For years now, I guess about 7 or 8, I have been wanting to talk about, tell, something that happened to me one night. I have only told family members about it since I’m not very good at standing up and talking in front of people or telling things to people. I guess I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me.

I have sleep apnea. I don’t know if you know what that is, but that’s where when you lay down on your back to sleep the muscles that hold up your soft palette at the back of your throat relax so much that the palette itself collapses downward and completely blocks your airway and totally shuts down and closes your airway. In other words, you stop breathing. It is dangerous and can kill you. I did consult a doctor about this. I do not think I could sleep with one of the breathing machines they use so I sleep with the head of my bed raised and try to stay on my sides. As long as my head is raised and I’m on my sides I am okay.

However, one night before I realized what was going on with me, I went to sleep one night and somehow must have gotten off my side and into a position that was not safe.  I woke up suddenly and was in a different place.

I remember feeling a slight tinge of fear but was mostly confused, thinking where am I?? All around me was nothing but deep blackness until suddenly I could see this spiral of beautiful, puffy white clouds spiraling off into the distance. I did not want to look at the far distant end of the spiral because I had this sudden knowledge that if I looked at it, there would be no going back. Somehow I just knew that. Don’t know how, but I just did, but I was not given a choice. I had to look at the end of the spiral, and so I did.

Next, let me say that I had no physical sensation at all. I was fully awake, fully conscious, but there were no physical sensations. I had no awareness of a body.

To get back to where I was, as soon as I looked at the end of the spiral of clouds, I was in the other place, but this one was different. This beautiful, beautiful light was everywhere. It glistened and shone like nothing I have ever seen. But the light was alive. There was an intelligence or presence inside the light. Like nothing I have ever experienced.

It was so bright it almost hurt to look at it and the colors of the rainbow were moving through it constantly. It was so bright that I turned to look away, but again, I was not given a choice. I had to look at the light so I did.

When I turned to look at it again, suddenly it felt like somebody had taken me and thrown me as hard as they could up against a brick wall. There was this really hard boom, and I was back inside my body. Totally awake but back inside of my body going “What just happened to me.”

I laid there for a few minutes, thinking about what I had just seen and experienced. I moved around a little trying to get my bearings back and then decided the only thing it could have been was for a few minutes or less, because it happened so quickly, so very quickly, is I think I died! It is the only explanation I can think of.

I believe for a very few brief seconds, I was allowed to see some of the glory of the Living God. The light was beautiful beyond words. I wish everyone could have seen it. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

The only reason I wanted to tell this is I hope it will reassure everyone that there really is life after death, and that God is more beautiful than any of my weak human words could ever express.

I pray that the living God Himself will bless your day and your whole life and that you can get to know Him better. He really does love you very, very much. God Bless You.

Just thought you would like to look at some pretty pictures of the colors of fall. I wrote a poem about Autumn. Here it is.

Autumn

Autumn does not fall as
Leaves do to the ground.
With finger to lip, a hush,
she simply turns and
Whispers Good-bye.

Wearing her soft slippers
Made of the finest weave
Of a grass still green
but tipped so slightly with her
Warmer yellows,

She slips away, intending to
Leave a place for her fellow,
Frosty as he is, they are still companions
One to the other.

But, oh, while she is here,
Throwing herself upon the summer’s palette
With abandonment, flinging onto everything
Within her reach.

She comes not to wither or destroy
Desiring only to remind that
everything must rest, strength to renew
For another year’s turn at life.

Some quiescent have laid, waiting for
Their mistress to return, to spring to
Their full life again. To each a moment she
Brings, these quiet ones, her children.

So she paints and paints and then paints more
Giving herself away freely, gleefully.
Joyfully she leaves her spirit, touching each
With her warmth and flame

In tones of warm golds, burning within the hottest fires,
Scarlets and oranges, awakening
A glory hidden, unobserved, now freed
Beneath the tearing, removal of
Summer’s cloak and hoods of green.

 Paul  in Corinthians says ‘I appeal to you brothers and sister, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought’.

And again a few verses later, he asks ‘Is Christ divided?’

I do not believe the church was ever meant to be divided at all, not even into two groups. It weakens its influence and credibility. For people trying to seek Christ, it confuses them as to which group to join!!!

