I can believe this Miss Kelly. I think this is easy for Tibetan people to believe. Many of our Buddhas do the same thing.
Not exactly.
The last day that I pressed the start button on my computer and it actually started was Tuesday. It was the day after I had walked across the street to visit some sisters and had been bruised by the shattering weight of a failing business as it appeared on their weary shy faces. The students know who we believe. They are angry. They don't come here anymore. Business is so bad. So we clasped hands together over a cold table in a deserted restaurant and petitioned the One who stretched out the heavens and the One whom before every knee bows for protection and blessing. Tuesday I walked over to offer some encouragement to the girls and couldn't find a seat there were so many people in there. There are so many people! Yes sister, this is because we asked Yesu. Tuesday I shut down my computer and lay down to sleep with the awe and satisfaction of requests granted as my pillow.
Wednesday no amount of pressing the start button would get the thing to start. Thursday all attempts of taking the battery out, starting it any other way, or checking different outlets resulted in a screen as black as death, however I did get a new meal card for April. Friday I didn't even bother trying to start it. Saturday I decided to send it back to America the following week. The computer was, like every other piece of electronics this year (lost Ipod, lost cell phone...), done for. I was preparing to watch my TV sprout legs and walk out the door and warm my hands when my DVD player spontaneously burst into flames.
But then there was pizza.
Rumor had it that foreign teachers can cook a pizza. Of the other teachers at our school invited, only one of them had ever eaten pizza before and that was pizza that I had made, so we know where the rumor started. A pizza party planned, four pizzas cooked, devoured, and an evening spent laughing and marveling in the magic of bacon bits and pepperoni shipped from America. Then one of the teachers who I had mentioned the death of my computer to demanded to see it. With a shrug I handed it over, I had nothing to lose since he couldn't mess it up. After all, it wouldn't even turn on.
Friends, I wasn't in the dewy garden that cool morning to see a stone rolled away from a tomb but what I did see was a little Chinese man with a contagious laugh and a working knowledge of English slang press the start button... and my computer started.
A computer dies and I spend three days contemplating how things were going to change for me with dreams of scuzzy internet bars invading my mind. A Man died and his closet friends go into hiding for three grief flooded days contemplating how things were going to change for them... change that they would never have guessed at, new life and eternal victory that they would never have received, until that Man walked back into their midst the third day.
He died and was buried. People started to forget Him, they gave up. And He came back.
And He's coming back again.
That's not Buddha's story.
