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The Hope That Is In You

By Christopher T. Walker

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Preface
“Based on a true story” would not quite accurately describe this book. Yes, the character “Josh” is based on a real person I met and have remained friends with, a real person who went through most of what is described in this story, a real person who pulled me out of the worst depression I have ever known. His story, as he told it to me, is faithfully represented in the pages of this book. The more fantastic elements, however, have been added in order to convey within the narrow confines of a beginning, middle, and end the intense range of emotions the real Josh felt over a much longer period of time.
Those elements of the story I have just described as “fantastic” appear to me to be quite ordinary in the context of the infinite power of our Creator. In an age when the general public is fascinated by the meaningless actions of fictional Hollywood sorcerers, who wave magic wands in order to make objects levitate (or similarly pointless special-effects driven actions), it is high time that modern artists remind the public of the insignificance of fictional magic in comparison to His extraordinary act of creation, an act that brought forth from nothing humanity and everything that surrounds us.
The real Josh knocked on my door many years ago on a miserably hot and humid summer day in Lexington, Kentucky. He certainly had no idea that behind that door lived a man whose life was falling apart. My wife had broken our marriage vows and, rather than apologize and try to save our marriage, had decided to continue her pursuit of the frivolous pleasures that her life had become centered around. As if that were not painful enough, she had decided to drag the love of my life, our daughter, into the drama she had created. When a situation like this occurs, lawyers feed off the tragedy. No one holds anyone accountable for their actions, and the system seems tailor-made to allow terrible behavior to be rewarded. Josh helped me remember that even though modern society sometimes appears to have given up on basic concepts of right and wrong, we must look past the ephemeral trends of pseudo “correctness” that swirl around us like so much white noise. Make no mistake, there is a “right” and there is a “wrong” in this world, and no amount of litigation or prevarication will ever change that.
When I opened the door, Josh appeared to me exactly as he is described in this book. He unfortunately did not keep the rather comical suit he was wearing that day (described in great detail in this book), but if he had, I would frame it and hang it on my wall. The courage it took that young man to do what he did that day, and what he has done for so many others since, fills me with awe. If I, in my humble way, am able to spread his story faithfully, then the greatest reward for me may be achieved: to help the message behind his words and actions reach as many people as possible. The world is in need of a message that heals, inspires, heightens faith, saves souls, and keeps us in touch with both who we truly are and who made us. That message has been around for thousands of years now, but must be continually renewed in order to fight the type of impulses that pull humanity into darkness. In my humble way, I hope this story will help bring light to those who need it, as Josh brought light to me.
 
Chapter 1

The Man In The Black Camaro

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Romans 8:38-39 English Standard Version).
 
