Today’s post will veer away from my usual non-fiction content that focuses on the integration of faith and psychology. Instead, this post will be the first of five that introduces you to every book in my Jack Sutherington fiction series. Today, I have excerpted a few pages from Book I entitled, The Rumbling Beneath. Meet Mahmoud Ahmed, a Muslim radical from Hat Yai, Thailand, who has traveled to America to punish his sister for her apostasy against her Islamic faith. However, the night before he goes to command Aliyah to repent or face death, he has a shockingly unexpected encounter with the last person he would have imagined.
(For more information on the Jack Sutherington series, please go to my author website at Davidgkirbyauthor.com.)
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Mahmoud parks his rental car in the Vacation Express lot, enters the motel, and takes the elevator up to the fourth floor. Just after he left his sister, the muezzin on his phone app alerted him of adhan, the fifth of the daily prayers. Accordingly, when he arrives back at his room, he engages in Isha’a–the night salat–by reciting five rak’ah. Then he retires for the night. As he drifts off to sleep, he gives thanks yet again that he has been called to serve in the holy jihad for the name of Allah. Tomorrow will be a day unlike any other . . .
Even before he wills his eyes open, he senses something is amiss. He can’t explain it. He just feels it.
When he finally forces one eye open, he sees the red digits of the clock radio on the motel nightstand announcing the time: 2:34. It’s the middle of the night so why is there a bright light in the room, he wonders in his sluggish brain. Not aroused enough to fully awaken, he closes his eye and begins to drift off into full unconsciousness again. It is only then that he is torn from his repose by the most unlikely and unwelcome interruption.
“Mahmoud.”
The young man’s eyes fly open.
“Mahmoud.” The Voice is deep and rich, and it vibrates the whole room. A light is shining behind him.
“Mahmoud.” The Voice is soft, but so loud that it strikes something deep within him—something that has never been touched before.
A giant tuning fork in his chest has been struck by an unseen agent. It is resonating within him, vibrating throughout his whole body. He hears a pure musical tone within himself. It feels warm, terrifying, intimate. It is so inundating that he feels immersed in it as in a river. No, it is something broader and deeper than the ocean. There is something amazingly familiar about it yet something so unknown, so incomprehensible.
“Mahmoud,” he hears the deep, sonorous voice repeat yet again. It is not one voice. It sounds like many voices, like the sound of cascading water rushing over rocks. The young man does not dare to turn and look behind him. He is incapable of not turning. As if being summoned, he sits up slowly and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. His back is still turned to the Voice and the Light.
In that moment, something strikes him as truer than he can understand with his intellect alone: His back is and has always been turned away from the Light. Yes, the Light. Shockingly, tears moisten his eyes. They begin to flow down his cheeks. Soon, he is weeping uncontrollably.
Somewhere in his head, a voice cries out, “What’s happening? This is craziness! Go back to sleep Mahmoud and . . . sleep forever.” The words are faint, barely perceptible. The words are irrelevant, and he ignores them.
The young jihadist turns around slowly and sees . . . Him. The figure is so dazzlingly brilliant that Mahmoud raises his hands to shield his eyes against the glorious presence. The tuning fork in his chest explodes and his whole body begins to shake violently. He collapses to the floor as if struck by lightning. He lies there on the carpet for a long time, unable to move or think.
“Mahmoud.”
Immediately, as if in obedience to a divine command, the shaken young man gets up on his knees—a very familiar prayer position—next to the bed. He beholds the figure of a man. But he is no ordinary man. He has been changed . . . altered . . . transfigured. His presence floods the room. No, more than that. The room cannot contain Him. Mahmoud senses that the light emanating from the Being’s body is penetrating the four walls around him and bursting out into the adjacent rooms, the hallway, the parking lot, the entire city and the surrounding countryside.
Worst of all—best of all—or both, the young Muslim knows in that moment whom he is beholding. He simply knows.
He also remembers in his throbbing brain what ‘they’ say. ‘They’ say that just before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. In the moment, he entertains the strange sensation that he is going to die, but his life does not flash before his eyes. Rather, he experiences something within him that feels like shuffling–everything inside of him is shuffling like a deck of cards. Shuffling. Shuffling. He is a deck of cards and he is kneeling in the presence of the Great Shuffler of hearts. He sinks down on his knees and legs as low as he can behind the bed to hide from the Presence that is undoing him from the inside out.
“Mahmoud Ahmed,” the water-over-the-rocks voice resonates, “I have been pursuing you and you have been fleeing from me to a far country. Tonight, I have come for you, my lost son. There will be no more running from my face. I am calling you to turn and come home.” The words are not an inquiry or a suggestion–they are a statement of fact.
