Free The Chair by James L. Rubart Page A

mind and body.
    Two minutes later A. C. skidded to a stop beside him.
    Corin whipped off his helmet and grinned at his friend.
    “You did it, didn’t you?”
    He nodded, still grinning like a kid at his first pro baseball game.
    “You’re insane, you know that?”
    Corin nodded a second time. “It’s my calling.”
    “What are you going to do when a call comes that you can’t answer?”
    Corin swung his helmet up to his shoulder, bent to grab his sled, and admitted a small piece deep in his heart hoped that call would arrive soon.



CHAPTER 15
    O n Wednesday morning Corin made coffee and plopped onto his couch ready to play artifact detective. He pulled up Google and punched in “chair of Christ” and in .24 seconds got nothing. Nothing on Bing or AltaVista either. “Chair made by Jesus” didn’t bring any hits either. Jesus made furniture, didn’t He? Tables, plows, benches, chairs. Isn’t that what carpenters back then did? He had no idea.
    Then he stumbled across an article talking about a saint named Justin Martyr who lived in Galilee during the second century. Martyr said it was still common during his lifetime to see farmers using “plows made by the carpenter Jesus of Nazareth” into the second century.
    Good. This was promising.
    If a plow being battered daily by dirt and weather could last one hundred-plus years, why couldn’t a well-cared for chair last till today?
    When he typed in “religious artifacts” things got even more interesting.
    He clicked on a link that said Sudarium of Oviedo and started reading.
    Fascinating.
    The Sudarium was a blood-stained cloth thirty-two-by-twenty inches that Jesus’s head was supposedly wrapped in after He died. And tests on blood from the cloth confirmed a common blood type among Middle Eastern people but rare among medieval Europeans.
    Pollen residue showed strong evidence the cloth was at one point in the Palestine area.
    Corin read further. Nothing about the Sudarium healing anyone.
    Next was a link to the Image of Edessa, a picture of Christ allegedly sent by Jesus Himself to King Abgar V of Edessa to cure him of leprosy, with a letter declining an invitation to visit the king.
    Now he was getting somewhere.
    But as he read on, it was clear rampant speculation far outweighed the facts.
    Corin kept clicking.
    According to legend The Veil of Veronica was used to wipe the sweat from Jesus’s brow as He carried the cross and rests in Saint Peter’s Basilica.
    He skimmed the research.
    Nothing about it having healing powers.
    He clicked past the Holy Grail . Indiana and Henry Jones had taught him all about that one. But at least that legend supported the idea Christ objects could have healing powers. No, actually, it didn’t. That was a movie and as he read further, it confirmed his feeling. There was less evidence for the existence of a real chalice than for the Sudarium, Image of Edessa, or the Veil.
    He skimmed over articles on pieces of the cross, nails from the cross, the Coat of Christ, and the Crown of Thorns.
    Again nothing about those objects healing anyone.
    Corin sighed and stretched. The best he’d come up with in three hours of research was maybe something Jesus made could have lasted until today.
    Time to see what the Bible said about healing.
    His fingers flew over his laptop keyboard and he watched Google splash multiple Bible verses onto his screen.
    Twenty minutes later he smiled.
    He copied three verses into a Word document, saved it, then printed the page and read through over it, his smile growing into a grin. At least according to the Bible, the idea of a chair with healing powers was very, very possible.
    Acts 19:11–12: “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.”
    Matthew 14:35–36: “People brought all their sick to him and begged him to let the sick just touch the edge of his