DISCLAIMER: The following is NOT meant to be religious, nor is it meant to convince anyone of what I write here. The purpose of this essay is simply to offer a different view about God, and prayer. I have no intention of offending anyone with this post, and just know that whether you believe in God, in prayer, or nothing, I respect your right to do so.
During the time I’ve been posting on Facebook, over six years now, I’ve found that whenever a person of faith talks about God, and says something like “I'll pray for you”, one atheist usually seems to find it necessary to tell that person that they’re living in fantasy land, the God doesn’t exist, and that prayer is a waste of time, because no one is listening. So first off, I find that to be rude, and frankly very offensive. My immediate reaction usually goes something like this. "Who are you to tell anyone that God doesn't exist, that prayer is a waste of time because nobody is listening?" Just because you don't believe in a higher power, or the power of prayer, on what authority do you base your opinion? Do you have any scientific evidence to present that will prove, once and for all, that there is no God... no higher power, and that nobody is listening? I don't think so... but did you know that there is a body of evidence, well researched, telling us that there is a God, that this God loves us, and that he very well may be listening to us. Now I'm not here to get into an argument with anyone about whether or not there is a God, or whether or not prayer is a waste of one's time. I'm simply here to tell you, that based on my life experience, and research into the matter of what happens when we die... is there a higher power, a God if you will, and if there is a God, does he love us. First, a little background that got me interested in the subject. When I was a little boy, I attended a Christian camp... Camp Good News in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I have both bad memories of the camp and good ones. When I was very young, my mother left my father for another man, and she left behind several of the thirteen children that she had given birth to. Actually, she had given birth to fourteen children, but one child, a boy, had died at the age of two from third degree burns. I do not know the story about how he had gotten 3rd degree burns... all I know is that he did not survive. Also, two of my mother's children were given up for adoption, and I only learned of their existence around the time I turned fifty. I was number twelve, and before I was born, my mother had considered adoption, but I've been told that after I was born, my mother just couldn't bring herself to let me go, which is ironic, considering she did let me go, and with the exception of one vague memory of my mother when I was very young... two or three years old... I never saw my mother again because the man she married after divorcing my dad was never told that she has given birth to fourteen children, as far as he knew, she only had five children. My father loved his children, but he was struggling just to survive, put food on the table and take care of the youngest of us, and what I've learned from child welfare services is that he was overwhelmed at the situation he found himself in, and so I and four of my sisters all found ourselves in the care of the State. Needless to say, the separation from my family at such an early age (somewhere between three and five) left me with issues, one of which was that whenever I was in an unfamiliar place, I wet the bed. Back then, the people who raised me didn't understand that wetting the bed wasn't a deliberate act on my part. Their response to my wetting the bed was to punish and/or shame me. This attitude wasn't just shared by the different foster parents I lived with, but also the Children's Center, where I was sent every time another foster family decided they weren't equipped to deal with me. At the Children's Center, bed wetters slept separately from the rest of the boys, in a smaller room, and in the morning, before we were able to join the other boys for breakfast, we first had to wash our sheets, by hand... no washing machine to make the task easier, and when we did join in at breakfast, it was obvious to all, we were the bed wetters, and the shame, at least for me, hung in the air like a black cloud. So when I attended Camp Good News, which was certainly an unfamiliar place, I wet the bed, and if you've ever attended camp, you might have some idea of what I must have gone through... the mean spirited comments, the fact that none of the other children seemed to want to have anything to do with me, and at the end of the camp season, when I returned back to whatever home I was in at the moment, the frustration of the foster parents at the duffel bag full of pee stained, smelly clothing, and the disgust they felt weighed so very heavily on me. I knew that I didn't wet the bed intentionally, but most of the adults in my young life did not. So at the camp, I was a loner. The only person who paid any attention to me was one of the camp counselors. He was obviously a young man with a big heart, because he took me under his wing, and made my life at camp tolerable. On the last day at camp, I cried at the prospect of leaving camp, because this young man had taken me under his wing, and so at the prospect that I would never see him again, I responded as any troubled child would, with tears. I remember to this day what that young man told me... he told me that if he didn't see me again in this life, we would see each other again in the next, and that comment