Today’s Christian churches needs to stand even more united than ever against the lures that Satan uses out in the secular world.

His last night on earth Christ prayed ‘I pray for all of those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in You.

John 17: 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—-I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.

With only one God the Father, one God the Son, one God the Holy Spirit, our Savior’s cross was meant to unify us and make us one.

Today in church, I heard a pastor pouring out his heart and spirit into a message about the Holy Spirit. I honestly felt sorry for him. You could tell he was very earnest about what he was saying, and sadly seeming to get very little response from the audience. Today’s pastors have a hard job so if you have a scripturally correct and Spirit filled one, we should give them our support and enthusiasm.

Today’s church especially in America is under a full attack from the secular culture around us. We get so caught up in the physical level of existence that we do not embrace the spiritual that as a church we should reach for. American Christians get so bombarded almost every minute of the day by advertising, the media such as television, magazines, radio and movies.

As American Christians we need to embrace totally the power of the Holy Spirit as God intended for us. To put Christ, God and His Spirit first in our lives every day, all day long, not just on a Sunday morning. We have to live in the world but were never meant to live as it lives or be a part of it the way non-believers do. We have to turn our backs on that way of life and be Christian first above everything.

Christ came to give us life abundantly and all of God’s spiritual blessings He means to lavish on us as spoken about in the first book of Ephesians.

It is a struggle to live in our culture and still try to embrace Christ fully the way we were intended to. Pray earnestly for His help. When you seek me with all your heart, you will find me. He wants to be found. Won’t you search today and find the joy and treasure that the love and presence of Christ can be in your personal life.

Christ is our Rock and only Savior. He is the love and joy that everyone longs for and that can be found nowhere else. Praise God for his goodness in sending Christ our way. The Holy Spirit is the guide we need and the only one we truly have to get us back into the relationship we were always meant to have with our Creator Lord. Praise God for sending us His Spirit to meet our needs.

In order to know a full, right relationship with God and Christ, we have to let the Holy Spirit have full control of us so that it is not I that liveth  but Christ that liveth in me. The apostle Paul was right. All he did was done through the power of the Holy Spirit. No man could have endured all the hardships he went through without the help of God. I can do all things through Christ(and his Spirit) who strengths me.

I agree with Billy Graham(written in one of his books about the Holy Spirit) and Watchman Nee in his writings. Until you crucify your old man, kill your old nature and self, on that cross of Christ, no human will get to know the full power of the living Spirit of God. We will never do that perfectly, but we should struggle every day to let the Holy Spirit live inside of us.

The cross was meant to give us a second chance at life, to right a relationship gone wrong when in that Garden of Eden we spit in God’s face and said, No, I want to do it my way and rebelled against our gracious, loving Creator. We have to give His Spirit control of our lives as best we can.

Christ through His Spirit can give us more joy, peace and love than anything down here.  There is no amount of money, power, ego, material possessions or sex that satisfies the way He does. It is the truth, not a spiritual myth or something that will happen only after you die. It can be for you, right now, today.

It does not necessarily mean he will change your circumstances, only that He can give you the joy of His presence in the middle of this garbage this world can throw at you. Won’t you turn to Him today before today no longer exists? He loves you more than you can even begin to imagine.

I came into the world as one of the least of the least—an orphan, unloved and unwanted by anybody—-except by Christ and His Holy Father. My earliest memories are only of fear and terror and extreme emotional pain and hopelessness. But, and it is a big but, somehow God reached down for me. I was blessed. As a young child, I can remember laying down in the grass and somehow feeling a presence with me in the sky above. As my life unfolded, bad times come to everyone, I realize now it was the presence of the Holy Spirit of the Living God that was giving me comfort. I have seen days when I felt the only love I had was the love of a dying carpenter hung on a cross over 2000 years ago. I was semi-suicidal at the age of 17!

But that presence stayed with me and when the darkness came for me as well, somehow I knew to look up and there He was in all of his glory and power. I love the words in Joshua and Hebrews that say ‘Never will I leave you, Never will I forsake you. Christ is my rock and my hope. I pray He can be yours as well