Marked?

Yesterday Jordy and I went to the wedding of one of her friends. It was an outdoor wedding, held in the early afternoon, and we all gratefully adjoined to the cooled reception area afterward. A fairly recent idea for some special events is to leave cameras around for the guests to photograph some of the proceedings, thereby giving a much more diverse view later. This wedding had several such cameras, and Jordy encouraged me to take some pictures with one. I took a couple.

"Here, let me take a picture of you," she said.
"They don't know me. A picture of me won't mean anything to them. Let's get a picture taken of us together."
I handed the camera to another guest and requested a picture. Jordy and I were in the picture, along with a man who appeared to be a first-generation immigrant from Africa.

After the picture, the man turned and looked at me intently. Then it began.

"You. You're a preacher, or you have preachers in your line." His eyes were fixed on me. "You've been through so much, but you're full of such love. Don't fight it.
You're going to bring so many people to Jesus."
Uh-oh. He continued in this vein for perhaps four straight minutes, mentioning that I had been through hell for about the past four years, and that in fact I had experienced a difficult life, but that I was going to do such great things.
"You've been having dreams, strange dreams, lately. You'll understand them. You are like John the Baptist, going before the Lord..."

I looked at him wordlessly, clasped his shoulder, and Jordy and I walked away. After we stepped through to the screened patio, she whispered to me: "Well, he got a few of of the details wrong..."

I turned to her after we sat down. "I think there's something that some people have, and they probably call it different things based on their beliefs. It's really all the same thing, though."

This is probably the fourth time someone has gone off on me in a similar fashion, not always saying exactly the same thing, but there are a few constants: love; challenge; potential.

Well, heck, we all have those.

I saw the man before I left. "I'll see you, man of god," he said. "Don't fight it."