comforted me, because even though I was so very young, I already believed that this life I was living was just one in a string of many. There were a lot of activities at the camp other than baseball, which I hated, because I was very small for my age, not at all athletic, and my experience in playing baseball was that when I struck out, which was pretty much all the time, the other boys would let me know just what a loser I was. But... as I said there were a lot of other activities, like arts and crafts, and trips to various places around Cape Cod, and one evening, I noticed that everyone was walking down the road that led to the main highway, and the home of the camp director. One of the counselors, when he saw me following, told me that this wasn't something that I should go to, but all I knew was that everyone else was going on some kind of adventure, I wasn't about to be left behind, and so I ignored the counselor's words, and followed everyone else up that dirt road. When we got to the end of the road, on the left was the camp director's home, and on the right, a small church, which everyone was entering. I followed, because after all, this was a Christian camp and church services were pretty common place. Every morning we had church service, out in the open, and I enjoyed those services, mostly because I enjoyed the music. As the service, the music seemed to fill the air, and gave me a sense of peace that helped me to escape my troubles, and so entering that church at the end of the road was as natural as going to breakfast in the morning. But... that was about to end, because when I got into the church, and sat down in one of the back rows, I saw an open coffin up at the front. It was the first time I faced death, and as I sat there, I saw a fly walking down the forehead of the man in the casket, and while I do not remember anything that was said at that funeral (the camp director's funeral), I've always remembered watching that fly walking down the camp director's face, and the best way to describe my response was that it deeply affected me, and put in me a fear of death that lasted for many years. Around the time I was in my early thirties, I started having panic attacks, and I thought that I was dying. I was attending the local Community College at the time, working towards an Associate's Degree, and because I was so much older than my fellow classmates, I found myself hanging out in the teacher's lounge of the English Department. Now when I was thirty, I appeared to be sixteen years old, and so I fit in easily with the rest of the students, but because I was at least about twelve years older than the rest of my classmates, I preferred hanging out with the older folks, teachers, support staff, and one janitor, whom I quickly became friends with. One day, I saw he was reading a book titled Journeys Out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe. The title piqued my interest, and when I asked where I could find the book, he told me he would lend me his copy. Robert Monroe wrote in the forward to the book the following. "Much has taken place both in the world and in my personal life since the final manuscript days prior to the publication of Journeys Out of the Body."
"It was an interesting experience, to say the least, when I publicly became a member of a highly suspect group labeled Psychic, Sensitive, Freak, and, more generously, Parapsychologist. The publication of the book quite thoroughly "blew my cover" as a reasonable orthodox business executive."
In the introduction, he wrote "In our action-oriented society, when a man lies down to sleep, he is effectively out of the picture. He will lie still for six to eight hours, so he is not "behaving," "thinking productively," or doing anything "significant." We all know that people dream, but we raise our children to regard dreams and other experiences occurring during sleep as unimportant, as not real in the way that the events of the day are. Thus most people are in the habit of forgetting their dreams, and, on the occasions when they do remember them, they usually regard them as mere oddities." At this point, I was hooked, and as I got into the meat of the book, I realized that the experiences he related about leaving his body were eerily similar to experiences I was having at the time. One that was exactly the same as what I was experiencing was that at times when I might be napping in the middle of the day, or watching television, I would close my eyes, and start drifting off into sleep, when I would hear this buzzing sound, and I felt as though I was drifting away, falling into something. These incidents frightened me, because they reminded me of when I had my tonsils removed, and I was given either to put me to sleep. The either was strong, and I did my best to push the doctor's hand away, because it was so repugnant, and when the either put me under, I had an experience of being in a tunnel, one that was spiraling. I could hear voices that seemed to echo, and the next thing I knew, I awoke in my bed in the ward, screaming. So whenever I had that experience of hearing that buzzing sound, thinking that I might be dying, I would sit straight up, and not allow the full experience to take place. At some point in Robert Monroe's story, talked about lucid dreaming, being sound asleep, dreaming, and being aware that one was dreaming. Well, that was happening to me, and his advice was that once I realized I was dreaming, I should look around, see where I was, and what was going on, and so I determined to do just that. Shortly after, one night I had this dream