Mahmoud lies flat on the floor behind the bed and attempts to sink down and hide within the fibers of the carpet. Another part of him—the summoned part–responds quite differently. He gets back up on his knees and reaches his arms above the edge of the bed toward the object of his soul’s deepest affection. His head and body remain hidden behind the bed.
If his heart is impenetrable steel, the Being across from him is a massive magnet pulling him inexorably toward him. Indeed, Mahmoud finds the bright figure irresistible. But something within him holds him back and prevents him from moving toward his visitor; and then there is the sound of sinister, urgent chanting coming from some distant place. It warns him, “Flee from Shaytan! Flee from the liar! Flee!”
“Approach me, Mahmoud,” the beautiful voice invites with no hint of demand, only a gentle beckoning reminiscent of his mother sweetly holding out her hands to him when he was a three-year-old boy.
Without hesitation, Mahmoud jumps to his feet and hurries over to the figure that throbs with brilliant light. Mahmoud is filled with impatience because he cannot reach the Being as quickly as he would like. As he comes closer, he glances into the face of the sun standing before him and immediately crumbles to his knees.
“I cannot be in your presence!” Mahmoud cries out with a loud groan as he continues to weep and bury his face into the carpet. “I have esteemed you as a prophet and a good man but have defied you as the God of the universe. I’m not worthy of your visitation.”
“You speak the truth, Mahmoud,” the transfigured Being affirms in the beautiful voice that rushes through his body like streams of cool water. “No one is worthy of being in my presence, or that of my Father, or the Spirit. No son of Adam can ever be holy enough by his own efforts to stand in our midst. Yet, my desire for the glory of the Father and my love for you bring me here this night. I have come to draw you to myself.”
“You love me?” Mahmoud cries out in muffled anguish as he grinds his forehead into the carpet until his skin burns. “What must I do?”
The jihadist feels the hand of the Ancient of Days rest gently on his head, and the turning fork in his chest resonates once again so intensely that he cannot contain its vibration. He fears that his body will crumble to dust.
“Today, before the sun sets, you must go and meet your sister at the Academy,” the rich, rushing voice speaks to him. “She will come to you and pray for your soul. Rejoice, Mahmoud, for today is the day of your salvation, my dear son who I designed and in whom I take great delight.”
Then–too immediately to be comprehended by physical senses alone–the Light is gone, and Mahmoud is alone. The absence of the Presence makes the room feel far darker and emptier than it had been before the visitation.
In one sense, Mahmoud feels like nothing happened in the last few minutes. An old and formerly dominant part of him prefers that to be the narrative of the night. No, that part of him fights to insist that nothing happened in the motel room. Denial is the most primitive and powerful defense mechanism of them all. Another phrase for denial is the ‘positive’ presence of unbelief. Mahmoud’s level of unbelief is massive and beyond every intervention except the miraculous.
In another sense, everything has happened that night, and Mahmoud knows nothing will ever be the same. Nothing. The decimated man with the shuffled heart rolls onto his side and curls up into the fetal position. He begins to moan the name of his nighttime visitor over and over. A part of him curses the name while the other part blesses the name. He is torn, a house divided. He is terrified.
Mahmoud lies motionless on the floor long after the Light of Life has departed. He is in unspeakable turmoil. He is sobbing. He hears his voice crying out plaintively, “Leave me alone, Jesus. Please don’t leave me alone.”
As he continues to weep uncontrollably, his wild eyes roam the room and fall on the nightstand next to the bed where he had been awakened only five minutes earlier. Incredibly, the three red digits on the small clock now read 9:31. Seven hours have passed since he had first heard the voice! How can this be, Mahmoud whimpers in the room that is bright with the morning sun.
An hour later, the young man is still lying on the floor listening to himself groan, “Leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”
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Thank you for taking the time to read this segment from The Rumbling Beneath. Next week, I will share an excerpt from the second book in the Jack Sutherington series entitled, Pursued by Light.
At the conclusion of five weeks, during which I will share one portion from each of the five books in the series, I will then discontinue my weekly posts on the Designer Therapy for Life site. I may publish a post here and there, but my attention will largely turn to other pursuits in life such as beginning a new book series.
Thanks to all of you who have walked with me over all or parts of the last five years during the DTFL journey! My prayer is that like Mahmoud, you will also see and know the Great Designer in a more intimate way in the days ahead until that Day arrives like a thief in the night when your faith will be turned to sight.
I hope you enjoy my books and mention them to others who suffer in this world and wish to know Jesus’ presence both in the light and in the dark.
