ANGELS AT WAR
CHAPTER 7
SULLY SAGE
WHILE WE DO NOT LOOK AT THE THINGS WHICH ARE SEEN, BUT AT THE THINGS WHICH ARE NOT SEEN. FOR THE THINGS WHICH ARE SEEN ARE TEMPORARY, BUT THE THINGS WHICH ARE NOT SEEN ARE ETERNAL. (2 Corinthians 4:18)
The gun slammed into the back of my head, and I understood why cartoons showed stars circling a noggin after a blow. The gun was my own and the hand that whacked me was also mine. But I did have a little help.
Right when I was rearing back to throw the unregistered gun I had been considering ending my life with into the river, Cricket hollered, “Sully, don’t!”
When I raised the weapon to throw, Cricket assumed I had lifted it to cause self-inflicted harm. A couple nights previous that would have been the case. Then, I had pointed the barrel both under my chin and at my temple. But I was having a hard time squeezing the trigger. I just about had myself talked into it when my cousin called.
Would I have gone through with it? I shudder to think I would have. But once my cousin reminded me of his impending wedding, I could not put a blight on it by ending my own life. I figured I would now have to wait at least a couple months before putting an end to what I considered a miserable existence. How bizarre. I was living what was supposed to be a dream existence, yet I hated it! Financially I was set for life, but I dreaded the future.
Even though it was my intention to die in the near future, I didn’t want to hang on to an illegal pistol for several weeks or months. Besides, why die in such a violent fashion? Was I intrigued by drama I claimed to hate? Was I infected by rock star disease, wanting to go out with a bang, like Kurt Cobain? Subconsciously, did I actually want to go down in rock history by joining the notorious twenty-seven club?
Yes, I did want to die. But no, I didn’t want to join the twenty-seven club. I would endure this world and tolerate my tormented mind for five and a half more months until I turned twenty-eight. Then Jeremey and Callie’s wedding would be sufficiently past as well. I also would die by an overdose rather than the violence of a hollow point bullet ripping through my squirming brain.
As I winced and grabbed my head, the gun dropped into a clump of weeds. Cricket came rushing up. “Sully, shame on you! What a dark blight you would put on Callie and Jeremey’s wedding by what you were about to do!”
“I wasn’t,” I began, but moaned at a throb of pain.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Sully,” Cricket said sympathetically. “I shouldn’t scold you when you feel so poorly that you want to kill yourself.”
“Cricket, I wasn’t going to kill myself,” I told her, refraining from saying, ‘right now anyway.’ “I was about to throw that pistol into the river.”
“Really? Why?”
“To get rid of it,” I shrugged.
“Why did you have a gun in the first place?”
Another throb made me groan.
“Sully, you’re bleeding,” Cricket declared. “Let’s get you back to the house. Grandma is a retired nurse.”
As we approached the house, Callie exited the front door carrying a travel mug. She stopped in her tracks, frowned and said, “Wow, and I thought Vi got rough with Sully.”
“He was getting mouthy,” Cricket said with a shrug, making Callie laugh.
I guess it should have comforted me that they weren’t all that concerned about my injury. But Callie’s face did turn serious as she asked, “What happened?”
“He was throwing something into the river, but threw it into his head instead.”
“Is he alright?”
“I think so,” Cricket replied. “But I want Grandma to see if he needs stitches.”
“She’s not here,” Callie said. “Grandpa took Grandma out to breakfast for their lunarversary.”
“What’s a lunarversary?” I asked.
“Grandma and Grandpa were married on May fourth,” Cricket explained. “So Grandpa does something special like taking Grandma out to eat on the fourth of every month.”
“Oh, nice,” I replied. “So how many?”
“Grandma said this was their seven hundred and seventeenth,” Callie replied.
“Wow!” I exclaimed.
“It’s months, not years,” Violetta said as she walked up behind us.
“Come on, Vi,” Callie said. “They are only three months away from sixty years of marriage. That’s something you’ll never experience.”
“How do you know?” Violetta snapped.
“You have to like guys first for one thing,” Callie shrugged.
“What are you nodding about?” Violetta barked at me.
Although the pain of my initial injury subsided, I winced to avoid the wrath of the redhead.
“Violetta, take a look at Sully’s wound. Would you please?” Cricket asked.
“What did you do?” Violetta sneered as if my injury was a result of idiocy. How did she know?
Turns out Violetta was an EMT on the volunteer fire department. We moved into the house, and Violetta retrieved bandages and a plastic bottle of some type of antiseptic. She looked at my wound and then declared, “It’s not that bad. Sully’s just being a baby.”
“Hey! What did I do to merit being called a baby? Do you see all this blood?”
“The scalp has an extremely dense network of superficial blood vessels,” Violetta explained as if she were a professor. “They are anchored in tough connective tissue, preventing them from closing naturally when injured. That’s why a little cut on the head can bleed profusely.”