where I was at a train station, a train pulled into the station, and it appeared very much like those trains I've seen videos of from India where the passengers are hanging out of the windows, and some on the top of the train, and in my dream, I believed the people on that train to be refugees. I then turned to a women who was standing beside me and I said to her "Isn't it amazing how they can do this", referring to the train full of refugees, "but they can't seem to do a thing about traffic." At that moment, I realized that I was dreaming, and I remembered the advice "look around you... what do you see?" So I looked around. The woman was tall, had dark hair, and reminded me of my sister Carolyn. She said to me, "Do you know who I am?", and I replied, "I'd know you anywhere.", though when I awoke, I had no idea who she was. Then saw soldiers, carrying rifles, and dressed in uniforms that looked very much like those worn by Germany's soldiers under Hitler. On the ground, I saw swastika's drawn in chalk, and the next thing I knew, I was floating up to the night sky. I became frightened, believing that I was not going to be able to get back to the ground, and almost immediately, I awoke. I was convinced that I had indeed left my body. It wasn't the first time I'd felt that, and it wasn't the last. So at this point, I'm sure you must be thinking, what has all of this got to do with whether or not there's a God, or whether or not prayer works, and I don't blame you, but what I write here is highly relevant to my take on whether or not there's a God, and my thinking about prayer. So because I was exposed at such a young age to death, without any idea what was coming, for many years, I was afraid of death. I didn't know exactly why, but I had this deep rooted fear, and I remember reading a book by a women who claimed to be a psychic, writing about what happens when we die, and every time I came across the word "death", I basically freaked out. I never did finish that book, partly because I couldn't get past the word "death", and partly because I found too many inconsistencies in the woman's story to believe any of it. But that's when the panic attacks started, and while at first I had no idea what was causing them, I came to understand that what was causing them was my fear of death, and ever time I had an attack, I thought I was dying, and so it seemed obvious to me that my fear of dying was indeed at the root of the attacks. So that brought me to where I started reading anything I could find about death, and what happens when we die. At that time, there wasn't a whole lot out there on the subject, but then one day, I discovered a book titled Life After Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist, who had interviewed 150 people who had what is referred to in short as NDE's, or near death experiences. His book was a qualitative study of the experiences of those 150 people when they had been declared clinically dead, but were later revived. Without going into the details of the book... you can do that yourself should you be inclined to do so, I had found, with his book, the first glimmer of hope when it came to my fear of death. Since reading that book, I've taken every chance I've had to look further into the matter, and like Dr. Moody, I saw that the stories of those who have had near death experiences, all had a familiar ring. They all talked about going through this tunnel, that at the end of the tunnel, they saw a bright light, and when they arrived at the light, they experienced the overwhelming feeling of being loved... a love they never had experienced before, and many of them didn't want to return to their bodies, but were told that it wasn't their time, and that they must return. Those who have had this experience had profound changes in their lives. If they didn't believe in a God before the experience, they did after, and they completely lost their fear of death. So you can imagine how that was so appealing to me, and it wasn't too much later that the panic attacks stopped. They didn't stop overnight... it took a few years, but the more I read on the subject of what happens when we die, the less often I had an attack, until they stopped altogether. At one point in my life, I was working as a home manger for an organization called Pinellas Probation Homes, in Clearwater, Florida. The purpose of the home was to give young men in trouble with the law, and on probation, a chance to turn their lives around through a three month program, which once they successfully completed, they would no longer be on probation and would be free to move on with their lives without the fear of jail or prison hanging over them. One day, I received a call from a professor of mine that I had become friendly with in college, and he asked me if I would ask the counselor for the home to give a speech to his class on what his duties were in the program. The professor told me that if the counselor found himself with laryngitis on the day he was to speak, then perhaps I could step in for him, and lay out for the class what my duties were as the house manager. The day came for the counselor to speak, when I got a call from him saying that he had, of all things, laryngitis, and so it fell on me to fill in for him, which I did. Some time later, a young lady called me, introduced herself as one of the class members that I had spoken to, and asked if she could interview me, explaining that she had an assignment for that class to interview someone in the "helping" professions, and write a report on her findings. I agreed to be interviewed, and