The Imagination Station

In the Bible Room at Whit's End, John Avery Whittaker is tinkering with his newest invention when Tom Riley comes looking for him. Tom teaches Sunday school, and he has run out of ideas. A new boy in his class, Digger Digwillow, squirms through every lesson, and Digger's parents have told Tom they cannot get him to open a Bible at home either. The boy's verdict is always the same word: boring. Whit listens, then glances at the machine beside him. He calls it the Imagination Station, and he thinks it might be exactly what Digger needs. Send him over, Whit says, and Digger will never again be able to call the Bible boring, because he will have his own experience to prove otherwise.

Digger arrives unimpressed. He wants to know whether Whit has any comic books, and he insists he already knows all the good stories - King David, Samson, Elijah, even the story of Jesus, which he sums up as a teacher who taught people and got killed. Whit suggests that Digger may not know it as well as he thinks. Instead of telling the story, he programs the Imagination Station, explains that imagination is a gift from God that can make a story feel real, and invites Digger to climb in. Digger predicts he will fall asleep. Whit closes the door and tells him to hold on tight.

He pushes the red button, and the Bible Room disappears. Digger lands in a crowd of robes, camels, and shouting - a street in Jerusalem during Passover, though he is certain it is all a trick, a back lot, a tourist village. A woman named Mary pulls him out of the road before he is trampled and takes him home, convinced he is a lost child stricken by the sun. There he meets her son, John Mark, who studies Digger's jeans with great curiosity and cannot make sense of a word he says about Whit's End or Odyssey. When Whit's voice calls to him, Digger bolts for what he thinks is the exit, and everything goes dark.

He steps out again into a closet - and learns he has been gone three days. John Mark decides the strange boy must be a young beggar and puts him to work: a robe to cover his odd clothes, and a job carrying bread up to the master's Passover table. Serve quickly and quietly, John Mark warns. It must be as if we do not exist. Only at the door does Digger learn whose table it is. The master is Jesus.

Inside, Digger hands the bread to Jesus himself and hears him tell Peter that before the rooster crows twice, Peter will deny knowing him three times. What stays with Digger afterward is not the words but the look - as if Jesus were seeing straight inside him. John Mark knows the feeling and gives it a name: love, like being wrapped in a soft, warm blanket.

Then Digger remembers what comes next. The disciples have gone to a garden called Gethsemane, and he drags John Mark through the dark streets to warn them. They arrive to find the disciples asleep and Jesus praying alone. Before Digger can reach him, temple guards close in, Judas steps forward with a kiss, and Jesus is arrested. The boys trail the crowd to the high priest's house, slip upstairs to watch, and hear witnesses contradict each other while Jesus stays silent. Asked outright whether he is the Christ, he answers, I am. The cry of blasphemy goes up, and John Mark quietly explains what the verdict means. Death. Digger, who once thought the Bible was boring, is on his feet, desperate to stop it - and the story is only half told.