Heaven and Our Son's Experience



Morning After



Our son, Sam has always had a thing with Jesus.  When he was only two years old I was reading a Little Golden Book about Jesus to him.  He would wave at the drawings of Jesus at every turn of the page.  I didn’t encourage him, he did it himself. 

Over the years (he is now eight) he has had a faith that is strong.  When his tummy hurt, he’d ask me to pray for it to be better and he’d walk away from me confident that it would be.  It would. 

In a car ride to go boating with friends, the sky got dark and it began to downpour and a storm seemed to be ending our plans.  He sat in his child car seat, folded his little hands, bowed his head and clenched his eyes tightly shut as he prayed asking God, "Please, make the storm go away."  The clouds parted and there were blue skies.  It impacted one of our friends in the car so much that he wrote a blog post about the faith of Sam. 

Our son has often said things that were always spot on at the moment needed. One of those times I was in quiet prayer early in the morning and asking the LORD to help me be more aware of giving.  Our son awoke  and walked up to me.  He said, “Mom, I’ve been thinking.  Giving to people is like giving to God.”

Last year, he really surprised us.  He said to our oldest daughter, “You are going to have a baby this year.”  My eyes bugged out and our daughter laughingly told him that she didn’t know how that would be possible.  She had been diagnosed in her teens as clinically sterile.  Just the month before he said this, she had been so sick from the complications of her condition that the physicians were recommending a hysterectomy.

Ten months later, our grandson was born.  

Sam doesn’t see himself as anything unusual.  This is normal to him.  This is part of his relationship with Jesus; believing and looking to Him and saying the things placed on his heart.  He says and does them without hesitation or questioning, because as a child’s faith is, it is without doubt and filled with expectation.

When he was around five he had a dream that Jesus was a lion and the Jesus-lion was laying on him while covering and protecting him from mean animals.  He said, “It was so loving; He loved me!  He roared at the others and they backed away and then He licked me, snuggled me and purred.  It felt so good!  It felt SO good!”  Sam had never heard of the Lion of Judah or had ever seen or read a one of C. S. Lewis' books about Narnia like the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe yet.  I showed him a cover of one of those books later as we walked through a store and I asked him if Jesus looked like that kind of lion and he said, “Yes.”

 This week Sam came down with a high fever.  He was lethargic.  He has had many cycles of sickness like this that we had become accustomed to.  He would often miss a few days of school until it went away.  This time he found it hard to move and the fever seemed really high as I carried him to bed for the night.  I didn’t take his temperature so as not to disturb him more, but I went to bed very concerned.  The medicine wasn’t decreasing the fever and I was considering the number of sick days ahead.

The next morning I let him sleep and called the school saying he wouldn’t be there that day.  Shortly after, he came walking out of his room.  He said, “Mom, I’m healed!  I dreamed Jesus healed me!”  I jumped up and felt his head.  The fever was gone.  I asked if he still hurt anyplace and he told me, no.  He was well!

I asked what it was that he dreamed.  He said, “I was in heaven.  Jesus told them, ‘Sam is very sick and this makes Me sad.  I’m going to heal him.’  Then Jesus turned to me and said, ‘Be healed.’”

Asking him if Jesus put His hands on him, he told me, “No, He just said it. ‘Be healed.’” I was in awe.  I saw how happy Sam was and how bright his eyes were. 

Continuing to check on Sam and feeling his head, no fever came back.  He was certain he was healed and I had kept checking.  (I’m convicted of this now.)

Once I settled into this having happened, I asked Sam if he remembered anything else about his dream.  He exclaimed, “I remember lots of things!”  I eagerly asked him what.

He said, “There were lots of streets and they really ARE made of gold! Every road is gold!” 

“It was beautiful. BEAUTIFUL!” 

“There were lots of churches everywhere! Everything we like is there.  Everything!  There were Bibles everywhere and books and shops filled with Bibles and books!”

“I saw houses, lots of houses!  I saw the houses!! The houses are all SOFT!  You can sit anywhere and lay down anywhere in them and it doesn’t hurt because they are all soft!   He wants us COMFORTABLE!!”

“I saw our house!  It even said, ‘Willey House’ on it!”  His joy kept growing as he shared more and more.

“I saw Grandpa Willey.  He was partying!”  Sam laughed and he made a gesture of dancing.  “Grandpa said, ‘Hi,’ to me and then he went back to partying!”  Again, Sam laughed.

“Everything you LIKE is there, EVERYTHING!  I’m going to play floor hockey ALL OF THE TIME!” 

