“It’s not everyday you get lowered into a well to die.”
Author’s Note: If you’d like the context behind this story, read Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Jeremiah 38:1-13. For another imagined conversation with a biblical figure, read Dinner with a Beheaded.
He swirled the glass before he drank. Amber. Neat. He held it up to the light like he was checking for something.
“Dark chocolate,” he said. “And something like meringue.”
I know my whiskey. Dark chocolate I’d give him. Meringue I’d never gotten from a glass in my life. I picked up my own and nosed it. There was something in there I had no word for.
“You won’t find this bottle down there.” He tilted his head at the floor. Meaning earth. “This is a different kind.”
I believed him. I’ve had good whiskey. I’ve never had one from heaven.
He was smaller than I expected. Thin wrists. The kind of man you would pass in a market without looking twice. Except for the eyes. The eyes looked like they had seen a city burn.
“Can I ask about the beginning?” I opened my journal. “Chapter one. When He first called you.”
He smiled into his glass.
“I told Him I was a child. That I didn’t know how to speak.”
“And He said don’t say that.”
“He said don’t say that.” He took a sip. “He said, ‘You must go to everyone I send you to, and say whatever I command you. Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you and will rescue you.‘”
“What did that do to you?”
He put the glass down. Thought about it.
“Have you ever been told you’re safe by Someone who actually has the power to make it true?”
I hadn’t. Not like that.
“Then He touched my mouth. And I felt Him go in.” He tapped his chest. “Words. His, not mine. I was maybe twenty. Twenty-two. I thought it meant things would go well.”
He laughed. Not bitterly. More like a man remembering a younger version of himself.
“It went downhill from there.”
“The kings,” I said.
“The kings.” He picked the glass back up. “After Josiah, they were all the same. Hard heads. Harder hearts. I would stand in the temple court and say what the Lord said, and they would hear it as politics.”
“They thought it was you talking.”
“They thought I was campaigning.” He looked for the word. “You have a phrase now. When you don’t like the message so you say the messenger made it up.”
“Fake news.”
“That.” He pointed the glass at me. “I was fake news for forty years.”
I laughed. He didn’t, quite.
“Here’s the thing about being a mouthpiece. You represent the King. And when a king on earth hears the King of heaven telling him he’s finished, he doesn’t go after heaven. He goes after the mouth.”
I thought about where I live. About how a government can look like a democracy on paper and run on envelopes underneath. About how innocent blood is cheap and image is expensive. I didn’t say any of it. He looked at me like he already knew.
“It’s not so different,” he said quietly. “Judah. Where you are. Money talks. Men want to look good to everyone. Truth gets in the way of that.”
We sat with it.
“The cistern,” I said finally.
He was quiet for a long time. The whiskey stayed on the table.
“They lowered me with ropes. There was no water. Just mud. Mud that moves. It comes up to your waist and then it keeps coming. It smells like everything that has ever died in the dark.”
“Did you think it was the end?”
“I sank.” He said it plainly. “I couldn’t sit. I couldn’t lie down. If you sleep, it goes into your mouth. So you stand, and you get tired, and you sink a little more.”
“Did you pray?”
“What else is there?” He looked at me. “I said, You told me You were with me. I said, You told me You would rescue me. I said it like a child again. Not because I doubted Him. Because I had nothing else in my hands.”
“And He sent Ebed-Melech.”
Something changed in his face when I said the name.
“A Cushite. A servant. Nobody in the palace would have remembered his name a week later. He walked up to the king in the Benjamin Gate, in front of every official in Jerusalem, and said, ‘These men have acted wickedly.‘”
“That took courage.”
“That took God.” He picked the glass up again. “Thirty men. Old rags under my arms so the ropes wouldn’t cut. I remember the rags more than the ropes. Somebody thought about that. Somebody thought about my armpits while I was dying.”
He drank.
“That’s how He does it, brother. He doesn’t always send fire. Sometimes He sends a man nobody has heard of, with a bundle of old clothes, just in time. Just before you go under.”
I wrote that down. My hand wasn’t steady.
“They called you the weeping prophet,” I said.
“I earned it.”
“Do you still?”
He looked at me for a while. Then he ran a thumb under one eye, almost like a habit.
“No…”
He looked at the whiskey in the glass, swirling slowly in his hand.
“This body doesn’t even know how to cry anymore. Not because of sorrow, at least.”
Then he looked at me with a slight smirk on his right lip. “He wiped all of them away. Just like He said He would.”
He put the glass to his mouth and, with the last sip, finished the heavenly drink.
Then he stood up.
“You asked what I learned in the mud.” He leaned forward on the table with both hands. “I’ll tell you.”
His face became a bit more serious.
“When you’re lowered down to your death and the mud is at your chin and you know that no one else is coming.”
A short, silent pause.
“You realize you are naked. You have nothing else to hold on to except for the words He said to you when you were young. His promises.”
He straightened up.
“And that, my friend, is more than enough.”
Then he was gone.
The glass was empty. The chair still warm.
I looked at the table where he’d leaned forward and wondered if the few drops of liquid there were tears.
I have come face to face with the man one who stood his ground against four declining, evil regimes.
The weeping prophet. Immovable because of God’s promises to his life.