✝✝✝

Joshua Vaughan had overslept again. It was a vibrant Sunday afternoon in Lexington, Kentucky, but as this teenager slept in his room with the curtains drawn and a pillow over his head, the outside world was having a hard time making an impression on him.
He would have welcomed the intrusion of the day. At that moment, his dreams had turned from a random collage of incomplete narratives punctuated by appearances of friends, family, and yesterday’s strangers to the dream, the nightmare he couldn’t escape from.
For weeks, the dream had returned to him every night. It always started innocently enough. There was a stage set up in a gargantuan stadium that seemed to hold the entire world. Josh stood on the stage with his electric guitar hanging from his shoulder. He pushed his dark brown, lightly curled hair straight back and then placed his hand on the guitar’s neck. Behind him, walls of amplifiers stood at the ready. He then surveyed the crowd before him and held his picking hand up high in the air to signal he was ready to rock. A deafening roar of excitement crescendoed into the cloudy sky. As if on auto pilot, his hands began creating chord progressions that set the amplifiers on fire. Then, with movements as precise as a spider walking on a web, his fingers navigated the strings, creating a guitar solo for the ages. The frenzy of the crowd became even more intense. Josh felt a true connection to the fans. Then the notes he was playing transformed into something beyond music. The waves of sound streaming from the speakers took on vibrant colors. Suddenly, azure notes were pouring from the amplifier. They were soon joined by notes of crimson red, green, purple, and a myriad of other colors. The world became draped in the color of his music, like a living canvas constantly repainted by crashing waves of pigment. Josh surveyed everything around him and, in supreme self-satisfaction, could not imagine how the world had even existed before he brought it to life with his music. But at that moment, his hands began to tire. The effortless, perfect chord choices became labored. Josh’s fingers began to cramp up, and he had to fight to find the correct chord voicings. False notes streaked through the stratosphere, and when he looked up at his amplifiers, he saw that the colors of his sound had all faded to a dark and depressing gray. He let his hands fall down to his sides and stared in disbelief at the swirling gray waves that were erasing all the beautiful colors he had given to the world. And as he followed those waves from the amplifier to the crowd, he saw that the people had been transformed by his music into lifeless, gray piles of bones. Guilt built up inside him as he looked for a single survivor. How could he have led them all to this end?
Josh turned violently in his bed. He was trying subconsciously to pull himself out of the nightmare by anchoring a fragment of his consciousness to the outside world, but the dark and isolated cocoon he had created for himself wasn’t complying. His sheets were becoming damp with sweat. He needed to break free from the dream.
In the nightmare, as he stood on the stage surrounded by an ever-graying world, a dim flash of light caught his eye. He focused all his attention on it and saw, as it grew stronger, that it was a mix of sound and white light that was cutting through the depressing gray around him. His growing consciousness focused on the light. The sound, he realized, was not from anything inside the dream, but rather...a car horn! It was a car horn, coming from the street outside his window.
Josh awoke and pulled the sleep mask off his face. He brought his feet to the floor and for a moment sat hunched over on the edge of his bed trying to shake off the vague feeling of guilt that the nightmare had left him with. He couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow this dream was trying to tell him something.
Another barrage of honking broke the serenity of his room. So impolite, thought Josh. Who honks nowadays anyway?
He rose to his feet, walked over to the window, and pulled open the curtains just enough to peak outside without letting anyone who may have been out there get a glimpse of the silly monkey-and-banana themed pajamas he was wearing. They had been given to him by the church after his accident, and, although he was happy and grateful to have them, he thought he was a little too mature to be seen in them.
As his eyes adjusted to the daylight, a vintage black Camaro came into focus. It was parked in front of his apartment building. The car was a 1960’s model, but it looked brand new. As he admired the vehicle, the tinted passenger-side window lowered. The driver, an African American man who looked to be in his 70’s, was dressed in a black suit and wore a black planter hat that had a band adorned with oval pieces of silver that shone in the afternoon sun. Below the brim of the hat, Josh could see that the man had a gray goatee and mustache.
