You see, while I walked the woods that night, searching for the predictable and likely outcome of physics—two bullets, both squarely placed within the heart/lung area of that deer, shredding him terribly, bleeding profusely, having lost more than enough blood to already be dead—something equally unlikely and unpredictable occurred. It went beyond the science of one-plus-one-equals-two, yet nonetheless added perfectly in me: I heard Him; deep within the recesses of my mind, a small still voice that said,
“This is the way;”
—clearly, but as a solemn command and with the most serious tone, the voice of the little old man. Aha, I heard him in my mind.
“Insanity,” says you.
“Perhaps,” says I.
. . . But the mind; the boiler room of all i-magi-nation; the forge of all reality; and in it, if you choose to listen, the most important things of all. It is the most unprovable place, yet the very thing that we use all-day, every-day. Yes, inside my mind I heard Him:
“Go to the hillside and find the sacrifice that I made for you since before the foundations of the world”
Hmmm, I thought. What hillside? I mean, really, all we have here is hillsides. But I went anyway, obediently, to where my instinct led.
Once there I actually found a blood trail that I had tracked earlier in the day but opted not to track again as I already knew its outcome. Not knowing what to do next, I simply sat down and became still, listening for something else, another clue, another voice in my increasingly ruined sanity, anything would have been nice—but instead, nothing.
There I stayed for over an hour until convinced of my own madness, I gave up and went home, chalking up the experience to bad luck and the seemingly imperfect and random dimension in which we live. I think what bothered me most however, is that a wounded animal was suffering. I hated that feeling.
The next morning was Sunday and I awoke with a feeling of guilt. I considered that maybe life wasn’t all about the food; that maybe the animals that I ate had a mind and soul as well, that maybe the proverbial “sacrifice” also felt and feared. Thus I arose and searched the same area as before, desperately seeking to conclude something that once seemed so natural but now condemned the very depth of my soul. I walked for miles, scanning every patch of brush and retracing the original trails until finally accepting the futility of my actions. Like it or not, I had failed, but hunts are sometimes that way.
So, that was then, but now over two weeks had transpired and sooner or later you let go and move on. Farm work typically slowed during the winter, so I resorted to hauling dirt and rock on the weekends to help pay the bills. One such job found me at a new home literally on the other side of the county and in an area I’d never been.
It was beautiful country with steep winding roads and a grandiose bluff that overlooked a river. The owner needed a pile of dirt moved to another location, but he was late so I parked in his driveway at the top of the hill. There I shut off the engine of the truck and waited, enjoying the scenery and peace.
After about 20 minutes however, I began to wonder how much slower one could be, that and now my contact wasn’t answering his phone. Here I was on my own clock and trying to pay my bills but thanks to him, was accomplishing nothing. I pondered the rudeness of making one wait. But suddenly my thoughts shifted from a mild frustration to the realization that something wasn’t quite right; something suddenly felt wrong. For lack of a better description I will simply say that the moment became still, -eerily still. The wind quit blowing and the birds stopped chirping. There was nothing but pure silence. You could have heard a pin drop from a mile away. It was ominously quiet both outside and, somehow, inside my mind.
Then it happened: I could literally begin to hear, no—not hear—but feel the words rise within my being. That same familiar voice:
So you still think you’ve got it all figured out, huh? That somehow this has all been an accident—the lost deer, the sacrifice I intended for you? You say you believe, yet doubt what I have accomplished. You desire respect, yet are unwilling to give respect to what I have given you. You see the high and mighty; you detest the blindness in others but yourself fail to see what I have set in motion even in this life.
Somehow you still think, in your arrogance, that you know what is best, and after everything I’ve shown you? You flaunt the story of a little old man, and I know you desire to see me again, yet are oblivious to the work I have done in front of you every day. You wish for others to reach beyond this world yet yourself seem unable to see or hear beyond your own physical senses . . . and by doing-so, you trivialize My power and ability. You fail to appreciate the true gifts I have given. You fail to see the very thing that you insist of others—to see Me. Yet you, in your own vanity, wish not to be questioned? Who are you?
So strong, so undeniable was the voice, the conviction, that I hung my head in shame during almost this whole time; but the realization continued:
It is the gospel of “you” that leads to destruction. You know it is evil [and in that moment I did realize it], as though somehow there was ever a separate “you” with which to contend—or maybe you want the gospel of “Me” and “you,” That way you can take the blame for what seems to go wrong, while giving me the credit for the good,…but therein is still the evil you, unwilling to cede total control of where you find yourself. Seldom though have I heard you say; just God, regardless of the outer circumstance. You either trust that I am the path set before you or you don’t. You don’t know as much as you think or pretend.
