THE GOSPEL OF TRAVIS - Chapter Twenty Three

THE CONFRONTATION ATOP CLIFF
Then Travis himself exited his cave to see Paul clambering up the cliff side trail. The storm clouds tore open and rain began to pour by the bucketful.

“You dare judge me?!” shouted Travis above the sounds of the driving rain.

“Nobody judges but God,” shouted Paul back. “But the rest of us can certainly speculate.”

“Fake Apostle!” declared Travis as he followed Paul up the rapidly muddying path. “A falsifier! Sent to be among the Gentiles - don’t make me laugh! You’re pathetic! A narcissist!”

“Let me go! All I wish is to leave you in peace. Why do you continue to harangue me?”

“Me? Don’t forget, you found me! You hunted me down! Peter did send you, didn’t he? Admit it! Or was it my cousin? Dispatched to destroy me? Or to bedevil me to madness? Tell my doubters that you found me here chuckling, for I will have the last laugh! When my Gospel of wealth overtakes your Gospel of love and weakness, my name shall be praised to the ends of the earth!”

As Paul reached the top of the cliff, he turned to Travis. “Proud! Haughty! Abusive! Irreligious and callous! Coveter of money and hater of what is truly good! You dare make a pretense of religion but you deny the thing that gives it power!”

“And what is that?!” spat Travis as he slid in the mud.

“Love! We can speak in tongues, we can prophesy and know every answer to every mystery in the universe, but without love it means nothing!”

With that, his body spent from the climb, Paul collapsed down upon a boulder, holding himself up as he gulped in air from between the raindrops.

“You want prophesy?” gasped Travis as he finally reached the top of the cliff. He held out his arm and pointed a strident finger at Paul. “Then here is my prophesy!”

THE REVELATIONS OF TRAVIS
“I foresee a world where the nonsense of universal love, as professed by the sick and the weak, is banished for the wanton silliness that it is. I see a place where your words, Paul, are heard and even repeated with reverence but where the meaning has gone out of them entirely, like a once mighty tree hollowed out by termites.

“I see men bolstered by an obsession with possessing their families and fearing their neighbor. I see the poor owned by the rich, the meek shouted down by the zealous, the hungry and thirsty denounced by the righteous for their refusal to work hard enough for God’s grace.

“I see houses of worship the size of palaces, with pastors treated like princes. I see statues and books and jewels and all sorts of ephemera, sold for the glorification of the one true God.

“I see weapons worshiped like saints. I see friends denounced like demons. I see cakes used as cudgels in the war against sinners. For I see sodomites and Samaritans rightly treated like parasites, and I see wives safely in their places.

“I see not just small gatherings of faithful but an entire kingdom, one that rules not just in heaven but to the far edges of the earth, populated with warriors for Christ willing to do great and terrifying violence upon those who would deny our supremacy.

“I see the unworthy herded into camps and sent away, in shackles made of righteous iron, yes, but also of righteous words.

“I see God and mammon worshiped together, for God has become mammon and mammon has become God. Yes, indeed, for they have always been one.

“And I see Jesus himself, his skin gleaming white, riding atop a horse with a golden sword raised to the sky! And he will smite the weak and exalt the strong, and he will drive away the humble and draw the proud closer to his bosom, and he will deny those who need and reward those who have earned and deserve.

"And in those days, at the end of time, I will stand at the Lord’s side, with a golden crown of my own resting upon my head. He will judge the living and the dead, and with each soul he will ask my advice. The gates to the afterlife will be opened to we Travisites, the best and the most worthy, and we will be led by Christ into the gleaming golden palace of the afterlife. And you and all the other heretics and sinners and weaklings will burn in hell. And I will laugh!”

ASCENSION
As Travis finished these words, with his hands clenched tight and his arms stretched high above his head in glory, an awesome clap of thunder pierced their ears and shook the earth.

And a great flash of fearsome light shone through the darkness of the storm.
For indeed a terrifying bolt of lightning ripped through the sky, striking Travis directly in the heart.

And as his body dropped to the ground, his lizard skin garb on his chest smoldering from the lightning strike, Travis’s soul immediately went out of his body.

We mortal men have no way of knowing for sure. But to my mind, there is no doubt that he joined the Lord Jesus in that very minute. Surely he now stands at the right hand of the right hand of the Father, awaiting his ultimate glory and our arrival into the Kingdom of God.

EPILOGUE
And so have I recorded the life of Travis, the one true and forgotten Apostle. May these words preserve his memory and vex his enemies. I can finally end this great labor. Perhaps now I can find some rest.

Surely, as we look beyond our doors, we can see the squabbling followers of Christ battling amongst themselves before our very eyes to claim his cross for their own. Soon we may see who among us is truly righteous and who has been misled, if indeed the Lord returns in our lifetimes as was claimed by that hack, Matthew.

Personally, with every passing day and with every step taken on the winding path towards old age, I have more and more doubts that the Lord will come again before I depart this life.

But perhaps if we cannot have the final judgement of the divine in our lifetimes then you, my dearest Theophilus, can help to provide me some level of validation.

I charge you to tell no less than seven friends about the good news contained within this account. Give them some confidence in the message. Tell them that copies of this gospel are for sale at a fair price, and that I can do a discount if they buy more than ten copies of it at a time.

And if you can encourage those seven friends to tell seven more friends each and to have them send me what money they can spare, then surely a nice reward will await you in the afterlife.

THE END

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