your Age-of-Reason thinking: all logic and no mystery. A supernatural God really throws you a curve. You can say He’s ‘omnipresent’ but you don’t really expect to see him sitting at that table over there. You can say He’s ‘omnipotent’ but if He does something powerful, you try to explain it rationally.” At that, he paused for a moment, brow wrinkled in thought.

“Omniscient?” Dillon offered.

“That’s the one,” Mark said, snapping his fingers in recognition. “You can say He’s ‘omniscient’ but you’re surprised if He knows your name. So, when He shows up, knows you and says something in a powerful way, you get all ‘reasonable’ and act embarrassed about it.”

“That’s probably a fair assessment,” Dillon conceded. “So, what do you make of Caleb’s parable?”

“That’s the easiest part of the whole story. We’re walking in a ‘dark’ world and our spiritual ‘eyes’ have adjusted to the darkness. So, we are generally unaware of the darkness itself,” Mark paused and looked out the window behind Dillon, thinking. Furrowing his brow, Mark continued, “We’re not even looking for a light.”

“Ok, I buy that,” Dillon nodded, “But why does God withhold the light?”

“He doesn’t.” Mark was looking just over Dillon’s left shoulder. Dillon was sure that there was more to Mark’s answer and waited for a minute before snapping his fingers in his friend’s line of sight. “Sorry,” Mark continued, “He said that the Sun will rise. You just have to wait for the right time. I was trying to piece together a verse from Isaiah: Thick darkness is on all of the people but the Lord rises on you…”

“Kings will come to your light and nations to the brightness of your dawn.” Dillon quoted the verse from rote. His mind swam for a moment in a pool of memories from his youth. He closed his eyes and it was as if he had been transported back in time.

The room was dark and the dark forms of his buddies surrounded him. Off to the left, someone struck a match and used it to light a single candle. The leader passed the candle to his left and began the verses. As each member of the group took the candle and passed it on, they joined the recitation until they were almost chanting together.

Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. Look! Darkness is covering the earth and thick darkness is upon all people.
But the Lord rises on you.
Kings will come to your light and nations to the brightness of your dawn.

“You are the light of the world,” the leader said.

“No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket,” the group intoned.

“Instead, he puts it on a lamp stand,” the leader continued.

“And it gives light to the whole house,” the group concluded.

This unusual “liturgy” had been the framework for their weekly meetings for over a year. It had added a sense of mystery and power to scripture that somehow been lost to him lately.

Dillon took in the vision from his memory. He remembered every detail of the room where his youth minister had presided over these meetings. The room had been in an unused part of the church, behind an air conditioner intake in the rafters over the main sanctuary. One wall was completely dominated by the top of a large stained glass window. The approach required that the group traverse a catwalk, thirty feet above the choir loft. It had been simultaneously beautiful and dark, sacred and dangerous. The conversations that the group of young men had in the candlelight had been similarly colored. He had learned what it was to be a Christian in that room and he had learned some of what it meant to be a man.

“Who has something to share?” the leader asked, though his face was shrouded in shadow, his eyes seemed fixed on Dillon. The custom had been to pass the candle around a second time; each participant would share a passage from the Bible that had spoken to him as he read during the week. Some would even offer commentary. Dillon watched the faces of the young men as they passed the candle around and read from the scriptures. He knew them all very well and their faces had been frozen in his memories. All young and untouched by the stress and strife that adulthood had no doubt heaped on them to make them as cynical and unbelieving as he felt.

Finally, the candle came to him. Dillon scrambled for something to share. He had not often come to the meetings without a verse marked in his Bible, but the embarrassment that he felt on those occasions came rushing back to him. He dropped his Bible in his lap and flipped it open randomly. He let his eyes fall on a verse and began reading.

When you hear the sound of marching in the treetops, be ready to fight, for it is the Lord of hosts who goes before you.

When he looked up, the leader was sitting directly in front of him. Almost out of reflex, Dillon handed him the candle. When the light from the small flame lit the leader’s face, Dillon recognized it instantly.

It was his face, as he had looked in the years when he sat in these meetings.

“Let us not be hearers of the word only,” the image of young Dillon began. It was the customary closing of the meetings. Dillon felt the memory slipping away from him but he joined the other boys in the response.

“We are doers of the word.”

“What?” Mark was snapping his fingers in Dillon’s face now. “Where were you just now? Your mind wandered.”

“How long?”

“A few seconds,” Mark looked puzzled. “You just finished the verse I was fishing for and got this thoughtful look. What happened?”

“I was just remembering something,” Dillon paused, trying to put words to the memory. “I was 17, I guess.”

“Go on.”

“We used to have these meetings at church where we read the Bible and talked about it and…”

“Up in the attic,” Mark commented, “Yeah, you’ve told me about that.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Dillon looked at Mark. He felt his ears burning and his cheeks begin to flush. “It’s going to sound crazy.”