somehow, I honestly do not remember, we found ourselves attracted to each other, decided to date. As I recall, we only had one date, I believe it was because everyone who saw us together told us we looked like so much alike we could be brother and sister, and I can't speak for her, but I remember thinking, "Oh God... I'm dating myself.", and without any nasty breakup, without any words at all, we both just stopped seeing each other, so I imagine the situation was as strange and disturbing to her as it was for me. In any event, the one date we had brought me to a church that she suggested. While I've always believed in a higher power... a God... I wasn't one to attend church. I had tried a few churches, but I never felt comfortable, because what I heard from the pulpit was so often at odds with what I believed to be true, but this particular church, my date told me, was a spiritualist church, and having learned something about spiritualism, I agreed to go, not knowing quite what to expect. The church was large, and from all outward appearances, looked pretty much like any other church, but it wasn't like any church I had been to before. There was a guest speaker, I'll just refer to her as Carol because I haven't asked her permission to include her in this story, and Carol gave the best sermon, if you could call it that, that I had ever heard in any church. She spoke at length about the Age of Aquarius, and not once did she lose my attention. She was intelligent, interesting, and not for a minute was I bored, as I usually found myself experiencing in other churches. At the end of her talk... it really wasn't a sermon... she was to give mini readings to various attendees. Carol was, and is, a psychic. She later told me that she didn't really like giving those mini readings, but that it was expected of her. So to make a long story short, when she announced that she was going to give readings, always the skeptic, my thought was "OK, if you're for real, read me first.", and she did just that. She told me that I had been searching for a long time... which was absolutely true, and she commenced to tell me other things about me that she had no reason to know, but which were absolutely right on. At the end of the service, when in most churches I would sneak out a side door so that I didn't have to shake hands with the preacher, I instead made my way to the line of folks being greeted by Carol, and I asked her if she gave private readings, to which she replied that she did, and gave me her contact information. A few days later, I met her at what I believe was her office, and she gave me a more in depth reading, and there was not a thing that she said that was untrue. She had never met me, and she had never met my date, so she had no reason to know all those things she said to me. At the time, you will recall, I was working with those young men in trouble with the law, and Carol said to me, "You know, you would do well working with young men... have you ever considered doing that." I was floored, and I'm not sure when it happened, but I realized that this was the woman in my dream. Her name was Carol, the same name as my sister, and she was tall, and looked very much like my sister. So I took classes with Carol for a time, and I learned a lot, and had experiences that were nothing like anything I had before I met her. At one point in the reading, I told her about my dream, and I told her that I believed she was the woman in my dream. She responded by saying that she believed she was also.
I'm not going to go into all that I experienced while taking classes with Carol, except for one story that directly related back to my dream. After I was in her class for a while, she asked me to teach a class for the children of he students. Of course, I was flattered, and I agreed that I would. One day, I was at the local mall, when a young man approached me and asked me if I had any weed... marijuana. I never did fully understand why he would single me out, I didn't look like what someone might expect a pothead to look like... I was a pretty clean cut looking young man, but because I looked many years younger than I actually was, I assumed that was why this young man.. a teenager actually, approached me, thinking I could supply him with pot. Instead, I gave him my phone number, and told me that I was teaching a class and if he wanted to attend, he was welcome, and I would teach him how to get high without using drugs. Honestly, I never expected to hear from him, but a week or so later, he called me, and asked if he could come over and talk about the class. I said he could, and so he did, and when he arrived he was with a friend. The first thing I noticed was a necklace his friend was wearing. The necklace was a silver chain, with a Star of David dangling from it. The star was also silver, and it was encrusted with what looked very much like diamonds. It was probably the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever seen, and I inquired as to where he had gotten it, thinking that maybe I could buy one for myself. He said that he had stolen it from his girlfriend, and that he was going to pawn it. I asked him how much he was going to pawn it for, and he told me five dollars. I immediately found myself in a dilemma, because what I had been studying with Carol was all about living a Christ like life, and I was certain that if I gave the boy the five dollars for the chain, it would be just as if I had stolen it myself. But... the beauty of the chain had me, and so I gave the boy the five dollars, he gave me the chain, and I never saw him again.
