Behind the Cross: The Centurion’s Journey to Faith – Episode #7
Whispers in the Dust
Journal Entry – Marcus Aelius Vitalis
Date: Monday, November 16, 26 A.D. (Year of the Consulship of Lentulus and Agrippa, 778 Ab urbe condita)
I dreamt of my father last night.
Not as he was in his last days—frail, coughing blood into a linen cloth—but as he had been when I was a boy: tall, iron-spined, his voice like a drawn blade.
He stood in the middle of a silent battlefield—no blood, no corpses, only dust. Spears stood in the ground like trees, and the wind moved as if afraid to stir the silence.
He looked at me, not with warmth, but with purpose.
“The first battlefield, son… is always the mind.”
His words echoed in the dream like a drumbeat.
“Win there—and your enemy is already bleeding.”
I asked him, “But what if the enemy is inside?”
He paused.
Smiled. Grimly.
“Then you’ll need to bleed first.”