“Crazier than the angel story?”

Dillon chuckled, in spite of himself, and replied, “I guess not. It was so real; like being there again. But then I opened my Bible and read this verse that I don’t recall ever reading in the meetings.” He went on to describe seeing himself as a boy when he looked at the leader. “I remember how devoted I was back then, how passionate.”

“So, there’s two of you: one young and passionate, the other,” he paused as if he were trying to generate adjectives that would not be inflammatory.

“Jaded, unbelieving,” Dillon picked up his coffee and sipped it. A comfortable silence fell between them for a few minutes.

“I have a battle to fight,” Dillon said finally, smiling at the elegant simplicity of God’s revelations, at the ways that the jagged pieces of his life could come together to form an epiphany.

“A battle against who?”

“Whom.”

“Whatever,” Mark seemed more stunned than annoyed. “A battle against whom?”

“Myself…I think.”

Mark paused for a moment and looked seriously at Dillon. Then laughing out loud, he raised his mug in salute.

“I hope you win!”

< Continue to Part 3 >

About a year ago, I started work on a short novel with the working title, The Warrior.  I published it in a serial format on my personal blog, but it got to a point that needed some major rewrites to arrive at the ending that I had devised… I’m pretty excited about it again, so I thought I’d share the revisions with all of you nice people…

Part 1 - Upon the Rock

"He opened his eyes to the sunset before him and sighed in resignation. The vista he was caught up in was more beautiful than he had anticipated."

The sound of the wind in the treetops stirred something in his heart, a place inside of him untouched for many years awoke for just a moment and heard another, more distant sound:

A faint marching.

It was as startling as it was distinct and the surprise of it disturbed the peace that he had been working so desperately to cultivate.  As suddenly as it began, the sound faded and disappeared.  He opened his eyes to the sunset before him and sighed in resignation.  The vista he was caught up in was more beautiful than he had anticipated.  The Continental Divide stretched out before him in an expanse so broad he had to turn his head to see it all.

No, a picture would not have captured it.  Even the most accomplished photographers would not have dared to attempt the scope of what he was looking at.  The sight of it brought an unbidden thought:

And the LORD looked on what he had made and it was very good.

“Very good, indeed,” he spoke aloud into the abyss before him.  “Even with me out in it.” 

“Especially with you out in it.”  The voice was as real as his own and the shock of it, out in the middle of nowhere, brought him to his feet.  He turned to face the person who had invaded his private thoughts and was shocked to find no one.  He took a few minutes to check around the thick trees directly behind him and realized that it would have been impossible for any person to approach his position, a solitary granite boulder protruding from a thick stand of spruce trees, without making enough noise to rouse him from his reverie.  It suddenly dawned on him that he might have found what he climbed up here looking for.

God had spoken to him.

There had been a time that hearing God’s voice was a commonplace occurrence in his experience but that was several years in the past.  His intimate encounters with his Maker had become more and more infrequent until he felt dry and thirsty and on the verge of total burnout.  He had retreated to the hills at the suggestion of a friend to seek God.  He left the trailhead at dawn and hiked two miles before spotting the outcropping that he stood on now.  After another two hours of improvising a trail, he sat down on this rock and began praying.  That had been before noon.

A sudden panic gripped him as the sun sank below the mountains: he had thirty or forty minutes of twilight to make the hike back to his car.  After that, he was on his own in the wilderness without a flashlight.

Moving quickly, he shoved his small Bible into the pocket of his Camelback and started his descent.  He cursed his foolishness for neglecting to bring a light and hurried through the trees, trying to keep his course as straight as possible.  The first quarter mile was a steep hill with a thick growth of spruce.  There was little underbrush as this was a public land that was subject to forest conservation and controlled burning.  He sent up a quick word of gratitude for his tax dollars at work and hurled himself down the hill.  If he remembered his approach correctly, he would come to a wide but shallow creek at the bottom and then follow it north to a fallen tree.  He could cross the creek there and climb almost straight up to the trail on the opposite rise.  Once he was on the trail, he could follow it in the dark easily enough.  Getting there before the light was gone became the top priority.

He reached the creek quickly and turned north to follow it upstream.  This turned out to be more difficult than he expected.  Keeping the stream within earshot on his left, he progressed as quickly as he could through the trees.  The sounds of crickets and night birds began to fill his ears and he knew that he was running out of time.  He found the fallen tree by tripping over it in the fading light.

