"Hello," Jesus said, "I'm back."

        He said it softly, almost under His breath, but everyone in the sanctuary heard Him. For ten of J. D. Sanders' flock, it was as if a camouflaged militant had burst into the choir loft with a machine gun, screaming and foaming and promising to kill everyone in the room for no reason at all. These people resorted to their basest survival instincts and crawled up under their pews with eyes shut and hands over their ears, hoping in vain that Jesus would just disappear again and not pursue the catastrophic theological question He presented by appearing in the first place. Nine others, who had until just seconds ago equated belief in Jesus with belief in Santa Claus or Jack Frost, popped back into reality like a dislocated shoulder and began scanning the room for evidence of some elaborate trick, however improbable, that could explain away the Second Coming as ball lightning or swamp gas or maybe just some tall, bearded, perfectly normal mortal with a special knack for teleportation. Amazingly enough, in a church that was known throughout the county for fervency and faith, only twelve out of the remaining thirty-one actually rejoiced, because for them the visitor was indeed Jesus Christ, and the event they had been taught all their lives to expect had finally come to pass. One of these was a little brown-eyed five-year-old named Brittany and, though Brittany was easily the least eloquent person in the room, she was the only one who thought of something constructive to say.

        "Jesus!" she piped, breaking free of her mother's terrified grasp and running towards Him, "You look just like Your picture!"

        Jesus smiled and scooped her up into His arms, simultaneously causing Brittany to giggle and Brittany's mother to gasp and faint. She fell to the floor with an unsettling thump.

        "Yes, well, Brittany, I can look like whatever I want, don’t you think?" Jesus said.

        "Uh-huh. I have a horsey named Peaches," Brittany asserted, trying to divert the conversation onto a more familiar, prepackaged tangent called Paying Attention to Brittany.

        "W-Why?" managed Jefferson Davis Sanders, his usually Stentorian voice muffled by fear and shag carpeting. Of course, the Right Reverend had meant to say something moderately intelligent like Why me? or Why now? or possibly Why in the choir loft of the New Smyrna Methodist Church of Fort Deposit and not up in the sky somewhere?, but he had yet to overcome the blistering irony of having what was usually a rhetorical statement answered with such sudden and earth-shattering force, so he was quivering and averting his eyes into the carpet, thereby hindering his mental faculties somewhat.

        "Because Daddy bought her for me at the auction," Brittany chimed, and began plucking absently at Jesus' beard.

        Jesus laughed.

        "No, my dear, I think the Reverend is talking to Me. It's pretty funny, really. God decided I was supposed to come back, well, now, and you asked Me to come at exactly the same instant, so I figured here was as good a place as any. Besides, it's four AM in Rome right now, and if I was to wake up the Pope he'd have a heart attack. He’s pretty feeble, you know."

        If any linguists had been present they would have been impressed by the fact that an Aramaic speaking Jew could so closely approximate a South Alabama accent, but there weren't any around, and the congregation of New Smyrna was too concerned about other things to worry about why Jesus didn't speak Renaissance English like He did in the Bible. To a man they shook loose whatever palsy had frozen their brains and began to ask questions, loudly and all at once, like reporters outside a courtroom.

        "You mean you like the Pope?"

        "But why don't--"

        "But I have to work tomorr--"

        "Where did--"

        "But how--"

        "Are we gonna--"

        Jesus silenced them by raising His hand, like He did the billowing waves of the Sea of Galilee so many centuries ago.

        "Don't worry folks, all questions will be answered in good time. Right now we gotta lot of work to do, so if you don't mind, please follow Me."

        Remembering that the last time Jesus had said that was recorded in Luke somewhere, Jefferson Davis Sanders jumped up like he had been nudged with a cattle prod, and within a minute New Smyrna Methodist Church was empty. By midnight, so was a good portion of the rest of the world.