I was soaking in every word he had to say and held to his exuberance, certainty and authority in the way he said them.  Then I asked him who Jesus was talking to when He was telling them that he was sick and that Jesus was sad and that He was going to heal him.  He said, “He was talking to the angels!”

“There were so many angels!  An army of angels!  There were thousands, no, MILLIONS! It was an army of angels and they were all in front of Him!”  I asked Sam again what Jesus said to him and he again said, “Be healed.”

When Sam had shared about the angels I knew what he was talking about.  I hadn’t shared with very many others what he so freely shared with me.  I had been in prayer a couple of years ago at an ARC (Alliance of Renewal Churches) gathering and I had a vision.  Jesus was standing behind me with His arms around my waist and His head over my shoulder and along side my face as we stood facing forward.  In front of me was the army of angels facing forward, too.  They were lined up, row after row for as far as I could see.  They were in white and stood strong with broad, straight shoulders.  The air of strength and impenetrable protection overwhelmed me.

 I can still remember the fragrance of Jesus.  It was the most lovely, fresh and clean fragrance.  I had wept after seeing His angels and being embraced by His love like that; to feel Him and know Him that near.  Later, when I heard the song by Chris Tomlin, “Whom Shall I Fear” (God of Angel Armies) I knew exactly the truth of it.

One evening, on a different occasion, I was in bed and praying.  I opened my eyes and I saw gold overhead.  It was even lower than the ceiling of the room.  It was all gold, the most beautiful sparking gold.  I knew I was seeing the underside of heaven and I realized how near to us it is.  It’s just right there! 

This quote is a quote I received today by Graham Cooke and it sums this up well.

 “Ours is a life of resolute expectation.  God’s goal is that you would be fully persuaded, secure and unafraid in His steadfast love for you.”

Reminding our son of all the LORD has done to show him who He is and how He loves him, I pointed out the places in his dream of His protection, comfort, love, joy, power, sorrow for his suffering and power of His words of healing.  That the Bible matters and the Word of God is forever and that the words in other books that were there were words that passed with eternal and lasting value.

 I showed him how family mattered, that he saw a home with our name and we will be together again and we can have joy for those who get to go to heaven before us.  I told him to hold to these things because Jesus is giving him a strong faith by letting him know Him so well.  He readily and knowingly nodded through it all.

Jesus is also letting us know Him through the experiences that Sam has freely shared.  When we share, it is a giving and a gain for those who receive it. Sam and I hope that by sharing this, you will know how much Jesus loves you, too, and that Jesus is worth knowing now and for always.

 

BIG BANG

John 8:12 NIV

Then spoke Jesus again to them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

Over the years we get muddled and mixed up.  Our visions become so focused on one thing we lose track of the big picture.  Special interests, stats, mind narrowing opinions with blinders to see or even deafening ourselves from listening to someone that may think a little differently than us.  As I have focused on things, I have sometime become short-sighted into the whole of it.

 Jesus walked into that narrow vision of expectations of who the Pharisees and Jews thought the Messiah should be.  They lost sight of the big picture that had been clearly displayed throughout the Torah that reveals the Messiah. They were missing Him by their own narrowed views.  On the flip side, some can become so inclusive of all, that they miss the truth.  The ones that by majority received Christ most readily as Messiah and LORD were the Gentiles.  They didn’t have the personally formed opinions or their own efforts in studies or time they put in.  They saw the wholeness of Christ and what He did as “God with us” because their vision was open to see I AM in the present.  They were taking it all in.

 This plays out even in the physical act of reading.  I can read for a long time looking at the words on a page or on a screen and when I look up or out my window it takes a while for my vision to adjust to see clearly all that is there and around me.  Sometimes I am amazed at all I had missed.  The sun may have set and there was only a thread of  orange still there in the mostly darkened sky and a better part of my day had passed.

My Christian life didn’t start out in any way of Bible study.  My Christian life was more relational.  I hung out with God.  I talked to Him a lot.  I needed Him a lot.  I noticed things in nature and saw His humor and His heart and His power.  I observed people and I observed all that I believed that He made.  I pretty much walked in His vastness.

When I did decide to really read the Bible, I would read conversations that David had with God in the Psalms and I’d say to Him, “Hey, we did this!”  The more I understood what it was like to really hang out and walk with God and know Him, the more other things made sense.  My vision was so much wider.  When I would read His Word it already was easy to understand.  I recognized His voice, much like a child that reads a message from his parent.  My experiences with Him were often miraculous.  I was used to this Spirituality. It was comfortable to me.  It still is the place where I am most comfortable. 

