Charlie closed his Bible. Tried to read ‘bout the tau cross in Ezechiel 9:4 but it wasn’t happening. The words broke up into jumbles soon as they hit his brain.
Maybe it was the music. The jiggly beat of Point of Grace’s “Begin With Me” was pumping through his headphones. Righteous lyrics, but the high-gloss arrangement and funky vocals were distracting tonight. He popped them out of his portable CD player and slipped in “Spirit Of The Century” by the Blind Boys Of Alabama. As their traditional harmonies soothed his head, he lay back on his bed, closed his eyes, and prayed for peace.
But no peace tonight. He kept on seeing his brother splashing like a drowning cat in that pool of blood, kept hearing Jack’s voice telling ’bout the Otherness …
Where was Jesus in all this? Why this happening?
Charlie figured it for a test. But of what?
My faith?
He knew his faith was strong. Powerful. So powerful he wondered how he’d got through his pre-conversion years without it. It was like oxygen now. If someone stole it from him, he knew sure he’d die in minutes.
But what says I’m the target of this test? Maybe it Lyle … a test of his faith in nothing.
For as surely as Charlie believed in the healing love of Jesus, so Lyle believed in nothing beyond his five senses. Maybe God was offering Lyle a chance to see how there was more to life than his senses, that life extended beyond the body, that each human body was home to an eternal soul that was gonna be judged when its life on earth was
done. Maybe this gonna be Lyle’s chance to change, to accept Jesus as his personal savior and see his name written in the Book of Life.
But … if this was the work of God, why was He hiding His hand?
Because that the way He wishes it.
Don’t go second guessin’ the Lord, Charlie reminded himself.
But where did Jack and Gia fit in? Pretty plain that neither of them were saved. Gia had faith in Jack, but in what else?
And Jack? He a mystery. What he’d said the other night about value for value still hung with Charlie. True that. The way things should be, but weren’t … especially not in how he and Lyle had been earning their daily bread.
Jack’s outlook didn’t seem to be as earthbound as Lyle’s, but his talk of the Otherness and the Ally power, of two cosmic forces in eternal conflict … that had Charlie a little shook. Where was God in all that? It didn’t even give the God of the Holy Bible the props of being denied. Instead He got bypassed, left and forgotten like an old store by a freeway with no ramp.
And when Charlie had tried to point out that this “Otherness” was just another disguise for Satan, Jack had flipped it ’round, hinting that maybe the idea of Satan had come from awareness of the Otherness.
Charlie rubbed his eyes. He still hadn’t answered his question: Who was being tested?
He reopened his Bible. All the answers were here. Have faith and Jesus would guide him to them.
But as for leaving Lyle and breaking up the team, that’d have to wait. Yeah, he promised Reverend Sparks, but if God was gonna go testin’ Charlie’s faith, he couldn’t very well turn his back and geese outta here. And if God testing Lyle, then Charlie wanted to take his brother’s back, help him to salvation any way he could. That what brothers was for.