Blessed Child (51 page)

A groan worked its way past his dropped jaw. “Uhhh . . .”

Adrenaline flushed through his body, and he staggered forward, on unfeeling feet of lead. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

Leiah was weeping, bent over Caleb, brushing his matted hair away from a gaping hole in the side of his head.

Jason made it halfway to them before he tripped and sprawled to the floor. He clambered to his feet, suddenly desperate to get to the boy. This couldn't be real, of course. Caleb hadn't really been shot in the head. Not now, not ever, not as long as Jason was alive.

His vision blurred and he went down again, but this time on his knees at the boy's side. It was there, close up, that the serene look of Caleb's bloodied face stamped the truth clean through Jason's mind.

Caleb was dead.

Nothing with that kind of damage could possibly be alive.

The breath left Jason completely. His throat ached and his chest screamed with a pain so deep he wondered if things were coming apart in there. This little boy had become his life, and now that life had been ripped from him. First Stephen, now Caleb.

A vague thought stomped through his mind. The thought that this much pain was more than he could bear. It was maybe greater than he should be feeling. Panic ripped up his spine.

“Oh, God!”

The crowd's screaming behind him and Leiah's weeping at his right knee began to fade into a distant world. A dull thumping filled his own. His heart. As though it were slugging up and down through blistering molten steel.

Jason clamped his eyes tight, threw back his head, and screamed at the sky.

“Noooooo!”

His voice wailed above the din, strained with agony, frightening in its pitch. And still his heart was exploding. Every nerve in his body seemed to be swimming in the pain. The last reserves of panic raged to the surface, and Jason knew without a doubt that he was dying. He was kneeling on the stage with his face to the sky, dying of sorrow.

He ran out of breath and inhaled deeply. The sucking echoed hollow, as if he were in a huge drum, and his eyes fell open to the black sky.

But it wasn't black.

It was blue. The same blue air they had swum through in the hills. Now around him a vacuum of silence.

His eyes had been opened again! The pain eased.

Or maybe he was dead and in heaven.

Jason spun his head about. No, he was in the stadium, and the wisps of red and green and yellow floated through the air, as they had in the hills, but now they made slow circles around the stadium instead of skipping over the meadow.

It was the same, and yet it was not the same at all.

Jason pivoted to the bleachers. What he saw stopped him cold.

The people were all out there, all 102,000 of them. But only some of them were standing, staring forward in shock, some of them crying, although he could not hear them. The rest . . .

The rest were dead.

Jason slowly climbed to his feet and walked forward a few steps. They weren't really physically dead, of course, but he was being shown them as if they were. They sat slumped in their seats or lay crumpled on the ground, gray and lifeless, not unlike the boy behind him.

Like a comet from the sky a small shaft of red light suddenly shot in from his left and ripped through his chest.

The pain was immediate—the same searing agony he'd felt a moment ago by Caleb's side. He gasped and collapsed hard to his knees, trembling. It felt as though Jason's skull had been opened and boiling water poured down his spine. And in that moment the source of the pain swallowed his mind.

He was feeling the very heart of God. Not for Caleb, but for these dead souls in the stadium. Because in reality it was these, not Caleb, who were dead.

He gripped his temples with both hands, and an involuntary wail broke from his lips. He wanted to curl into a ball and beg for relief.

In the same way Jason's heart had broken with Caleb's death, God's heart was torn apart by the death littering this stadium.

It was suddenly so plain, so utterly terrible. A sentiment similar to rage coursed through Jason's bones, and he sobbed in long desperate gasps. How could these fools do this to their Creator? To their Father? To Christ?

But the sentiment was immediately replaced by simple profound sorrow. And deep love.

Tears streamed down his face. Jason felt like he might be melting into the floorboards. Begging for them, he reached feeble hands out toward the crowd.

With a blinding flash the skies ignited and then blinked to black.