The older I have become the more I am beginning to recognize Him in other parts of this physical world. I see the Spiritual and physical overlap. Sciences have started to make sense to me because it matched His design and intentions and His Word.  Of those who wrote the Bible thousands of years ago under the inspiration of His Spirit, they write of things that man had not proven or found yet in science.  And as scientists often focus on the science and get deeper and deeper into it over the centuries, today they often miss the connection to the Word of God.  I’m not a scientist, nor am I a Biblical scholar.  I am someone that is comfortable to say anything to God and receptive enough to listen to Him.   You could say I’m child-like.

But, as I see Him more in physical ways I am amazed.  Numerous times in the Bible the LORD is mentioned with Light and Life.  Today, we even make jokes when someone hurts themselves, but not seriously hurt, and we may say to them “stay away from the light” as if it was the Light at the end of the tunnel where God and heaven are as if they are about to pass from this life to the next. The Light at the end of the tunnel.

The beginning of Life and creation is often debated.  As science has narrowed to the physical, it misses a bigger vision.  Science didn’t use to be this way.

 I was doing some reading recently and I am incredibly grateful to be alive in the days of “Google”.  I was researching some science studies on light.  I came across a lengthy document called The New Chemistry, a lecture on molecules and Avogadro’s Law by a scientist named Josiah Parsons Cooke 1827-1894 and it included lectures he did in Cambridge.  Mr. Cooke begins saying its history has been marked by very frequent revolutions in its theories or systems. This is an introduction he made before he began the lecture teaching.

 The courses of the planets have not changed since they were watched by Chaldean astronomers, there thousand years ago; but how differently have their motions been explained first by Hipparchus and Ptolemy, then by Copernicus and Kepler, and lastly by Newton and Avogadro.  He states that I also know that our knowledge of these laws is as yet very imperfect, and that our human systems must be at the best, but very partial expressions of the truth.  Still, it is a fact worthy of our profound attention that in each of the physical sciences as in astronomy, the successive great generalizations which have marked its progress have included and expanded rather than superseded those which went before them.  Through the great revolutions which have taken place in the forms of thought, the elements of truth in successive systems have been preserved, while the error has been constantly eliminated; and so as I believe, it always will be, until the last generalization of all brings us into the presence of that law which is indeed the thought of God. 

As I have been involved recently with young students and areas of physics, I began to understand in very simple forms, the process of nuclear energy and the power of it not just in death, but life. In nuclear physics, one makes a powerful energy by splitting a tiny form, the atom, to create a much greater energy.  More recently, atoms have been split by laser light.

As the sun shines brightly, it is producing an incredible amount of energy that reaches us as light and heat.  The light on the moon is a reflection of the sun upon its dull surface.  The sun is an example of different kinds of energy, kinetic, electromagnetic radiation, thermal, gravitational.  In other forms of energy I learned that Sound is also an energy.

Here is what I began to see in the vastness of God.

 I read the famous equation and Theory of Relativity of Albert Einstein’s,  E=mc2.

 E means energy.  The m means mass and c stands for the speed of light and the 2 is squared.  That means it is the Speed of Light x the Speed of Light.  This equation led scientists to atomic and nuclear energy.  It makes a big bang of energy. 

The beginning of the Bible is Genesis 1 and it starts with an account of creation.  The word Genesis means origin and it is also synonymous to birth. Some scientists say that everything started with a “Big Bang.”

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

 The presence of God’s Spirit is hovering over a formless mass and water is mass, too. Water is also a component that is part of every living thing.

Genesis 1:3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

These were His first mentioned words.  “Let there be light.”  Sound.  And more.

As the Bible says also in John 1:4 NIV  In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.

If you look at God as Life and Light, then we read that God as Light said, “Let there be light.”  We now have c2.  Speed of Light x Speed of Light. 

Can you imagine this equation on a God-Powered level?!  Mass times the speed of light squared equals Energy!  The Biggest, Life-giving Bang and science has the equation but, it was written thousands of years ago by the hand of Moses through the inspiration of His Holy Spirit.  Life. Creation. Genesis.

The theory of relativity goes much further with time and space and the speed of light which is the fastest moving thing that man can measure.  Light travels at a constant finite speed of 186,000 miles a second.  It takes light 8.3 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth.  It travels 93 million miles. 

When we read of the “days” God created, the time can possibly mean time in different ways than we know it and relativity, and speed and time play into that. Science now uses the term “space time.”  2 Peter 3:8 NIV  But do not forget this one thing, dear friends; With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day.  This is before any thoughts of relativity were conceived scientifically.