Did I not tell you before, that everything in your life has happened for a reason, everything, and that I was there all along, forming you to My reason, and My good will? So what will it take to get you to believe the real depths of what I do and have done? I will tell you that you are not here to haul dirt, but that perhaps the dirt exists in your own unbelief. Raise your head—now, and see the sacrifice that I have prepared for you since the beginning, the life I have ruined for you, that you might understand. For if he had not been exactly who he was, you could not be exactly who you are: the man I need you to be in this day. Receive the one whose blessing I took, that you could become what you must be for Me. He is My sacrifice…for you…Be not unthankful, for the work that I have done.
And at that very moment I raised my head to see something that should not have been where it was, this far from home and on a Saturday. The sight was beyond what should have been or could have been. My God! It was not only unlikely, but impossible. A little truck headed up the road in my direction—not just any truck mind you, but a raspberry Blazer, slowly made its way, turned, and pulled straight up to where I was sitting.
I was choking up as this went way beyond a coincidence or mere voices in my head. There he sat, I could see even through the glare on the windshield, my dear old dad, himself, eyes welled with tears, hoping against hope that I would come and speak to him. Trembling now from this undeniable miracle, this unfathomable occurrence, I ran and opened his door. I could not reach him fast enough.
Having not been spared the rod of correction from my heavenly father, I humbly embraced my earthly father in appreciation for the sacrifice he’d been, myself seeing things through a different lens: the optics of faith and understanding, certainly, in this capacity, for the very first time. Never in my life was I so glad to see him as we both stood there unashamed to share the sniffles of Joy.
However, the change in that moment was not within him so much as it was within myself, in my understanding of what I had missed about the facts. It was not what my father had been doing wrong but rather what God had been doing right all along. And to think that I had completely mistaken the point.
The little old man had set me straight and I loved it. It was a voice from beyond the portal that had somehow reached across to teach me this unfinished lesson. A voice had led my father as well that day to the most unlikely place: a remote road in the remote countryside where neither of us was likely to be and had never been before or since.
But you never know about Faith, who will hear its calling and who will not. That day at least, one of us, my dad, had listened a little closer than had I. He was never the religious type, but had learned to listen to a deeper instinct within. It is a small thing, a small still wind that whispers, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
Yet it taught me to listen a little closer too, to believe in where I was and what, perhaps, God was doing in my life. That no matter how “good” or “bad”, happy or sad; to not call it vanity or madness, but instead the reasoning of God which far exceeds all expectations of man. It is not the hill where we would go in life, but rather the hill where the spirit leads us that matters.
It is not as we would have it be, roaming high above the clouds in a dream, the ideal life, but as He wills in every moment of every day. Therein is where the Joy and, for now, the Glory is to be found. And if we could only see that servitude to Faith is indeed the beginning of freedom and the perfect life that we all ultimately seek. In the end, to see as God sees will bring the real miracle of flight of which we dream.
Like the gold that is tried in fire, I too was being purified for what would shortly occur in my own life. God’s refiner, His Word, was destroying all that could be destroyed in me so that only that which could not be destroyed would remain . . . Listen well my friends, to that small still voice of love, peace and the direction of God . . .
Through this experience I learned many things. I felt the profound depth of God’s love, His unfathomable power even on this side of the portal, the stillness of His voice and His desire that we put aside the negativity that this world brings. It is here that I see the fallacy of becoming entangled in the darkness of the physical. I speak of the human life; its never-ending drama, constant problems, fighting, arguing, and discontent.
Indeed we are in this world but not of it. The spirit of God is in you, in your imagination and this is who you truly are. And though the Element of Faith can reach beyond our physical-senses, it also brings rhyme and reason while here. In turn, realizing this truth is the very tool we need to survive in the now. That there is more to come is indisputable, yet for now believe that we are already 100 percent exactly where we are supposed to be in Faith, in Him. This is God’s perspective.
Yet even after all I’ve seen in Heaven and Earth, here and there, I still can’t say which is more beautiful: the glory of the eternal or the precious sacrifice that we are in this world for one another. One is forever, the other temporal, yet one is nothing without the other; something must die in order for something else to live, thus both realities have their place, the lesser bringing life as food for the greater.
It disappoints me, I suppose, considering our time here is so short and so precious, to yet see so many people who waste each day in the doom of unbelief, always forfeiting the riches of love in the moment for dreams of another day. Why is it we holdout for the Cinderella dream instead of seeing that the perfect mate is God in the moment?
The next moment in our lives here is never guaranteed; thus do you really want to waste the ones you do have? The magic is always in the moments, and in them we shall all be changed (see 1Corinthians 15:52). Though foolishness to this world, believing in the moment that God sets before us is in fact the beginning of wisdom and the road that leads to the portal.
To see this requires a change of perspective. Repentance, it is said, is a mere changing of one’s mind, a choice to turn our back on the old way and come face to face with the new. It means deciding on what we are going to believe and call reality. In this we stretch beyond the brutality of this physical world, standing before the threshold of Heaven, the breeze of liberty upon our face. Yet it is a conscious choice that begins the process of transformation.