The man raised his head and looked toward Josh’s window.
“C’mon, boy,” the man said, gesturing with his hand. “We gotta get going. This day is gonna be a long one.”
Josh moved back in surprise and then leaned in again to peak out of the slit in the curtains to see if there was anyone outside that the man could have been talking to.
“No, no. I’m talking to you, monkey boy,” said the man as if he had read Josh’s thoughts.
Josh looked again at the Camaro. As a cloud passed overhead and blocked the strong sun that had been reflecting off the car, he now noticed that it was not entirely black. The paint job featured a simple white cross about a foot high on the passenger-side door.
Oh no! thought Josh. Today? It’s today? Well, why wouldn’t it be today? He admitted. But how did this man even know I was in here? I didn’t even open the—but his thought was cut off by a new round of honking. This time, the man laid on the horn without interruption.
Josh threw back the curtains and slid the window open.
“Okay, okay! I’ll be right out,” he shouted. “Give me five—no, make that ten minutes.”
The man nodded his head in agreement.
Josh shut the window and turned back to his room, the disorder of which was now plainly exposed by the day.
Josh had not expected anyone to show up at his apartment. He certainly hadn’t expected a stranger to come unannounced. He did know, however, that something was supposed to happen at some point—the pastor had told him to be prepared. He just thought that he himself was supposed to be the sole author of that something. Maybe I took too long to get started, so now I’m getting a kick in the pants, he thought.
On his way to the closet, Josh stepped over a pile of dirty clothes, some library books, and an empty pizza box. The closet itself was practically empty, except for a beige suit and a pair of green Converse sneakers.
Josh thought back to the day when he had received the suit. It had only been a few weeks earlier.
“You’ll know what to do when the time comes,” Pastor John had cryptically told him before handing him the suit, which could only politely be described as beige. It was, in fact, quite a bit brighter than beige and only a few shades darker than Big Bird’s feathers. The large, dangling gold buttons surely weren’t standard on suits normal people wore, and the wide collar had gone in and out of vogue so many times that only irony could justify it as a fashion statement now.
Josh had taken the suit with a certain amount of dread. A musky odor of mothballs not only trailed the suit but seemed to precede it: seeing the thing from across the room, one couldn’t help but think of mothballs, causing that particular odor to surge up from the recesses of memory. But Josh wasn’t complaining. He much preferred to evoke the odor of mothballs than to have people guess the suit’s true history.
The suit, in fact, was a dead man’s suit. It had been a donation to the church after hanging who knows how many years (decades, thought Josh) in a widow’s closet. Most of Josh’s belongings had been stolen while he was in the hospital, so he was incredibly grateful to receive the help. Still, now that the suit was hanging in his closet and he had had time to think about it, it gave him the willies.
Pastor John hadn’t said what it was that Josh was supposed to do. He had only told Josh that someday he would have the opportunity to reach young people like himself and maybe keep them from having to go through what he had gone through. Whenever that day came, he should try to do his best.
Josh changed quickly. Since he had no other shoes anyway, he tried to avoid thinking about how terrible his green Converse looked with the suit. He was mostly just relieved that when he put the already knotted tie around his neck and tightened it, the length worked out. He had never tied one before, so it could have been worse.
Josh looked in the mirror that hung on the inside of the closet door and assessed the situation. Big Bird suit. Brown, almost purple tie. Green sneakers. No belt. The pants were too long and bunched up at the top of his shoes. The shirt may have been white at some point in a long-forgotten past. The jacket’s original owner must have had much larger shoulders.
If this suit were a piece of classical music, he thought, it would be titled “Ode to Wrinkles”, and the refrain would be all about stinky mothballs.
He closed the closet door. There was no reason to dwell on what would only make him depressed. Afterall, even though he had maybe waited too long to get started, he was excited to help people by telling them what he had learned and by sharing his love of God. What did it matter what he was wearing? Once I start talking about Jesus, people won’t even notice, right?