Suddenly everything was back to normal. At least the stadium was—the sky still swam in colored light. Donna and several of the cameramen broke free of their shock and were racing for the stage. Exclamations of horror rippled through the stadium, and people were leaving their seats and running to the field. It looked like an ant farm gone nuts out there. They were going to swarm the stage.

Jason lowered his arms. He knelt dumbly on the stage, panting, and it occurred to him that his whole vision had lasted mere moments. But he knew now what he had to do.

He stood to his feet, steadied himself, and made for the stand. He snatched up one of the mikes and threw up his hand. “Stop!”

His voice reverberated through the stadium.

They didn't stop. Donna had nearly reached the stage.

He hollered it this time. “Stop it! Everyone stop where you are!”

This time they stopped. But he yelled it again anyway. “Stop!”

Motion seemed to cease—except for the colored lights, which circled, maybe a little faster now. A few whimpers carried on, but otherwise it was only his heavy breathing over the PA that sounded.

He suddenly felt oddly jubilant. He wasn't sure he'd ever used that word before, but it was the kind of moment that required such a word.
Jubilant.
As if he wanted to leap from his feet and join all those wisps floating around. God was going to do something. Something greater than any of them had seen. Not necessarily to him or to Leiah or to Caleb, but to the dead people out there, unaware they were even dead. He smiled.

It occurred to him that while he was standing here breathing hard into the mike, contemplating words like
jubilant,
they were all out there staring at him as if he'd dropped out of the clouds. And not just these faces, but a couple hundred million others through the cameras.

Jason looked back at Caleb and Leiah. The boy was definitely dead. Leiah was definitely weeping. He faced the cameras.

“My name is Jason.” The announcement echoed, but it sounded distant to him. “My name is Jason and God has opened my eyes. I told you to stop because something is happening, and I don't think you're supposed to move yet.”

He turned back toward Leiah, who was now staring at him too. They were all staring at him. Caleb's blood was making a pool around his head.

The crowd is waiting, Jason.

He put the mike to his lips. “This isn't what it looks like.” He felt as if he were standing in one world and calling into another—the one in the football stadium. Maybe he really was dead.

“I mean, I know Caleb's been shot through the head. He really has . . .” He swallowed, thinking about that. “But he's alive. And he was right. I was dead, but now I'm alive too. Alive in his Spirit, I mean. But you”—he pointed to the crowd—“most of you are dead.”

He lowered the mike. It occurred to him that he wasn't coming off in the most brilliant of terms.

Donna stood five feet from the stage, white as a ghost. The bare-chested man who'd become a ringleader of sorts stood ten feet behind her, bug-eyed and silent. The cameras whirred there beside him, and the colored lights whipped quietly around the bleachers, riding warm waters of blue. The sky crackled with some static overhead, and Jason thought that was new.

He tried speaking again. “What I'm saying is that God's heart is breaking more for you than for Caleb. You have to turn to him. To Jesus, I mean. Please, you have to let him touch your hearts.”

Jason paced to his right. “I mean maybe God does some dramatic things now and then. He heals a boy; he makes skin smooth; he opens blind eyes. But believe me, it's the eyes of the heart that need opening. That's the real miracle—to understand his love for you. To love him.”

Above, the sky began a steady crackling—fingers of that static suddenly reaching across the sky. Yes, indeed, something was up.

“God could heal Caleb's dead body if he wanted to,” Jason said. “Sometimes when people are so blind, he will do things like that, just to get their attention. He turns rivers to blood, and he turns water to wine, and he knocks down stone walls. But it's your hearts that he wants to heal. Whoever said that a straightened hand was more dramatic than a healed heart?”

Jason glanced at Caleb, and heat spiked up his spine. Leiah had backed away from Caleb's body. The boy lay on his back with one leg folded under his body and a giant hole in one side of his head. The cameras could see that. They could see that he was dead. What they couldn't see was that he was also alive. They couldn't see the blue light swirling all around the body. They couldn't see the red hue surrounding his chest. They couldn't see the static crackling high above.

Jason faced the sky. The fingers of static had gathered into long streams and were circling as if they were on the edge of a whirlpool now. Jason stepped back instinctively, stunned. He was going to do something! God was going to do something to the people!

