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persuasivetfs · 2 months ago

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Our Lady of Blessed Contentment Part 3

There were many things in Amir Khan’s life that he was not pleased with. His shoestring apartment, his perpetually aching knees, his deep sense of loneliness.

Unmarried, elderly, and as one of the few Muslim residents in town Amir had to make do with what he did have. He had his job as an accountant, his books, his routines and his close personal relationship with God and maybe that was enough.

So it was with sudden disturbance that the elderly Mr. Huang, Amir’s boss at their accounting firm, made a very sudden and public conversion to Christianity. Now this by itself wouldn't have been cause for alarm.

Mr. Huang had been a Buddhist in all the time that Amir had known him, and beyond the statue of Guan Yin he kept on his desk and the occasional day off on Buddhist holidays, Amir hardly would have noticed. He had hoped that little would change, with Mr. Huang’s conversion beyond maybe what days he would have off next.

With this new religion however, came a zealousness that Amir neither expected or wished for. In truth, it scared him. The man had taken to peppering every inch of wall with Bible passages, crucifixes, and artistic scenes from the New Testament.

It made Amir feel as if he’d been kidnapped in the once familiar office, forced to work in the house of a Christian extremist rather than a secular accounting firm. It made him so uncomfortable that Amir was even hesitant to pray as he usually did, fearful that Mr. Huang or somebody else would force him to stop.

And he wasn’t alone in his discomfort either. Several other co-workers, two Buddhists and an atheist, felt similarly about the crowding of Christian imagery in their workspace and met privately to discuss their options.

In time it was decided, that Amir as the most seasoned and loyal employee would meet with Mr. Huang over their concerns. He didn’t like it, but he was willing to do whatever it took to make things bearable at work again.

So it was with quiet trepidation and trembling heart that Amir knocked on Mr. Huang’s door.

“Come in,” Mr. Huang greeted, his voice muffled but much louder than he expected. Amir entered.

Mr. Huang sat calmly at his desk, filling out information on his computer. He looked vastly different than before his conversion.

For one Mr. Huang looked decades younger, his face nearly free of wrinkles, while his bald spot had been covered by a thick crown of wavy brown hair. He smiled.

“What can I do for you Mr. Khan? I hear you have a list of concerns from you and a few of your other co-workers,” he greeted, pausing from his computer with his hands folded on his desk.

“Well, myself and others have grown concerned over the overwhelming nature of Christian imagery in the office. We feel that as a secular accounting office that both employs and receives clients of many faiths that while some displays of your personal faith are acceptable, that what we have now is too much.

”We just ask that some of the Christian imagery is toned down, while asking that you promise to maintain a sense of religious tolerance among staff. I have a list of signatures agreeing to such proposals right here,” Amir explained, revealing a list of 4 signatures including his own.

“May I have a look at that, please?” Mr. Huang asked and Amir obliged, handing it to him. He nodded after examining it.

“Then, I will see to it that everyone on this list feels perfectly comfortable and tolerated working here. We’ll be a solid unit,” Mr. Huang said, getting up from his chair.

It was then that Amir noticed that Mr. Huang not only looked younger than but was slightly taller and far more muscular as well. When he gripped his hand, Amir’s own hand felt small and delicate, as his boss’s which had once mirrored his own in age had gained a flourish of youth and strength.

In the next few days, it was announced that a team building exercise would take place at the local Summer camp on Saturday.

It would consist of Mr. Huang, Amir Khan, Kelly Zhao, Tyre Blake, and David Cheng. It didn’t take long for everyone to deduce that the only people going besides their boss were those who had signed their names on the complaint letter. Amir considered lying about being sick to avoid it, but he felt it’d be wrong if he left his co-workers out to dry while he hid at home so he opted to go.

When the day came and they all drove to the campgrounds, they were all greeted by Lawrence Daniels, a stoic and smooth-talking young man who introduced himself as a kind of guidance counselor.

Also attending to everyone’s surprise was Mr. Huang’s adult son, Eric. The last any of them had seen of Eric he was arguing with his father in the parking lot of their office. Eric had been dressed in a revealing nylon crop top and pair of skinny jeans while covered entirely in body paint. From what Amir could gather, Mr. Huang had bailed Eric out of jail after being caught trespassing with an illegal homosexual night club. Apparently the hope had been that Eric would abandon such foolishness and go back to school so he could work at his father’s company but that very quickly fell through. At least that’s what Amir had thought.

Yet this Eric dressed in a white button down shirt, khaki pants, and upright posture seemed entirely different from the man Amir had known of. This Eric looked like a younger splitting image of his father, similar in rigidity and strength.