As we become more aware of God, it says in Isaiah 29:18 NIV In that day the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of gloom and darkness the eyes of the blind will see.

My Dad is a physicist and he told me that when people need glasses to see better, they need lenses that let more light into the eye when the eye lens is not capable of focusing an image properly onto your retina.  The lens prescription is based on the amount of bend into the lens to allow the proper bend amount to the light rays to sharpen the vision.  Light is what allows the vision of the image on the retina.  When you have seen animals that have lived in caves for years and years like small fish or newts, their eyes no longer form fully or open.  You can see dark places beneath their skin that look as if they were to be eyes. They remain blind because they have no light and the need of continued growth of the eyes stopped.   

Light is what is needed to see.  The word for light in Greek is pho.  We see the word pho in photograph which means light-writing.  Photosynthesis. Photons.  All are the part of the element of light.

 This summer has been a wet one.  Water is a life-giving element and so is light.

 Even with all of the rains this summer, my plants are not as big as they usually are this time of year.  We haven’t had many days of sunlight.  When the sun does come out, I notice much more growth.  Light carries the energy to make my plants grow.  This is the process of photosynthesis. Light is a component necessary for growth and vision.

Light is also equated to thought for ideas which is creativity and understanding.(Notice the word create in creativity) Our cartoons will show a character and suddenly there is a light bulb above their head.  It means they had an idea.  In a more recent animated movie called Despicable Me, the main character, Gru, doesn’t have a light bulb when he has an idea.  Instead, he says, “Light bulb.”  It is a humorous twist representing that he had an idea.  

There is a lot more in the Bible regarding light, the lamp stand and being a light. The pillar of fire as a light in the night. The tongues of fire at the time of Pentecost. The potential study, teaching and insights to it already fascinate me.

May Jesus, the Light of this world, give you the vision to fully see Him and open your eyes and your ears to more.  LORD, let there be Light. 

Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled

The topic of "Believing" is vast! It is a topic I am teaching soon. A tie-in  to believing is the verse about the first and greatest commandment in Matthew 22:37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’  What keeps us from that?  The culprit tends to be the mind.

I can love someone with all my heart, but at times, the trust isn't fully there.  The lack of trust is in my mind.  My young son can tell me a story and at times I find myself saying, "Is that the way it really happened?"

Throughout the scripture, God is persuading belief.  He is making things happen, miraculous things happen in the least expected people and places.  It's encountering the living God!  Following big displays of His God-ness, He often has people do big things.  Things they wouldn't have otherwise already done if they hadn't been moved to believe Him.  Even Mary, who swiftly believed and was considered blessed for it, was visited and told by an angel what she would do.  That's big persuasion.

There are still the stragglers.  Saul was given the Kingship by God. He was also given God's Spirit upon him.  It says in 1 Samuel 10:6-8 that the Spirit came upon him in great power and that God changed his heart.  Following this, he was told what he was supposed to do. 

Saul failed miserably in a variety of ways.  Not seeing himself as God saw him, not believing what God told him, pride, asking others their thoughts instead of asking God His and flat out disobeying.

Even though Saul had the Spirit of God upon him, he did not walk in it.  His heart was changed, but his mind was not.  He didn't fully believe, trust or yield.  Walking in the Spirit will guide us well.  When we ignore it and walk in our own ways it will often lead us right into a corner.

The words came strong today during additional preparation time for this study, "Betray not your heart."  So often our minds can betray our hearts.  Living in the place of the LORD's heart and Spirit, there is peace. David, who was later made king by God, was said to be a man after God's own heart.  I also felt the words, "Peace leads, guides and instructs.  Fear, stress and worry are enemies to My ways."

When a word is pressed upon me that stands out, I usually look it up or do a little more research on it. I looked up the word "betray" in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  It is defined, "Be disloyal to (one's country, organization, or ideology) by acting in the interests of an enemy."  Betray not your heart.

Joyce Meyer wrote an entire book called, "The Battlefield of the Mind."  Negativity binds us from embracing the positive.  Many people find peace in meditating.  It is the clearing of the mind of negative thoughts and stress.  Meditation isn't just an Eastern culture idea.  David says in Psalm 119:15 I meditate on your precepts and consider your ways. David knew the power of God and reminded himself over and over again Who God is and who he himself was in God.  One of the times is in Psalm 118.  It brought his mental state into one of joy and strength.

Believing is an action verb and it does take our effort to turn our thoughts to Him.  As the scripture says in John 14:1 Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me.