Miracles
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

My uncle was a religious man. When I say religious, I mean that he claimed to be a Christian. He claimed to live his life by the principles preached by Christ and his church. He claimed to be good.

When I say my uncle, I mean that he was the husband of my aunt – my mother’s much younger sister. That meant that he was not my uncle by blood nor was he more than about 10 years older than me.

From time to time, he and his wife had cared for me after my mother died,. My father worked in the oil industry and was away for extended periods of time. When he was home, I really looked after him, as he was not good around the house. I am a homebody, I guess.

Anyway, then my aunt left my uncle and I think that my uncle went a bit crazy. Not straight away, but by the time it was clear that she was not coming back, he got a strange idea in his head. He got the idea that I should become a woman and be his wife.

I am not a woman, or I was not one then. I was just a regular guy. At high school studying just enough to get by, playing sports, getting interested in girls, all of that stuff. But my father was heading away, and I was sent around to my stay with my uncle.

Maybe you have heard about Pastor Ruth? She was the pastor of a church not far from us, who used to be Pastor Paul. Then (some folks say) there was a miracle, and he became a she. My uncle started going to her church, and of course, he took me along.

I said my uncle was a religious man, and I felt that I should respect that. I hung my head when he said grace, and in church I sang and waved my arms and cried out as he wanted, but I was not a believer. I do not believe in miracles. I do not believe that a man can be turned into a woman. But my uncle sure does.

He said that Pastor Ruth’s transformation was evidence of the power of God. He wanted me to be transformed like her. So, every Sunday and once on a weekday evening we would drive all the way down to Pastor Ruth’s church to pray for a miracle that could see me become a woman, and then his wife under God.

I did not know anything about his ideas at the beginning. He was just religious, and I was in his care. He kept asking me whether I was feeling any changes. He was looking to see if I was starting to act less like a young man. I just thought that he was weird, like all religious people.

But I quite liked church. It was a Sunday morning show. Pastor Ruth was indeed a very interesting person. She was tall for a woman, with shoulders a little too broad, and her face was what you might call masculine in shape, but she was beautiful. She took care of her appearance – she wore makeup and styled her hair, and she wore clothes that were like feminine versions of the robes of a catholic priest. She was a show-off, but it worked on her audience.

She had a wonderful voice. It was feminine but quite deep, and it was mesmerizing. She had a way of delivering her sermons starting with a loud whisper and then rising in tone and volume. I would look to either side of me and see people in the church enthralled. Some would have their eyes closed just listening to the sound of her, rather than the words coming out. Those words were largely nonsense.

I hardly understood the meaning of what she was saying. It was talk about scripture and “prophetic wisdom” whatever that might be. But it seemed enough that she was just talking. Whatever she was saying, people were eating out her hand, and putting cash back in it.

My uncle had money and he gave her plenty; enough for him to be invited into her inner circle and be named a deacon of her church. Enough for him to extract from her the assurance that I too, might be the subject of a miraculous transformation.

Apparently it was Pastor Ruth who told my uncle that in order to be transformed, I would need to be with her full time. I think that made my uncle pause, as he was dependent on me at home, just like my father was. But he wanted the miracle so badly he just handed me over.

I was starting to understand what was going on, or at least suspect it. I suppose that I could have walked away, or run more likely. It would be a while until my father got back, but maybe I could hide out until he did? But, to be honest, I was curious. There could be no miracle, and this woman was fascinating. Maybe I even had a sexual thing going on. I mean, she was an attractive woman, or appeared to be, and I was an impressionable young man.

So, I moved in to stay with Pastor Ruth and her husband Dwight. There was another person staying with her and praying for the same miracle. The difference was that he was a couple of years older than me and he really was praying for that miracle. He wanted to be a woman. His hair was longer than mine, so now I can guess he was at least a month or two further on from where I started, but he was definitely showing the signs. I mean his face and body were plucked clean of hair and he had done his best to make his face look feminine. As well as that he had the first signs of little breasts. He was very proud of them.

He asked that I call him Lynda, so I did.

Pastor Ruth asked him to call me Hannah. That was her name for me.

I didn’t know anything about hormones then. I didn’t know that you can put something in a guy’s morning smoothie that will neutralize his nuts then make breasts grow. I had no idea that the plasters that she put under my arms were also feeding hormones into me. Maybe that Is why I started to wonder about things, maybe to question my lack of faith, when I noticed the changes starting. In my ignorance it looked at if prayer really could change a person’s physical form.

But I guess I figured out what Pastor Ruth was. She was not a woman – she was a transwoman. I learned that because that was what Lynda was, and what some of her other female followers were. There were people who came to her in the belief that she could make them into what they wanted to be. Or there were just transgender people who were worried that such a thing might be incompatible with Christianity and wanted to hear her “Matthew 19:12 sermon” – the one about eunuchs.

But by the time I worked out all of this, I was growing my own tits. My hair was long and soft, and it was the only hair on my body except the thin arched eyebrows, my muscles had been replaced with soft tender flesh all over, and I was rounder on the butt as well as the chest.

My father got back from his work contract about this time and contacted my uncle to have me come home. I was too ashamed to be seen by him. My uncle had told him that I was at a Christian camp and arranged for me to speak with him by phone. Pastor Ruth was with me. It was difficult to talk. My father said that he understood that I was enjoying myself and he would not disturb me, although he missed me. He would take another contract and be home by Christmas.

