Is it Supernatural

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:33:10 -0500

Is It Supernatural

In this document, I will explore whether any of the experiences we have had are supernatural. This is an interesting and valid question to examine. We are very spiritually minded people, and our dreams could easily be an extension of our studies and activities. Though many of the dreams are odd and at times contain a strange amount of wisdom or insight into things we might be studying from Scriptures, still that does not necessarily mean that these are messages directed to us from God. Over time, I have extended a fair amount of energy trying to determine two things:

1. Is the dream or experience supernatural?
2. If so, how can I determine the message is inspired by God?

By far, the second question is the more interesting and important inquiry, never the less it is appropriate to examine the extent by which we can determine if there is a high probability that the dreams are from a supernatural source.

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Is It Supernatural.pdf

In the State of Refuge, a.k.a: Coming under the Wings of the Divine Presence

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:28:31 -0500

In a State of Refuge
Version 1.0

Growing up in the United States, the concept of needing or seeking a refuge can be quite foreign. My family was part of the lower middle class, and my parents needed to be careful while spending money, however basic safety and security was simply an assumed component for our standard of living. Examining the world of my children, we have increased our standards of living from a financial perspective, but in all practical terms safety and security seems to have become more and more elusive each day. As I write this, Mumbai India has experienced a terrorist attack that in some part is focused on Westerners. Though far away, these events are brought right into our immediate consciousness, our homes, via TV and the Internet.

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In a State of Refuge.pdf

Laodicea in a Strawberry Patch

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:17:23 -0500

An experience from the Summer of 2007

In the spring of this year my wife and I decided to plant strawberry plants in our garden. The wonderful thing about gardening is that the space takes on a life of it’s own. My wife and I are not exceptionally talented gardeners, and the space is mostly one big biological experiment.

Our plan for the strawberries was to lay down plastic mulch, to reduce the weeds, and then plant through the mulch. The theory was that because the patch would be producing for a number of years, the plastic would greatly reduce weed growth. Well, now with a little experience, I can advise that this is not the best laid plan for working a future strawberry patch, but now we will have this construction for the next 4-5 years or so.

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Laodicea in a Strawberry Patch.pdf

Painted out of a corner

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 09:05:14 -0500

Sometimes you may have heard the term: “Painted into a Corner”, well in this story I am going to relate the opposite, and pose that we consider the spiritual applications of this real life experience.

I enjoy carpentry and woodworking. When I bought my home, I decided after a few years to replace the carpeting with wood floors. While finishing a floor, you can actually understand where the saying: “Painted into a Corner” might come from. It is not very challenging, but when you go to apply finish to a wood floor, you do need to take a second or two to plan your application strategy, such as: start in the closet, work across the windows, cover the back of the room, and make sure you finish at the doorway out of the room. If you don’t follow at least a simple plan, you could find that you have literally painted yourself into a corner. In this context, you have stranded yourself without an exit out of the room. Thus the phrase often comes to mean stranding yourself in a discussion or position through a lack of planning, insight, or wisdom.

When I was younger, in the summer between one college graduation and the start of an engineering curriculum in Boston, I had a job painting homes for a hospital. The hospital owned many homes, and rented them out to their employees. While a number of them were empty, I had the opportunity to paint in preparation for new renters.

One day I was painting a large living room with a fireplace. I was on the trim, and had come to the corner of the room. When I was ready to start the corner, I noticed that there was a spider living in the corner. So, I took him out and placed him on the wooden floor and then started painting where he had been. I soon finished the corner, and looked back at where I had placed the spider. I quickly became worried that I had injured him. I could see his legs moving, but he was slowly turning in a circle.

Looking closer and closer at the spider, I became confused. I got right up close, only a few inches away from his body. On one side, the spider had long legs, maybe an inch long, while on the other side it seemed that he had no legs at all. As I focused closer, I could see that in fact he did have legs on both sides of his body, but on the side which must have been “up in the corner”, he had the tiniest of little legs. So small in fact, that once he was out of the corner, his legs could not even reach the floor. I watched the perfectly formed little legs try to move forward in concert with the perfectly formed extra long legs, but this only resulted in the slowly moving circular path. And so, he just turned in circles on the floor in front of me.