Amir followed the pair inside. It was a dining hall with connected lunch tables crowding from one side of the room to the next. As people took their seats at one of the tables, Amir struggled to move his legs, the pain in his old knees was too much.

“Try sitting on the edge next to me, Mr. Khan,” Eric’s charming voice offered. Amir, surprised, did as Eric suggested, sliding in next to him on the corner after Eric comfortably sat down.

“Hello there, welcome everyone. My name is Lawrence Daniels and I’m a pastor at Our Lady of Sacred Contentment Church,” all of them but the priest, Mr. Huang and Eric Huang looked to each other to confirm what had just been said.

Not only had Mr. Huang converted to this priest’s church, but he was most likely just trying to convert them all as well. This possibility drew collective annoyed glares and heavy sighs from the non-Christian participants.

“Alright calm down everybody, I’m only here as a secular facilitator of today’s team-building function, nothing more. Just thought I’d be honest about where most of my work experience as public facilitator has been,” Pastor Daniels admitted, not expecting such resentment.

“It’s quite alright, Pastor. Please continue on,” Mr. Huang said in an authoritative voice.

“I hope I can leave early. My knees are particularly bad today,” Amir whispered to himself. Eric nodded.

“This won’t take long, we’ll be out of here soon,” Eric said with a wink in his direction.

“Now I’ve heard that we’ve had some trouble with disunity around the office. So together we’re going to work through some exercises to improve company cohesion. Now before we start I’d like you all to fill out these brief questionnaire sheets,” Pastor Daniels explained, handing out sheets and pencils to the table.

Amir stared down his questionnaire. It asked him basic questions about his age, his marriage status, his skills, his interests, his faith, his education. His whole life on a single sheet of paper. It didn’t take long for him to finish.

When all the papers were collected, Pastor Daniels skimmed each one before coming to a stop.

“Amir Khan?” Pastor Daniels asked, scanning the room. Amir’s stomach lurched like he had been called on in class.

“Yes, Mr. Daniels?” Amir refused to call him his pastor.

“I’ve noticed a few strange discrepancies on your form. Are you being completely honest with me?” Pastor Daniels asked, pointing at the papers. Amir looked around flabbergasted.

“I have nothing to lie about,” Amir answered with a shrug.

“It says here you’re 67, but that can’t be true. You look about 30,” Pastor Daniels said with the voice of a school teacher impatient with childish pranks.

Amir wanted to counter him but suddenly found that he couldn’t. Years were peeling off his face as the seconds clicked by. His wrinkles were receding, his hair was growing and his body was regaining a sense of vitality he hadn’t felt in ages. Across his face, his wispy gray mustache and well-kept beard had faded and become replaced with a dark and luxurious mustache that Amir felt the sweet urge to twirl between his fingers.

“And here, you say that you are unmarried yet you have a gold wedding ring across your finger. Or is that mere jewelry, Mr. Khan?”

A solid gold ring materialized on Amir’s finger and with it a name, Jasleen. Amir had thought they had lost touch after he emigrated to the United States and yet he remembered that they had married, that she had come with him, and that she was young as he was. In fact, they already had a son and there was another child on the way.

“Nope, proudly married. I wrote that as a joke,” Amir said, half-confused as he tried to save face. Everyone gave him looks that varied between pity and annoyance.

“Maybe try to keep such jokes between friends, right, man?” Eric whispered with pleading eyes.

“Yeah, sorry,” Amir said, awkward and dazed. He vaguely remembered Eric Huang as his boss’s unemployable gay adult son but that was impossible. Eric worked as a major consultant for his father’s accounting firm with the hope to inherit it after Mr. Huang’s retirement and he was engaged to a woman. Eric was one of Amir’s closest friends and yet he couldn’t remember the two working together. Did this mean that Amir never worked there?

“Now for what you wrote for interests, you put math puzzles and reading but that doesn’t sound like you at all. Of all I’ve heard from Eric, you only love football, nutrition, and exercise.”

Amir groaned as his whole body ballooned underneath him. His neck widened, his chest expanded, his arms and legs and torso packed on muscle. While never the most unathletic man in the world, Amir had played tennis in college, he felt larger and more powerful than he had ever felt. Memories of tennis soon gave way into football, and Amir suddenly gained a deep and reverent joy in the sport that had never died with age.

Suddenly his small tweed sweater and corduroy pants felt too small for him, too old for a muscular young man such as himself. Before he could focus too hard on his outfit, he found himself in a snug gray crop top, a pair of nylon shorts and sneakers, as if he was in the middle of a run.

“And with faith, you wrote Islam but as a non-pastor you have one of the strongest and loudest senses of devotion to our church. You’re obviously a deeply pious Christian man,” Pastor Daniels pointed out.

