The last few days have left me in shock.  I really don’t know what I’ve gotten into anymore.  When I first met Jesus, it was because of my brother Phillip.  Phillip, freak that he is, came to me completely freaking out, saying that he had found “the one,” the guy Moses and the prophets had all been promising would come to save Israel.  I figured it was just another crazy Zealot looking for recruits to throw their life away fighting the Roman army.  What’s more, he told me the guy was from Nazareth.  Nazareth!  First of all, everyone knows that the Messiah will come from the city of David.  Second of all, Naz-town?  The best thing that ever came out of that place was the garbage.  Or so I thought.  Then I met this Jesus.  There was something so different about him, different from anybody I’ve ever met in my life.  I’d never met the guy, but he seemed to know everything about me.  Heck, he even knew I’d been sitting under a tree when Phillip found me!  I told him I believed Phillip, that I really thought he was the Son of God that we had read about for so long.

Now I’ll admit, the water-into-wine trick he pulled at that wedding was pretty sweet.  But honestly, Jesus told me that I would see greater things with him, and I was left thinking, “That’s it?”  Boy, was I wrong.  A few days ago, I watched Jesus, the guy whom I’ve spent hours with talking about life and girls and everything else, take a couple loaves of bread and a small catch of fish and feed thousands of people with it.  That night, we go out on the boat in the middle of a storm, and I see Jesus, the guy I crack jokes with over the dinner table, walking on the water.  That’s right, he was walking on it.  You can’t exactly do that, but Jesus did. 

So Jesus jumps up on the boat with us and his tunic’s barely wet.  The crowd was trying to figure out what he had done, but he launched into this speech about how he’s the bread of life, and how we can only get to Heaven if we eat his flesh and drink his blood.  Some of the guys who have been traveling with us said it didn’t make sense; Jesus seemed to know that some of the guys weren’t buying it, and so he spoke to them.  I noticed that a lot of them got up and left, and we haven’t seen them since.  Now, I like to think that there are maybe, say, 11 or 12 of us who are probably the closest people to Jesus.  So he comes up to us a few minutes later and asks us if we want to leave too.  Well, who gets up to speak but Peter (who never shuts up).  Peter said something, though, that really hit me.  He said, “Where else would we go?  You have the words of eternal life.” 

Pete was dead on.  First of all, there’s really nowhere else for us to go these days.  It seems like almost everyone in these parts either thinks we’re crazy or we’re in league with the devil.  We ran away from home, we left our families; heck, some of us left our wives just to follow Jesus.  But at the same time, what else would we do?  Jesus and his ministry are the only things I’ve ever found in life that I’ve put my whole heart into, that I’ve ever been willing to give everything up for.  I’m no scribe; I’m not sure all the time what he’s talking about or if there’s really something bigger that he’s come here to do, but I know whatever it is, I’ve got to be a part of it.  Because now, I really think that Jesus is God’s Son.  We said we’ve got nowhere else to go, but there’s nowhere else that I want to go.