I felt heart broken as I looked back at his corner. There was no way I could return him to his original home. The paint was wet in the corner, and he would not be able to return. He had stayed so isolated in his little corner that when moved even just a little, he was not prepared. All of his faculties had been developed based upon his little corner home. His perspective was never challenged until I came and moved him.

What happens if we are brought out of our comfort zone, moved to a new perspective, challenged by God. What will happen when I am: “Painted Out of a Corner.”

Two Fixed Points

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In this dream I am outside looking up into the night sky. After looking for a few moments, I go inside a house. My Father and my uncle are there inside the house. I say: “Jesus is coming! Come look at the night sky!”

My Father agrees to go look, while my uncle says: “Jesus is not coming, that is a bunch of nonsense. I am not going outside.”

At this point my Father and I go out of the house. We walk away from the house and look up. I see two stars which are large and very bright. They are positioned close to each other, if you were to hold your index finger and thumb at arms length, they are maybe an inch apart. The star on my left has a yellow halo around it, while the star on my right has a red halo around it. These two points are fixed in the sky, while every other visible star seems to be moving around them.

I also see colors go moving across the sky. The one color in the sky which sticks in my mind is red, and it is like millions of small red dots which move across the sky like swarming flocks of birds. The red dots seem to move through the heavens and around the stars in an unpredictable but fluid manner.

I look over at my Father, and his mouth has completely dropped open, and he looks like he is in shock. I woke at this point.

I remember thinking when I awoke that something has changed, perhaps the change was in me, or with the world, but I thought that something was now different.

Meteor Strikes

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In this dream I am outside, upon a hill, looking into a valley. Down in the valley, there is a village, and the one home I see is a white farmhouse. Between me and the village is a forest with many dark green pine trees. They are not White Pine, these are short needle trees, and dark green. I remember seeing tress like these recently on a trip to Keen, NH.

As I turn my gaze from the village to look up into the sky, I see balls of fire come from the sky. Some of the balls break into multiple pieces as they descend. One of the balls hits the ground at the site of the village, and I see the white farmhouse disappear. At, and after, the impact is the ground completely scorched. When the ball of fire strikes the earth, I sense a tumbling, disintegrating, kind of activity. The other objects are striking all around.
As I watch these objects, I am trying to figure out what they are. My first thought is that they don’t look like any weapon I have ever seen. My second is that they seem to be falling too slowly to be a meteor. They are coming down fast, but I would expect a meteor to strike the earth more like a bullet, and these I can track as the fall. They are coming in at about a 45 degree angle from my perspective.

As I am contemplating these objects, I suddenly get a realer-than-real close-up view of one. My view is tracking with the object. So I am traveling with it, at the same speed, and able to see it as it comes through the atmosphere. The scene must be in slow motion, because I can watch the flames slowly move on the outside of the object. I can not see exactly what is within the flames. It is shaped like a russet potato, kind of oblong and a bit lumpy. The interesting thing is that I can clearly see a fire mushroom shaped compression cloud at the front of the object. This makes me quite certain that the object is traveling through our atmosphere. Also, I come to the conclusion that it is a meteor of some sort. But it must be unstable, or not completely structurally sound throughout, as some do break up while still in the air, and at least one of the ones I saw hit the earth broke into a tumbling action when it hit the ground.

After this, some of the objects were striking closer to me. I am suddenly in a metal chamber. It is like being inside of a cooking pot. The extremes are rounded, and it looks like stainless steel. One of the objects strikes outside and in front of the direction I am facing. From the inside, I cannot see it. But, I have an outside view as well as inside, kind of a simultaneous awareness of both locations. Fire strikes the outside of the chamber, the fire moves in a strange way. There is a burning at the fringes, which spreads across the surface of the metal, and grows as a line of fire in all directions. Perhaps I am seeing this in slow motion, because I can see this all happen.
One the inside of the chamber, I slowly move around the interior of the metal, staying away from the hot surface. I say to myself, or think this through… “these are not intended to hit me, it came close but it was not aimed at me.” I am reassured by this thought, and think that there is more to come. The metal is hot where the outside “line of fire” is moving, but cools off quickly to either side of this moving line.

