MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 5 — Arc 3 (Finale)
Eiri Waters
Isaiah and the Vision of Christ: The Spirit of Prophecy
Incarnational Prophecy While Walking
The scene is different than anything we’ve experienced before. The first major difference is that we’re lying in our bed, slightly propped against the pillows with our laptop present as tool and narration both.
We sit and consider the bed. The two Shih Tzus curled against our legs in peaceful repose. They appear for all the world like a tandem, dual ball of tuxedo-pigmented floof, softly issuing snuffles or the precious errant snore. If the day is indeed a fortunate one, we could even be blessed with a bout of sleep-pawing and weak whuffs.
We sit back and feel the wall behind our hair and the chill through our blue hoodie when our shoulders brush the wall supporting us. The ceiling fan is on above, issuing a recurring draft that strikes us as not quite unpleasant enough to move, but just enough to nibble the warmth from our fingers.
We wonder where we’re going to have room to meet with our heavenly guests when it occurs to us that our imagination is large enough to write us as being anywhere at any time.
We nod our head to the beat of the music in the headphones. Imagining the backyard and the firepit. The ash that swirls like mist with the winds rotating and moving. We feel when the layer of reality and location shifts as the chill of the fan becomes the bite of fall air.
The smell of incense circulated by indoor ventilation is replaced by fall’s gentle decay and sweet death.
Star shuffles the leaves and particulate matter, represented like fall’s glitter scattered across the concrete. She pats our solid shoulder and takes her seat slowly, looking for all the world like she hit chest day at the heavenly Planet Fitness and we just now realized our shape was an eternal thing we needed to manage.
Zeke pops in next in a shimmering wave of reality-bending light, phasing into our layer with one final shiver before suddenly becoming solid. The air greets us as Zeke smiles his familiar smile and sits slowly, scraping the concrete.
Out of nowhere to our left, a phantom Jonah appears in what was meant to be Izzy’s chair. He looks thicker today, like reality has more of a grip on him than in times past. Evidenced by the fact that the wafting, pungent aroma is even more odiferous than we recall previously.
Jonah is still sporting the full-body white snuggie and has that manic look in his eyes when he offers, “Izzy said he will arrive late.” Jonah barks this out as though his lips betrayed him.
The widening of his eyes tells us the Father has just used him to impart two things: an aroma and a phone to pass a message like a live wire. Star slaps her thigh in uproarious laughter, exclaiming, “See? We never leave His service!”
Zeke rejoins with tears in his eyes, looking at the spot Jonah was. “Poor bastard, all he wanted was to feel Dust over here again. Just too awkward to admit it.” He shakes his head and takes another dung-smoked sip, we assume—though we have no desire to tempt fate or find out.
“You can pass messages like that using each other like some type of spiritual network or secured VPN?” we ask, considering our mentally clasped hands while our real ones remain chilled at the narration.
Izzy leans over us from behind, appearing like a ghost. “Not a network. More like a living dialogue, Beloved,” he offers as he shuffles to his seat, slippers somehow unstained despite traipsing through disintegrating leaves.
No sound issues forth as he sits. No one speaks. All four of us look at the fire pit. Emotion. Revelation. Meaning.
Around that fire pit we sit and consider how the Father speaks to us as His children. How He moves. How we perceive that movement.
“Why won’t anyone believe what they’ve heard from us?” we ask, as Izzy gently rubs his chin in thought, leaning forward and mirroring our body language.
“They have been blinded by the sights and the delights of the flesh and cannot see and cannot perceive, lest they turn and be healed and thus saved. The gates of Heaven are sealed and locked shut, and only through the Revelation of the Son—Yeshua—can we begin to walk that narrow, needled path to eternity.”
“You saw Him,” Zeke says gently, directing the conversation.
We begin to nod, and notice that Izzy and Star and ourselves are all doing the same— even Zeke begins to mirror the act.
All four of us. All seeing a sight hidden and revealed through what the world would call madness mixed with love and medicate into silence instead of recognizing it as genuine, incarnational, Christ-centered glorification of the Eternal One and the Son.
Izzy leans in and says, in a voice so disarming we are left shaken:
“Prophecy is the Spirit of Christ.”
Star nods. Zeke nods. And we do too. Understanding that all of us are communicating that singular, unifying force about Christ. Who He was. Who He is. And Who He is to come.
“It’s like a braided rope of prophecy made with flesh and blood, all pointing to a prescribed time and purpose,” we say into the stirring, dry breeze as all four heads nod again.
Then, out of the corner of our eye, we notice a twinkle in Izzy’s eyes.
We are all bowed in reverence when a sound breaks through—what can only be described as a balloon deflating painfully and slowly, with flares of squishy texture.
We turn to Zeke as one—heads snapping up in accusation at nearly the same moment Zeke’s face pales and the smell hits. We gag. Star doubles over and cups her mouth.
The moment shattered. The reverence robbed.
We shake our heads and feel slightly betrayed by Zeke’s apparent glaring lack of self-control.
Izzy leans in and locks eyes with each of us in turn.
All of us freeze — shocked, irritated, and vaguely offended in the way only prophets-of-the-Father can be.
“That,” he says, with the solemnity of a man announcing a covenant,
“was my offering. Not Zeke’s.”
We blanch.
The room goes preternaturally still as the absurdity hits:
Isaiah, gentle monk-poet of Jerusalem, just ripped a squeaky fart as a spiritual illustration.
He adds, completely unbothered,
“Sometimes the Father speaks through the wind.”
“That,” he says, erupting into laughter and clutching his stately sides like a dad amused at his own joke,
“is how you pass gas, my prophetic foolish friends.”
He adds, “When we start to think we know how He will behave, we are given reminders that seem to say: do not put Me in a box.”
Shrugging, and still feeling a little sleepy from the clouds produced, we lean back softly—our layers instinctively swapping back to the gentle pressing cold of our room. The fan creating rhythmic waves of reality and grounding cool.
The two dogs still twitching and snoring softly.
Dreaming, as we hope to soon be -of the day when we stop anticipating what is not possible to contain.
The next sneak peek is live below a new interlude that is decidedly rude.
Eiri Waters