For much of his life Amir’s faith had always been a private matter. A relationship that was intimate and quiet, achieved through reflection and reverence. Made all the more quiet, in such a county where his religion was often regarded as a threat.

Yet in that priest’s voice, Amir felt a sense of electrifying zealotry that he never had before. A devotion that could not be contained in quiet contemplation but had to be shared with all the people of the world.

His new faith too, had come with a sense of community Amir had long craved. Every week, if not more, he could go to church and pray among the throngs of the faithful. No longer isolated, Amir could be as open about his faith as he wished and would often find others in town who shared his views.

“I’m a Christian first before anything else, Pastor. I would never write any other faith as being more important than the one we share,” Amir said, raising his eyes to heaven with the passion of a Sunday preacher.

“Right of course, my apologies. You did write ‘Christian’ here. Never should have thought differently, though there is one other complication, Brother Khan,” Pastor Daniels said, pausing for dramatic effect before he went on. The dining hall was silent. A bug buzzed by the window. Kelly Zhao yawned.

“Why did you fill out this sheet at all? You work as a gym teacher and football coach at the local high school. I still don’t know why you even came in here.” Memories writing and rewriting themselves to fit the current situation blurred into Amir’s mind.

“I was carpooling with Eric to the school gym when he got a text to come here to act as co-facilitator from Mr. Huang. So not wanting to be bored in the car, I tagged along and wrote down some information on one of your forms. Wanted to see how far I'd get before you noticed,” Amir said with an impish grin.

“Why were you heading to the school gym?” Mr. Huang sternly asked Eric who shuffled nervously in his seat.

“It's Saturday at midday, I have the keys, and the basketball team doesn’t practice till 6. Figured we’d have the whole place to ourselves,” Amir admitted, idly twirling his mustache.

“Well Eric, while I still need you here, it should be no harm to take a few minutes to drop Mr. Khan off at the school. Please do so before we have another distraction,” Mr. Huang said, hand waving the pair away.

Both of them grunted as they slid up from their seats, their muscular legs were too large to be able to stand up and out of them.

Amir, for all his new personal history that had just become cemented in his head in the last half hour, still marveled at the fact that his knees, still the weakest part of his body, were strong enough to successfully hold up his massive new weight.

Eric let out a sigh of relief as the pair left the dining hall behind.

“Thanks for trying to make my Dad’s team building exercise interesting, Amir. Though probably not the best to make jokes when my Dad’s trying to bring people into the fold,” Eric said politely as Amir swaggered out in his muscular new form.

“You’re welcome, bro. I find that adding humor in discussions of faith, improves everybody’s mood and can help make people more amenable to the word of God,” Amir said, confidently.

“You also work with teenage boys everyday. So what works with them might not work with my co-workers, or my father,” Eric said, dreading the future argument they would have. Eric unlocked the car from a distance.

”You think Pastor Daniels is really going to successfully convert the Sinners back there?” Amir asked, twirling his mustache with deep satisfaction.

In the walk to Eric’s car, Amir noticed an old gray Saturn that felt uncannily familiar. It was a small, old car, seperate from the others, probably abandoned. Amir quickened his pace, unnerved, only satisfied until they reached Eric’s own Jeep.

“He hasn’t failed yet,” Eric answered, getting into the driver’s seat. “Honestly, I have no idea how those pastors at our church do it. It worked on my father and our family, and you know how obstinate he is.”

“They’re really building a new world. God’s heavenly kingdom on Earth and we all get to be a part of it,” Amir said with a grin and a mighty flex of his muscular arm before he got inside the passenger's seat. Eric started the car.

“We’ll have to see about that,” Eric answered quickly, so quickly he hoped Amir didn’t hear. The man didn’t seem to notice, smiling with unaware bliss as he twirled his mustache.

In the coming days and weeks, Amir quickly solidified himself as both a major aid and hindrance of Wentworth Falls Public High School. On one hand, the man was an excellent football coach, encouraging his players to victory in a way they haven’t seen all season. However, Amir was also proving to be a major source of controversy. While once afraid to do so much as pray in public as a Muslim, as a Christian in the United States, Amir was emboldened to invoke Jesus and the Church, even to the point of working to convert some of his students.

While this new Amir had come to lack the eloquence of people like Pastor Daniels or the quiet subtlety of Pastor Agosti, he was able to utilize his position to convert young wayward souls to the Church as Pastor Carter would do once the Church basketball team was set up.

Many in the school’s admin were opposed to such open proselytizing in a public school, and tried to use threats of suspension to force Amir to stop, but certain conservative religious and private interests blocked any real chance of that happening. The influence of Our Lady of Sacred Contentment was growing. It was only just the beginning.

#mental change #male transformation #hypnosis #christian #jockification #age regression #OLSC

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