I believe that I awoke around this time.

Ship to the Storm

Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:57:29 -0500

Ship to the Storm
Approximately 11/25/07

My wife and I are on a white ship. This is a sturdy ship, which could be brought into the antarctic ocean. It is designed like a research vessel, not too large, but very sea worthy. My wife and I are on the deck, the ocean is rough, but no waves are coming over the deck. We are moving on the front deck when suddenly a klaxon alarm starts sounding. There is a red flashing light up high to the left of us. When the alarm starts my wife and I move forward to a horizontal bar which is approximately 5 inches in diameter and is mounted to the deck at either end by similar bars. When we reach the bar, I wrap my right arm around a cotton rope which is tied to the bar, then put my left arm around my wife. This is where we are going to ride out the storm. A large wave is before us and we crest it. As we come off the crest, my vision is pulled up and off of the deck, and I see the ocean in front of us from a 3rd person perspective. I rise a few hundred feet off of the deck, and what I see in front of us defies explanation. I expect to see a storm, even a very bad storm. Instead, the ocean is simply missing in front of us. I see a large bowl shaped section of the ocean missing, it appears to be a couple miles across and over a mile deep. Large 50 foot waves are moving laterally to the sides of the bowl. The turmoil in this part of the ocean is so hard to describe, I contemplated writing up this part of the dream for days but still could not come up with a description of what is in front of us.

As we passed over the lip of this water bowl, my vision returned back to the deck of the ship. We quickly gained speed as we came down the side of the bowl. About 1/3rd of the way down, I turn to my wife and say “I think we are in trouble”. It was not a fearful moment, I just recognized that if we keep speeding up the ship will simply break apart when we reach the bottom.

About 1/2 down the side, the ocean begins to change. The water is quickly becoming colder and slushy, and the added friction against the ship hull starts to slow down the ship. By the time we near the bottom of the bowl, the water is very thick and slushy. I know at this point that the ship will survive. However, when reaching the bottom the entire ship slips as if in slow motion under the ocean.

I am so shocked that I wake, or kind of wake. Everything seems to slow down, I see a large bubble rise to the surface of the ocean, I know that the ship will come back up. The question is how to survive. I consider that the water is so cold that when the ship comes back up, we could be resuscitated. Then I think, “no, perhaps we should have taken medication before the ship goes under the water”. As I truly start to wake, I realize that the only way to survive is to be inside the ship, and I see a chamber inside the ship. It is a wood paneled sitting room. The atmosphere inside the ship is calm.

Finally, I realize that this is a symbolic “YE in ME” moment. Being associated with Christ will not be enough for my family to survive this crisis. Only by being integrated and grafted into the true vine will there be sufficient grace to survive this crisis.

YE in ME

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Ye in Me
10/31/07

A blank white computer screen is in front of me. On the left upper corner of the screen it says in large letters: YE in ME nnnnn. The “YE in ME” was spelled very clear. I also feel like a voice read the message, but this is a bit fuzzy. The “nnnnn” was an additional word which was after the ME. I lie in bed trying to see this last word. It was like seeing it at the periphery of your vision. I also woke up, I think the voice woke me up. As I lie in bed contemplating the last word, it strikes me that it is “.org”. I see this as an answer to a prayer for the dream website, and jump up to write to Brother S.

The Wheels Keep Turning a.k.a. A Leaf on the Wind

Mon, 8 Oct 2007 23:40:49 -0400

This is a real life experience in the Fall of 2007.

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Jonah on a Grape Vine

Sat, 1 Sep 2007 22:23:36 -0400

Jonah on a Grape Vine is a real life experience which occurred in my garden, late summer 2007.

Please click the image below to download the PDF file.