Many times each day that choice must be made inside your heart and mind, to see what God sees, to choose what God chooses, and to allow His mind and will to become one and the same as yours. And that, my friend, is the science of defeating death: by ignoring the outward circumstances, no matter how obvious or treacherous they may be. One must look through the physical, past the veil, and into the divine reasoning. As crazy as it may sound, turning your back on the seemingly obvious and accepting this deeper reasoning is the only way to eternal life.
The day will come however, I promise, that the struggle of seeing beyond will end. The time will arrive when those who believe, that is, the inner-man, will simply walk out, rather, ascend-out of the dimension in which we find ourselves—a New Earth at first, but then through the portal and into our Heaven. Yet even the portal is opened by the magic of believing and this was the key all along: believing itself, is the key to the power of God.
And while the magi built Faith into the Word, God built it into you. There is nothing, no circumstance that believing upon the Faith-Element can’t overcome. In the now, no mountain is too tall, no problem insurmountable. It heals all things, transcending the past, the present, and the future, and with it, a peace that goes beyond all understanding.
It really is a sacrifice—the forfeiture of one life and one reality. Everything that you know and believe and see and feel in this world—you have to let it go, all of it. It seems impossible, but it isn’t, and as the divine-source trusts our intentions and works, things will accelerate in these end times. The rate at which Faith changes things will increase and the results will quicken. It will get easier though, I promise.
Faith is not an abstract concept, yet neither is it an attribute of the human. Faith is not a possession of self-will and determination. Faith is not natural; it is super-natural. It is the person of God incarnate, the very real Element that lives within us; the remnant-source that melded into the world all those eons ago just after the portal closed.
In this world, for now, there is just a tiny bit of that light in each and everyone and everything, but it is the same light that I remember from the other side. It only exists in small doses but is still, by far, the most powerful substance in existence. Thus it only takes a little to do the job, just a drop, but we are all in fact drops of God in one another’s life just as my father was in mine.
Indeed Faith is the new tangible; the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: It chooses for us the path we take at every cross-roads; it separates what appears to be real from that which God says is real. It is a match-maker of the impossible. It can bring a raspberry truck to the most unlikely place, a little old man to the mind of a reckless youth, and even open the portal that will save the world.
For what it’s worth, I saw the exact same deer the next year, ironically not limping, but running across the field by my house. My father passed away the very next day . . .
Faith heals all things. It is the infallible Element and Substance of God.
Flash Backs
My Transition to the Past
The Destruction of the Temple
“I have remembered the days of old, the years of
ancient times.”—Psalms 77:5
Many decades have passed since then. Now I sit alone with naught but silver hair and memories that span the ages. No doubt I am a man fallen from the graces of the world. The cabin is as old and run-down as myself, seemingly as broken and sad, a gray relic of a more carefree time. Eventually I lost it all: money, gone; divorced of wife and largely shunned of family. Now I sit as an eccentric: “The strange old man who lives back on the hill” is how they know me.
Everything was so simple before I met the little old man. I remember the farm and the years of my youth. I reflect upon those days with pleasant imagination yet know full well why they departed. Life is funny that way, here one day with joy and newness; the next, health and happiness a thing of the past. He took what I had from me, the status quos of this world: normal views, normal desires, and normal goals.
The best laid plans, of course, but my former aspirations were fleeting; my love for land, wealth, and good fortune are gone. Yet these were all replaced with things far better than that which the eye ca
n see. My daughter envisioned it many years before. From the mouth of babes: at only 12 years old, she awoke one morning, sobbing from the memory of a sad dream. She walked at a ridged pace straight to the kitchen where I readied breakfast.
As she neared I could tell she was crying. She hugged me tight and told of her terrible visions. In them many years had passed. It was a dreary scene, cloudy and cold, the leaves gone amidst the dead of winter. The farm lie in tatters and now myself at the bottom of the hill as I labor to cross the drive and dam of the lake. Where I was going, she could not tell…
She noted as I recall, near silence in her dream, all except the stark sound of a tap . . .tap . . .tap—my cane as I walked upon the gravel, each step the struggle of a worn and elderly man. I lived in solitude. Disregarded; my value to friend, family, and the world long gone.
“You were all alone except our shepherd,” she sobbed.
The scene of her dream now switched to the cabin, itself devoid of all furniture but a single lowly bed, the haunting echoes of emptiness adding to this dreary stage. I know full well the creaks of the floor and the music of the whistling wind between the logs. There she recalled, I lay in that bed, held by a monster who desperately tried to kill me. It was an evil, dark being, and very powerful. Each night it screamed a most fearful bellow in an attempt to extinguish my life.
She said I was subjected to this demonic barrage for years. Sobbing in great heaves, she said, “No one would help.” Little did she know, that no one could help. True to form, for decades, night after night its weighty burden was laid upon my mind. Though its power can no longer hold me, I recall many restless hours; often I tossed and screamed as one who burns in a fire, my regrets, paying dearly for my lack of insight and a wrongly directed belief in this world, every ounce of human self-esteem and identity stripped away.
The Book of Daniel and the Mystery of the Resurrection Machine Page 11
