Джон Литтл: The Murder of Jesus Christ

“No thank you.”

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Karen clicked on 5-Minute Sermons and a list of choices popped up. She scrolled down them and was surprised to find at least a hundred of the mini-sermons.

“Busy girl.”

One title caught her eye: Saboism for the Young at Heart . On a whim, she clicked on it. She had the choice of audio, text, or full video. She chose the video and the monitor flexed to bring Erika Sabo into full focus. Her voice was strong and clear.

Whenever I speak to an audience at a high school or any other event for young people, I’m struck by the passion and the yearning everybody listening brings forward. But, there’s always one overriding sentiment that hangs in the air: WIIFM?

WIIFM is an acronym my mother taught me a long time ago, and it’s perfect for the youth of today. It stands for What’s In It For Me?

That sounds like a horribly selfish thought, doesn’t it? But that’s not the way I see it. I see young people who have a million options in front of them. I see teenagers who have immense choice for a future career and for a future family. I see youth who want change in our horrible political arena, who want to enjoy life and to bring the best things about humanity to the fore.

I see our best generation, a generation of people who don’t take shit from anybody, who calls it like it is, and who isn’t afraid to walk away from anything that wastes their precious time.

So, if you have that mindset, why should you listen to me? After all, until a few months ago you never heard of me. Some people believe who I am, and others just want me to go crawl back under whatever rock I emerged from.

If you’re the kind of person with a thousand choices ahead of you, with the future waiting for you, with no time to waste on bullshit, you might look at me and ask: What’s in it for me?

To be clear, I’m not only talking about those of you under the age of twenty. Anybody can be young. It’s a matter of how you think, not how creaky your bones are!

People with old thinking are caught up in their lives. They don’t like to change. Anything! They don’t like to change the TV shows they watch, they don’t like to change the roast chicken they eat every damned Sunday, and they don’t like to change their religious views. Hell, I’m not sure they even like to change their underwear.

I’m not talking to those people. That would be a waste of my time.

Change is for the young, and the young at heart, who are willing to look at new information and grow with it. I want you to fight for yourself! Don’t listen to your parents or your grandparents, because they’re stuck in an age that no longer exists. You know that. Since you heard that the daughter of God Himself has come to Earth, you know that nothing will ever be the same.

That’s just a fact.

Fight. Don’t accept the way things have always been!

On the screen, Erika Sabo stopped to let her viewers absorb what she’d said so far. Karen wondered how much of her promised five minutes had been used so far.

So, why Saboism? Why believe me?

Why not stick with your parents’ Judaism?

In the Bible, early on, Jacob had a dream about a staircase leading up to Heaven. When he awoke, he was troubled, unsure what he should learn from the dream. It was clearly a prophetic vision, and at first he didn’t want to know what it meant.

We know. They taught it to you in school, right?

The dream showed Jacob that he had the right and the obligation to lead the Chosen People, the people of Israel, the Jewish nation. My father even changed his name to Israel, as a constant reminder of what he was to do.

Let’s take a quick detour, back even earlier in time, to Adam and Eve. In this, the first human drama in the Bible, we find that sin entered the world. The serpent tempted our first people, and they chose to take a different path than they should have. They chose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

(That’s quite a name for a tree. My Father always had a good sense of humor.)

Since that day, sin has been passed down through every human generation. You, yes you , carry sin within you.

I am God’s daughter. I say that proudly and clearly. I am here to show you how to cast your own sins away, so you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. By following me, you enter into a loving relationship with my Father, and you can find your way to eternal peace.

I am the new stairway to heaven.

So, WIIFM? Eternal life. Nobody else is going to promise you that.

Karen Anderson closed her browser and then closed her eyes. She needed sleep, but she doubted it would come for her.

On a whim, she opened her email program and typed a name she hadn’t typed for many months: David Abelman. She needed to warn him. This wasn’t the daughter of God. Whoever she was, she was sent by Satan. David needed to get away from her. She wrote a pleading email, warning him to escape while he could.

After she hit Send, she lay down and once more closed her eyes. She wasn’t expecting a good sleep.

That email was delivered, and I saw it later that day. I stared at it in disbelief, almost starting to laugh, which I probably would have done six months earlier.

I was also puzzled. Karen was the most religious person I’d ever known, and I would have thought she’d be both amazed and thrilled to know the long-promised Messiah was here.

Of course, I emailed her back almost immediately, telling her some of the things I’d seen Erika do.

The Golden Luna reunited with the Skywheel a couple days later, and it was another month before she caught a shuttle back to Earth.

I was watching her travels from afar, wondering what she was thinking. She didn’t answer my email, which could mean she was still on a different wavelength than me, or it could mean she didn’t think about me at all, or maybe she was too busy with the logistics of whatever she had to do while finding her way back home.

Regardless, all I knew is that her silence felt deafening. I wanted her back. The more I thought about her, the more I wanted her back not just on Earth, but back with me .

We’d had a wonderful relationship together, except for when we were arguing about religion. Now, it felt like we would be on the same side of that discussion, and things would be perfect for us.

Unless we’d changed places, and it was her who was going to argue against Saboism.

Maybe we would work through that, but damn it, I wanted her by my side, working with Erika, not against her.

I imagined Karen and I travelling to spread Erika’s word. Hell, that was probably silly since Erika only travelled a short distance. She spread her word on the internet, through her website, her social media connections, her YouTube channel and, of course, media interviews.

Old style of travel wasn’t important. Communication was.

Regardless, I liked the romantic notion of Karen and I travelling to spread the word. In real life, that might mean a lot of typing on keyboards, but we’d put our heads together to work as a team, single-minded.

No idea if that was in the cards or not.

What was she thinking?

I really missed hearing her voice.

Finally, I saw a clip of her on CNN.com as she climbed out of the shuttle and waved to the camera. She spent another three days with NASA, debriefing whatever it was she could tell them about the mission. It seemed to me there wasn’t much she could say, since their craft had zipped around the moon without any sign of the aliens.