During class with Carol, many in the class asked me about the chain, because they too saw just how beautiful it was. Every time someone asked me about it, I would say, yeah... it's stolen, and tell them how I had come to own it, and they, sensing my ambivalence about whether or not I should even have the chain, they all told me that I shouldn't feel like I had stolen it, that it apparently was meant to come to me. At the time, I had no idea just how prophetic their assurances were. Shortly after this, my position at the probation home ended, lacking the funding to continue, and I found myself unemployed. Carol has moved from St. Petersburg to Sarasota, and had purchased a building so that her students could be close, and she called me, knowing I needed work, and asked if I would come and paint the apartments, that I could stay in her son's room who was off at camp. I agreed, because I needed the money, and because I had left Carol's classes, and looked forward to spending more time with her. One evening, just before dinner, Carol called me aside and asked me where I had gotten that chain, because it was hers. She told me how she had come to own it... that she had given a reading to a young Jewish man who was having trouble with his religion. She didn't go into the details, except to tell me that she had done a reading for him, and that the reading had resolved a lot of his issues, and that he had commissioned that piece of jewelry for her as a thank you. When Carol asked me about the chain, I started to tell her, as I had my classmates, "Yeah... it was stolen", because I knew Carol well enough to know that Carol was someone who was highly perceptive, and was known as someone who would answer your question before you had a chance to ask it of her, but before I even got the chance to tell her that it had been stolen, she told me about how the chain had been commissioned for her, and that her older son had stolen it and given it to his girlfriend. The boy I bought the chain from was the brother of Carol's son's girlfriend, and he had stolen it from her. For me, the connection to the dream, the soldiers, and the Nazi symbols in chalk on the ground, hit me like a ton of bricks, because that chain connected it all together.
So for many years, I kept searching, even though I was now certain that life does continue after we die, because I was craving more proof. It took many years, but the proof came. I read all that I could about near death experiences, about reincarnation, and just about anything dealing with that side of life so many people never give much thought to. When I was working as a crisis counselor at a local mental health hospital in Florida, in an in-service meeting, I watched a video featuring Wayne Dyer, a self-help author and a motivational speaker. The one thing that stayed with me from that video was when Mr. Dyer said the following: We are not humans having a spiritual experience, we are spirit, having a human experience." That simple sentence, for me, explained everything. Of course we're spirit. I always knew that, even when I thought I did not. And my years of searching for proof that we do not die has brought me to the place where I am absolutely certain that there is a God, and that this God loves us.
It's never been my intention to preach to anyone, and it's not my intention to do so with this piece of writing. My only purpose is to explain how I came to believe in God, and in the idea that we are all eternal beings, spending time here on earth, to learn, and to perfect ourselves. Until recently, I had to rely on what I read, on the documentaries I saw, and on the various videos and stories about children who claimed to remember their past lives. And while I was convinced that the stories were true, because when someone who died on the operating table, came back, and told the doctors what they were doing and saying while the patient was, for all practical purposes, dead... well, the science of it cannot be denied. The story is the same from people of all religions, from people with no religion, and from people from all over the world. They all tell the same story about the tunnel, about the love, about meeting God, and about how the experience changed their lives, and then most recently, I came upon a series on YouTube called, The Ghost in My Child, stories about children who remember their past lives. In many of the stories, the parents starting doing research after coming to believe the stories their children were telling them, may be stories of past lives, and in their research, several of them were able to find evidence that the stories their child was telling them about having lived before was substantiated by what they found. For me, these videos were all the evidence I needed to know, as I had always believed, that yes... there is a God, that we are all eternal beings, and that there is purpose to our lives. It's not all just an accident. We don't live just to have x number of years, and then die, and cease to exist.
As for prayer, well the reason I believe prayer does work is because of the science. Science tells us that everything, including us, are vibrations. That everything vibrates at different frequencies, and that like our bodies, so too are our thoughts vibrations, and those vibrations, like a pebble thrown into a pond, radiate out. Carol, my teacher, once told me "thoughts are things"... "words are things"... and the science, for me at least, proves that what she told me is right. So that when we pray, especially is large groups of people pray together, their vibrations do affect the world around them.
I know that for those who call themselves atheist, what I write here may be falling on deaf ears, and that's OK. It's never been my intention to convince anyone of anything... but rather to provide information to those who are ready to hear it.
One final note. A Facebook friend of mine told me that one day her grandson was in the car with his dad when they passed by a homeless man. The boy told the dad that he knew the man from before he (the son) came to live here, and that the homeless man was just going through some hard times. So don't take any of this from me, but for those who, like me, might be searching, listen to the children, and one day, maybe you too will find the answers you've been searching for. As for those who are put off by anything religious, just know that I am too. What I've discovered after all these years has little to do with religion, but rather, science and fact. 🙏
What do you think? Do you agree... disagree? You can comment below, and your thoughts are welcome.