After crossing the creek, he began to climb the opposite embankment in earnest.  It was steeper than he remembered, a common mistake he made when hiking.  He had done the same thing before, underestimated the difficulty of the return trip, but never had he lingered this long so far from the trail.  He climbed with both hands and moved as quickly as gravity and the terrain would allow.  As it got darker, he became more desperate.  It seemed that he must have veered south as he climbed.  Would that lead him to miss the trail?  He tried to recall the trail layout, the local topography, anything that might help him dead-reckon his way.  Normally, this was a strength for him.  He remembered most information that he was exposed to once, especially maps.  He had hiked the trail here a number of times.  But tonight, when he needed this faculty most of all, it had failed him.  Whether because on fatigue or fear or the fact that he had fasted all day, he was completely unable to draw upon his reason.

“Stop.”   It sounded like his voice, though he could not remember forming the word on his lips, nor in his mind for that matter.  But stop he did.  The word had such urgency and command that he dared not go on without pausing.  He listened to the sound of the dark forest, the birds, the insects and the breeze. His own labored breathing was like a clanging cymbal interrupting the song of the mountains.  He inhaled deeply, taking in the fragrance of the spruce trees, the sweet decay of the mulch underfoot and the subtle headiness of wildflowers in a nearby meadow.  He began to calm.

“I suppose the worst thing that could happen,” he thought out loud, “is that I’d have to spend the night out here.”  It was not going to get unbearably cold at this altitude in late spring.  The only real concern was the wildlife, bears and mountain lions were not uncommon in the area.  No, the “worst case” was still pretty undesirable, he decided and began looking around intently.  Concentrating on the shadowy images around him, he spotted a break in the darkness.  It was level with him and not more than fifty feet to his right, a clearing in the trees wide enough for the twilight to fall on the ground.

He made for the break and found his path blocked with thorny brambles, already the light in the clearing was fading from view.  To skirt the undergrowth would cause enough delay that he might miss the trail in the dark, so he set his jaw and plunged into the thorns, prepared to endure the trial all the way to the clearing.  But the undergrowth cleared after about ten feet and the rest of the way was clear and level.  He walked out of the trees and onto the trail as the waning moon overhead slipped behind a thick cloud, plunging him into relative blackness.

He slumped to the graded surface of the trail and sipped water from his pack, feeling the adrenaline rush pass and give way to the exhaustion and pain from numerous cuts and scratches.  Most notably, his left knee was scraped from a fall and his right hand had a deep cut from a broken limb that he had grabbed as he tried to find purchase during his climb.  These two wounds he cleaned as best as he could with the tepid water.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness and he was just about ready to get up and press on when he heard footsteps approaching from ahead of him on the trail.  A tall, lanky man rounded the corner from the right about 20 feet away and it occurred to him that he would have missed the trail if he had continued in his mad rush without stopping.

The stranger caught sight of him almost instantly and stopped.  “Are you Dillon?” he said in a pleasant, accented baritone.

Stunned by the question, Dillon only nodded and then realizing that his gesture was probably missed in the dark, answered, “Yes, how did you know-“

“You hadn’t signed out at the trailhead and so I thought I might run into you.”  The newcomer answered.  “Forgot your headlamp?”

“Forgot a lot of stuff.”  Dillon said.  “I don’t suppose you’ve got a light.”

“I do,” he answered.  “But it will be easier for you to see in the dark without one.  I’m heading back to the trailhead now.  Care to go along?”

“I’d appreciate the company.” Dillon admitted.  He stood and fell into step beside his new companion.  The trail was wide enough for them to walk side by side without trouble.  For a while, both hiked in silence.  Dillon realized after a few minutes that he could see rather well in the dark.  It surprised him the detail that he could make out on the trail ahead, roots in his path that he could sidestep, rocks that he could step over and the leavings of someone’s Great Dane.

“You know,” he began, “I really can see better in the dark.”

“It’s a simple matter of physiology really,” the stranger said.  “Your eyes will adjust to the light available.  If I had a flashlight on, your eyes would adjust to that light level and you would only see the obstacles in the light.  Without the flashlight, your eyes adjust to the ambient light: starlight, moonlight, et cetera, and you can see everything in your path.”

“You hike a lot in the dark?”

“Sometimes, it’s unavoidable,” he answered.  “Everyone must walk in darkness from time to time, but eventually the Sun will rise with healing in His wings…always does.  It’s a parable: that is, Dillon.”

“You have me at a disadvantage, friend, since you know my name and I don’t have a clue who you are.”

“Caleb,” he offered.  “I…um…volunteer on this trail.”  He stopped and faced west.  Dillon looked through a gap in the trees and realized that abyss before him was the valley he had crossed to rejoin the trail.  “There,” Caleb pointed to a place in the darkness just off to the right, “that’s the rock you were sitting on a little while ago.”

“How did you–” but the question died on Dillon’s tongue as he turned to look at the enigmatic stranger.

Caleb was gone.

< Continue to Part 2 >