✝✝✝

Josh stepped outside into the heat of a cloudless and humid July day. As he walked toward the black Camaro, he wondered where they would be going and what they’d be doing. He hoped it would be somewhere there was air conditioning.
When he opened the passenger-side door, he heard music playing from the car’s sound system. It was a soulful blues, with a lead guitar tone that sounded like it was straight from a vintage guitar in the sixties, but clearer and more emotion-laden than anything he had ever heard.
He got in and shut the door, happy to get out of the heat.
“Hi, I’m Josh,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Josh,” replied the man. “The name is James, but you can call me Jimmy.”
Jimmy’s voice was soft, and he spoke slowly with an almost musical inflection. As they shook hands, Josh noticed that the man was quite thin, but appeared as strong as a much younger man. With his elegant black suit, his planter hat, his well-groomed facial hair, and his vintage car, Jimmy had a well-orchestrated look that gave him an unmistakable panache.
“I have to say, Josh,” said Jimmy with a sly smile, “I think the guy you got that suit from probably looked better in it even after he had passed away.”
Josh laughed but began to feel self-conscious.
“Who is this guitarist?” Josh said, trying to change the subject but also curious to know who was producing some of the most gut-wrenching solos he’d ever heard.
“I’m sure we’ll have time to talk music later, little man,” replied Jimmy. “But first I noticed you didn’t bring your book with you. You got the entire thing memorized?”
“Well, no... I wasn’t sure what we were doing today,” answered Josh.
“Alright. Why don’t you reach into the glove compartment and take mine. It’ll be my gift to you. And next time you go anywhere without it, know that I’ll be giving you the evil eye,” he said and winked playfully.
Josh opened the glove compartment and pulled out the most beautiful Bible he’d ever seen. The cover was made of perfectly black, soft leather and was adorned with an ornate cross of gold leaf.
“Looks brand new, don’t it?” said Jimmy. “Don’t be fooled. It’s over a hundred years old. It was given to me back in the days when I knew worse than nothing. It’s pulled me out of some dark places, Josh. Like the ones I think you’re in now.”
Josh failed to hide his surprise at that last statement. He wondered what Jimmy had been told about him.
“You take this book,” Jimmy continued, “but know it’s not just a gift. It’s also a responsibility. Some day when you get to that good place and you see someone who needs to know what you know, you pass it along, too.”
Jimmy reached over to the ignition and turned the key. The motor leaped to life with the force of hundreds of horses. Jimmy steered the car away from the curb and headed toward the Kentucky countryside.
“So where are we going?” asked Josh.
Jimmy grabbed a pair of dark sunglasses from the pocket of his jacket and put them on.
“There are some things you’re not going to understand, boy. It’ll be better not to ask. You know all things happen for a reason in this infinite universe. You’ll have lots of time later to think everything over. You just promise me you’ll stay focused. Can you dig that?”
“Sure,” replied Josh without giving it much thought. He had the feeling that, as nice as he appeared to be, Jimmy was also a little too theatrical. He wrote it off as owing to a difference in age.
“Alright then. This whole thing is almost ready. It’s a question of timing. We’re still a little early, so we’ve got time for a drive.”
Jimmy drove them through the countryside. They passed by many farms with their endless lines of black wooden fences, inside of which beautiful horses ran through the bluegrass. Josh felt connected to the farms, having grown up in the area and having passed many a summer painting fences and barns to earn a little spending money.
“Something else about that Bible,” Jimmy said softly while staring at the road ahead, one hand on the wheel. “It always tells you what you need to know about the future and the past. People in this world are always looking for cheap advice from Hollywood magicians and crooks when the truth is right in there. Close your eyes now.”
Josh complied out of politeness, but in truth was beginning to wonder what the point of this day was.
“Feel the sun against your skin. Feel the road pass underneath us. All this is just temporary. We could pass a thousand beautiful sites, live a thousand beautiful days, spend an infinite amount of time confronted by extraordinary visions without really being able to see. You feel what I’m saying? Sometimes, it’s a simple as needing, let’s say, a pair of spiritual glasses. But sometimes, you can experience the same thing over and over without really being able to see anything, because you need a deeper push toward the truth. Now, you and I could sit down on a comfortable couch, and I could try to tell you what you’re missing, but things you don’t work hard for never change your life, man. And to be honest, it would take me too long to get to the starting point—the truth of where you are now. You might even hide it from me. So today you’ve got to get it all right, and we won’t move on until you do. Today, you’ve got to go through the honest experience of it all.”
Josh tried to take in what Jimmy was saying and make sense of it. He kept his eyes closed and tried to imagine the landscape they were passing through. He wondered, however, what this had to do with anything.
“But you’ll not be alone,” said Jimmy. “I can help show you the way. The first thing to know is that the book you’re holding is a guide to this life. It helps you interpret the past and leads you into the future. Too many people use it only during certain hours of the week, as if its wisdom is limited to the hours of a church service. But time places no limits on this book. The lessons inside this book are always important, and they always apply to what you’re going through. You just have to be willing to make the connection. So right now, open that book at random, and whichever passage your eyes fall on, you read it until you’re ready to use it to guide your day.”
Josh felt the smooth edges of the Bible pages, chose a spot, and opened the book. He opened his eyes and read the first passage he saw:
“But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,” (2 Peter 3:8-9 King James Version).
Josh read the passage several times, taking in the phrasing of the King James Version, so different from the English Standard Version he was used to reading. As he wondered what connection this passage could have to the day ahead of him, he felt the car come to a stop. He looked up from the Bible to see where they were.
The first thing he saw was incomprehensibly strange. A barn swallow, in mid-flight, appeared frozen in the sky some twenty yards in front of the car. At first Josh thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. He rubbed them and looked again. It was still there, but what he then saw in the distance overwhelmed his senses and filled him with rage. It was a battered old farmhouse on a large stretch of poorly tended land.
“No way! Not this! Not in a million years!” yelled Josh.

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