The Visitor (Episode 4)
Ethan Everest had read the message three times. Then a fourth. He stared at the screen.
It was only seven words.
“We have found the story you mentioned.”
He leaned back in his chair and didn’t move for several minutes.
Outside his window, the neighborhood was settling into another ordinary evening. A dog barked down the street. A car passed by, making a horrible racket. His refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.
Just another ordinary day, looking in from the outside. But Ethan knew it wasn’t.
He moved the cursor over the message.
The account that had posted it was still there. No profile picture, bio, location, or history.
Just a name:
Visitor-7A9-Orion
Ethan had spent the better part of the afternoon trying to convince himself that the previous conversations had been some elaborate prank that someone was playing with him. Perhaps, he surmised, it was an AI experiment gone awry.
He stopped.
None of those explanations answered the question that had been bothering him since the beginning.
How did the Visitor know things no stranger should know?
And now there was this.
We have found the story you mentioned.
Ethan slowly opened his blog.
He scrolled through his most recent posts until he found the one he had been discussing with Visitor-7A9-Orion.
The greatest story ever told. The Gospel. The story of Jesus.
“Okay,” he whispered. “You found it.”
His fingers hovered over the keyboard as he began to type.
“We”?
He paused before deleting it. Then he typed again.
Who is “we”?
He decided to delete that, too.
Finally, he wrote:
What did you find?
He pressed Enter.
The message disappeared into cyberspace. Nothing happened.
Ethan waited.
Thirty seconds.
A minute.
Five minutes.
He was about to close the laptop when a new message appeared on the screen.
Not what.
Ethan frowned.
Another line appeared.
Who.
His heart began to beat faster. Then another message.
We found Him.
Ethan stared at the screen.
He whispered the words.
“We found Him.”
For the first time since this strange conversation began, Ethan wasn’t curious. He was afraid, but not because he believed Visitor-7A9-Orion was dangerous. Ethan suddenly wondered if the Visitor had discovered something that Ethan himself had spent years trying to understand. Then the next message appeared.
Your story says He came to you.
A pause.
We want to know why.
Ethan leaned back in his chair.
There it was, the question beneath every question.
Why did Jesus leave His heavenly throne to engage humanity and die on the Cross? Why would God come looking for people who weren’t looking for Him?
Ethan had contemplated those questions numerous times.
He had even spoken about them in churches. He had discussed them over coffee. However, this was different.
Because somewhere impossibly far away, a stranger was asking. Someone who had never heard the story wanted to know more.
Ethan placed his hands on the keyboard and began to type.
Maybe the better question isn’t why He came to us.
He paused.
Maybe it’s why He would come to you.
The cursor blinked.
No response.
Ethan waited.
As he started to close the laptop, one final message appeared.
Perhaps that is what we are trying to discover.
Below it was something Ethan had never seen before. A file with no title or extension. Just a string of numbers and letters.
Ethan stared at it.
He knew he should have closed the computer and walked away.
Instead, he clicked.
The screen went black before a single image appeared. It was a photograph of Earth taken from space. The picture intrigued him. It was the perspective. The image had not been taken from a satellite, but from somewhere much farther away.
Much, much farther away.
Beneath the photograph were three words:
We are coming.
Ethan struggled to breathe as his heart raced, pounding against his chest.
Another line appeared.
Tell them.
The screen went dark.
And for the first time, Ethan wondered if he had been writing a blog about God or if God had been preparing him to receive a message.
To be continued…
Until my next post…
Be salty, stay lit.
Rainer Bantau —The Devotional Guy™
© 2026 Rainer Bantau | The Devotional Guy™ | All Rights Reserved
You can read previous episodes of this series here.