“Regardless, I am not a wimp,” I said stoically.
A malicious grin developed on Violetta’s face. “Good, then this shouldn’t bother you.”
She dowsed my cut with rubbing alcohol and I bellowed. I’m sure my scream echoed through the valley. When the pain subsided, I admitted, “Okay, I’m a wimp.”
The three ladies laughed, but it was Violetta I did a double take at. For the first time I thought her face looked pleasant, rather than hostile and bitter. I thanked Violetta, and she brushed it off as no big deal. Cricket pulled me aside and said, “Can I talk to you in private?”
I felt a sense of apprehension. Now that my wound was doctored, it was full frontal on my mind that she wanted a broader explanation about my gun. I would simply tell her the truth. We went to the horse barn. The equine were happily munching their breakfast. I explained to Cricket what I was doing when she discovered me. “I promise you, I was not going to shoot myself.”
Cricket studied me carefully. As she looked into my eyes, it was as if her gaze was siphoning thoughts from my brain. It gave me an uneasy feeling. With a frown, I asked, “You don’t believe me?”
Her demeanor became perky. “Oh I believe you, Sully. Sort of. It’s just, well, I had a dream about you. That’s actually why I came out here so early today. You may not have been intending to use that pistol against yourself when I saw you. But you have recently intended to use a pistol against yourself, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know what you are getting at,” I replied, feeling extremely vulnerable.
“An angel of the Lord came to me in my dream. He said go to him who stands in front of a pale horse. Death and hades are following him. I’m ninety nine percent sure his message suggested that you have suicidal tendencies.”
My mind reeled and spun. Was I in the Twilight Zone? “You were visited by an actual angel?”
“Whether he was real or a figment of my mind, I don’t know. What I do believe is that the message of my dream was real, and that it was inspired by God. After all, I did find you in front of a pale horse.”
I looked at Violetta’s light colored Palamino, contentedly munching on hay. I was agnostic at best, atheist at worst. But I had to admit, something supernatural was going on here. With a baffled expression, I looked back at Cricket. She said, “I believe God has a purpose and a plan for you. I was instructed to bring you the words of life.”
“I see. And what are these words of life?”
“Christ and Him crucified,” she declared, quoting 1 Corinthians 2:2.
“What does that mean for me?”
“Salvation.”
“Cricket, I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic. So how can God have a plan for me?”
“I’m an atheist, too,” she replied happily.
I folded my arms. “Up until now, you have struck me as one of the most honest people I have ever met. But you just spoke the biggest contradiction ever. You tell me about dreaming of angels, words of life, and Christ. Then in the next breath you say you’re an atheist. Explain that!”
“Why don’t you tell me about the God you don’t believe in?” she said.
So I did, with my main point being how did she justify a God of love burning people in hell for eternity for just not believing in him?
“I don’t so that’s why I said I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in the God you just described either. I believe in the God of the Bible. And a thorough examination of the scriptures prove eternal torment is a false doctrine.”
(For a free, well done Bible study guide on this subject, you can go to Amazing Facts online and click on study guides and find the one entitled ‘Is the Devil In Charge of Hell?’)
“Well, there arises another problem. I don’t believe the Bible. How can you trust a book two thousand years old?”
“Because of the sure word of prophecy,” she said. “The prophecies about Jesus. The prophecies of a persecuting power that would be fulfilled during the dark ages, to name a couple. Look, I don’t have much time. I need to get to work. How about you and me have a Bible study?”
“You want me to study something I just said I don’t believe in?”
“That’s where we will begin. We will discuss why you can trust and rely on the Holy Bible.”
I have to admit that I was intrigued by everything she said. From her dream to suggesting I could count on the Bible. I had met thousands and thousands of people in my line of work. But I had never met anyone quite like Cricket Karr before.
She wasn’t exceptionally pretty. Not like her volatile sister anyway. But she had this brightness in her personality, a light that shone from her character. So I said, “Alright, when?”
She said her mother was scheduled to run their flower shop the next day, so we agreed on tomorrow afternoon.
I got something to eat and took a long nap. Later that afternoon, I went after the gun I had tossed into the weeds before somebody else found it. I found it and dug it out of the clump of weeds. I don’t know why, but before tossing it into the river, I sat on a bank and looked the gun over as I contemplated the conversation I had with Cricket.
After several minutes, I stood and began to raise the gun to throw it into the water. Recalling my bonked head, I began to lower it into position to toss it like a frisbee. Suddenly two hands were on my lower arm that held the gun. My limb twisted in a painful position that had me both frozen in place and groaning in pain. Then Violetta’s pretty face with an ugly expression was inches from mine. Her large blue-green eyes looked fierce. Her red-gold hair was pulled back tight and into a braid that fell over her left shoulder. She looked every bit the part of a female warrior. With clenched teeth, she said, “What do you think you’re doing?”
