BEHIND THE CROSS: A Centurion’s Journey to Faith

A Faith Partners exclusive. A new chapter every Monday.

My name is Marcus Aelius Vitalis. I have given Rome twenty years and the better part of myself, and I have the scars to show for both. I have commanded men, broken sieges, and questioned enough liars to know the sound of the truth when it finally cracks through. I am a soldier. I deal in what can be counted, confirmed, and put in a report.

I tell you that so you understand I am not a man given to wonder.

They sent me to the Jordan with a leatherworker’s tools and orders to keep my rank to myself. Find the preacher out of Galilee. Learn who he is. Decide whether he threatens the Empire. Write down everything. Simple work for a man like me.

I was standing in that crowd at the river the day the sky opened and the voice came. I have spent every month since trying to set it down in words Rome will accept. I have not managed it yet. That is where my trouble started, and it has not stopped since.

The work itself should be plain. Follow the man. Send back the facts. But I am always a day or two behind him. By the time I reach a town he has already gone, and what he leaves are the people. A man who could not stand, on his feet. A house that had given up, loud with hope again. I sit them down and question them the way I have questioned prisoners my whole life, hunting for the seam where a story falls apart.

The stories do not fall apart.

I know when a man is lying to me. These people are not lying. That is the thing I cannot put in a report. I have tried every explanation I own. A rebellion needs fighters, and this man gathers the sick and the poor. Power has to be guarded, and he says things that would make holding it impossible. Every model I bring to him fails in the middle. A soldier whose models fail is a soldier who can no longer trust his own judgment, and so I lie awake past the fourth watch with entries I have written and cannot send.

You should know I am not the only one walking this road. There is a man named Mattathias who has been circling the same preacher since the beginning. He answers to the Sanhedrin, not to Rome. He is asking a harder question than mine. He knows exactly who I am, and for reasons of his own he has chosen, so far, to keep that to himself. And there is a third man. Plain cloak, no allegiance I can name. He has been counting days on a wall and learning the rooms where I sleep, and he has set his attention on the people I have let myself care about.

Because I do not travel alone either. There is a young man, Jonah, who fell in beside me at the river and has not left. The road keeps binding us closer than either of us planned. He carries his own burden in Sara, his sister, fourteen years old and the only family he has left in this world. Whatever this thing is turning into, it is no longer something I can work from the edges and walk away from clean.

And there are words.

A few the preacher spoke, which reached me secondhand the way everything reaches me. I wrote them down because that is what I do. I have not been able to cross them out since. I do not understand them, and I was trained to set aside what I cannot understand. These will not be set aside.

Understand this before you read a single entry. What I am recording follows the true path of this man, in order, season by season, from the Jordan toward whatever waits at the end of it. I am never standing where the wonder happens. I am the man who arrives the next morning and tries to write it down so my commanders will believe me. I came to investigate a threat. I am beginning to fear I am investigating a future King.

There is a day coming, nearer than I know, when the man I have tracked from town to town will stop walking, turn, and look straight at me. I have spent this entire investigation certain of one thing.

I am the one doing the watching.

I am afraid I am wrong.

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This is a Faith Partners exclusive. I set down a new entry every Monday, in my own hand, at the end of hard days. For $5 a month you read each one the day it lands, and you keep me on this road all the way to the end of it.

I picked up my stylus before I had any idea what I was walking into. The first entry is waiting for you inside.