When I put the phone down, I sobbed like a little girl. Pastor Ruth held me and stroked my hair.

“You are truly becoming a woman,” she said. “Let the tears flow because now you can. Isn’t it wonderful?”

The emotional outburst was a shock, and it was not isolated. As Lynda became more female, she just got happier and happier, but I kept crying. Pastor Ruth came to realize that Lynda was not the right person to help me, so instead she suggested that I meet another member of her congregation.

Ben Alden was quite a bit older than me and was studying law at a nearby university. He came from a good Christian family, but he was having a bit of a crisis of faith. Pastor Ruth knew that there is no better cure for a crisis of faith than for him to witness a good old-fashioned miracle, and I was to be that miracle. She wanted to introduce me to Ben.

So that might work for Ben, but how was it supposed to work for me? Well, maybe Pastor Ruth was smart enough to know something about me that I don’t know myself. Because Ben was not only a warm and kind person and smart too, but he was seriously good looking as well.

I mean, before this all started, I described myself as “a regular guy, studying high school, playing sports, getting interested in girls, all of that stuff”. Remember? So, what had changed? Everything, that’s what.

Pastor Ruth told Ben that I was halfway through my transformation, and it was all by God’s hand. She said that I was developing a female body but that I still had ineffective male genitals that would soon be turned inside out by God’s own power. He seemed ready to believe it. She suggested that he get to know me and watch me change before his eyes.

I said Ben was smart, but he was still substantially a believer. That means smartness only goes so far, and past the point of conflict with faith, smartness just disappears, or takes a seat way down the back.

“Are you really going to change into a woman?” he asked me intently.

“Why don’t you take Hannah for a burger and let her tell you all about it,” said Pastor Ruth. “In which case, Hannah, we will need to find you something suitable to wear.”

She provided me with a nice floral dress, and she put my hair into a bun on top. It was very feminine. For the first time she put some eye makeup and lipstick on me and showed me how to reapply the lipstick. I have to say that when I saw myself in the mirror, it sort of turned off whatever was the male part of me that still survived. I seemed to suddenly become very interested in being pretty.

When Ben saw me, I could see that he was the male. I mean I looked at him differently. He was a man and I was not. The look that he gave me excited me, because he was excited. I realized that I could see it in him. And suddenly I was interested in Ben, in a way a girl might be interested in a guy. I am not going to try to explain it. It might be the hormones, that I was beginning to learn about, and beginning to pour my smoothies down the sink and take my patches off at night. But it might be the other kind of chemistry. You know, the kind between two people.

As he drove me to the restaurant he just talked and talked, and I listened. I just sat there in the passenger seat with my hands in my lap, just agreeing with him, and smiling. I have no idea what it was all about. Instead my head was full of crazy ideas about what it would be like to have Ben have sex with me, if I was a woman.

When we sat down at the restaurant, he asked me to talk about myself. He said: “Is it true that you are not really a girl yet, but just turning into one?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want this, but something is happening to me.”

“I think you are beautiful,” he said.

I cannot properly describe what those simple words did to me. I felt so fantastic it seemed that my heart would explode in my chest. I wanted to jump over the table, grab him by the ears and suck his tongue out of his head. I wanted to tear my clothes off and open my legs … but then, what lay between them?

Instead I found myself blushing, and whispering: “Why, thank you Ben”.

But inside I was a bubbling mess of female desire. I knew that the following day I would have two smoothies, and I would get extra patches from the drawer in Pastor Ruth’s bathroom where I had found her own supplies.

Of course, what happened next was a very long way from what Pastor Ruth intended. The miracle had occurred. I was transformed, to the extent that hormones and prayer could achieve. And what miracles the Lord does not allow the pass, the surgeon can do.

But until then a girl has to make do. There are ways to please a man until the final miracle, and if you love a man as much as I do Ben, his pleasure means everything.

My uncle proudly introduced Hannah to my father, just before Christmas. Of course he was shocked. He would have been more shocked to hear his brother then announce that his son now become his daughter was going to become his sister-in-law, but I got in first.

“Of course, I am going to be happy living as a girl, Daddy,” I said, giving him the reassurance that he asked for. “I am going to be married.”

I could see my uncle smiling in expectation – the evil bastard. I wanted to savor the moment.

“His name is Ben. I love him and he loves me. He is paying for my surgery, and when that is done we are going to be married. You’re going to love him. I have invited him for the family Christmas dinner that I am preparing for the four of us.”

If my uncle was crazy before that day, he fell off the tower of sanity when he saw me smiling at him, as sweetly as a girl like me can do. He never made it to the Christmas dinner. He is now detained in a mental hospital. Apparently, he mutilated himself and believes that God had commanded him to become female and rid the world of men.

At that holiday dinner, the three of us formed a true bond. My father has his son, and his name is Ben. And he has a daughter too – somebody who knows how to look after both of the men in her life.

As for Pastor Ruth, well Ben is no longer a follower, but she is still out there, collection bag in hand, offering miracles.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2020

Author’s Note: This story is more of a spin-off rather that a sequel, to a story I wrote in April last year called “Faith” about the origins of Pastor Ruth and her Church of the Miraculous Transformation. I think that there could be a true sequel from that story too, another spin-off in contemplation, because I think that Pastor Ruth is an interesting character.
But as an aside, I have become involved in an interesting series arising from a site I found called virtuousmodestlady.tumblr.com concerning a cure for homosexuality called the Christian Feminization Academy! I will blog on this soon!