A warm wind blew through Jason's hair. He scanned the stadium. The wind whipped papers through the air, and people were beginning to look around, surprised by the sudden change. It was a real wind, and to Jason it felt like the breath of God.

He dropped the mike. A loud thump followed by a muffled, rolling sound filled the speakers. He looked to the sky and lifted both hands. “I love you, Father,” he said softly. Light rushed from his mouth and streaked to the sky.

Hot wind suddenly slammed into his body, and he caught his breath. He took a step backward on wobbly knees. “Oh, God! Oh, dear God!” Something was up. He felt as though he had been swallowed by the static.

A boom suddenly crashed overhead. White light blasted down from the vortex of that whirlpool and swallowed the stage and everything on it.

Jason's body was picked up and thrown back a good ten feet. He saw it all in the split second that he was airborne: the shaft at the light's core, as round as a pillar swallowing Caleb; the bucking of Caleb's little body; the collapse of the boy's frame back to the artificial turf.

The crowd gasped as one behind him.

Then Jason landed on his seat.

He stood slowly to his feet. The boy's body lay unmoving. Jason glanced at the crowd. Donna stood with her mouth open. The blue light still swirled around the stadium.

Jason walked to the body.

He was still three paces from that dormant form when Caleb suddenly sat up to a sitting position, as if his upper torso were on a spring. Jason stopped. A hundred thousand sets of lungs gulped air in the same instant.

The blue light suddenly vanished from the stadium, as if someone had pulled the plug.
Pop,
it was gone.

Caleb blinked once, wiped some blood from his eye, and then stood to his feet.

Leiah was the first to scream. She rushed Caleb, threw her arms around him, and began to hop up and down with him. Jason already had his arms wrapped around both of them when the full meaning of what they had just witnessed hit the crowd. To say they erupted would be to compare it to a physical detonation. It was more than that. It was the explosion of throats and hearts and minds all in one fell swoop.

Caleb broke free and began to hop. He thrust his fists above his head and skipped across the stage.

Then he began again, hopping vertically now. He lifted his face and cried to the sky. “Jeeesuuusss!”

Like a swelling wave, the cry swept through the stadium.

“Jeeesuuusss!”

Caleb stopped and faced them, as if only now aware of their presence. He ran up to the microphones. “Look to your hearts!” he cried. “He will give you new life as well. That is his greatest power.”

The weeping began almost immediately—wholesale, like a flood across the stadium. They had seen. They had heard. Now they understood, Jason thought.

God was bringing them back to life.

Caleb suddenly jumped off the stage and sprinted to the front line where a man knelt with his face in the grass. Beside the man a woman lay facedown in full repentance. A small boy sat in a blue wheelchair between them. His legs were wrapped in metal braces.

Caleb pulled up in front of the boy and then Jason recognized him. It was the small boy from Caleb's first failure. It was the blond child who'd been placed on the Old Theater's stage by a desperate father. And as far as Jason could see, his was the only wheelchair in sight.

Caleb snatched up the boy's hand and pulled him. The blond boy stared wide-eyed as his torso came out of the chair. Then he was standing; it was really that simple.

And then he was stumbling behind Caleb, pulled to the stage. He was running and Jason began to laugh.

The child was staring at his own feet when they reached the stage—a natural enough reaction, considering what had just happened. Consequently he ran straight into the uprights with enough force to break any boy's legs.

But today a break was not in the plan. He stumbled onto the stage and sprang to his feet with a cry of surprise. He spun back to his parents and cried out again—a high-pitched squeal of delight.

The father looked up and saw only now that his son was missing. The mother rose. They stared toward the stage, aghast. And then their faces wrinkled with emotion. They fell into each other's arms and began to weep loudly.

Caleb grabbed the child's hand and together they began to hop, delighted and laughing. It was like ring-around-the-rosies, and it could just as easily have been, but either way, it was because of the Holy Spirit's power.