----- Original Message -----
From: Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2012 10:47 AM
Subject: Call me Whacko, but here's my life altering vision
Alice, Marsha and All who have nothing better to do today.
My life altering vision.
Although I think I told this story before, I'll run through it again. It is absolutely true. I offer no explanation other than the one I'd assigned to it at the time it occurred.
The year was 1962. The year before I had embraced the Holy Spirit, was baptized and spoke in tongues. Enough said.
My first wife and I had been married for less than two years. Two shy, lonely people who came together because we each believed that this might be the best we could hope to do. I might blush with embarrassment over this, but it is a fact, and it was what it was.
My wife was a nominal Christian and really wanted me to join her church, the Evangelical United Brethren. They were a kindly group of folks, not given to doing much as a church, but willing to take me into their midst. But I believed that if I was going to join something, I wanted to be in all the way or no way at all.
My wife's aunt and uncle were involved in an Episcopalian church that was full Gospel, an unusual combination. We attended several services and I was taken by the honesty of Father Dennis Benet. He believed in the power of the Holy Spirit and in healing. He also spoke in tongue and was given the gift of translating other folks who spoke in unknown tongues.
So that's the background. A shy fellow in my late twenties, suffering from a serious inferiority complex, married to a woman of similar makeup. So it came to pass that we were sitting in my wife's aunt and uncle's home one evening. About a dozen people were gathered in a prayer meeting. I was contentedly leaned back in an overstuffed chair with a cup of steaming coffee to help me pray. All was quiet. Someone spoke softly in tongue. No one felt the need to translate.
Suddenly I was startled to find myself standing in a pit. A hole in the ground. I was actually in it, standing on several old weathered planks. The walls were dirt, with small stones and soft brown dirt, stretching up about two feet above my head. The light overhead was bright daylight and I saw that the edges of the hole was broken and jagged cement, a sidewalk. And I could see legs and shoes passing by, only up to about the knees. I watched a pair of shiny red pumps pass with nylons on trim legs, a pair of green slacks and brown loafers, tennis shoes, dress shoes, skirts, slacks and even part of a briefcase. All went hurrying past my line of sight. Suddenly I was on the sidewalk, out of the hole. It was gone as if it had never existed. But the people were still rushing this way and that. And an unspoken voice inside my head said, "You are just as good as anyone else."
Later I told people that the voice had said, "In God's eyes you are just as good as anyone else". Today, over fifty years later, I can't remember which I actually heard. But at the time I put it onto God. He was telling me that I no longer needed to feel inferior, that I was equal to everyone else.
Those of you who have gone from feeling like wormwood, to feeling equal to the people around you, know what the difference is. My entire life changed from that evening onward. Even following the initial depression of becoming blind, I did not feel less than anyone else. Just blinder.
The thing is this, I knew intellectually that I was as good as others. But emotionally I did not believe it.
Making that leap from knowing to believing is the real trick.
How many times I would hear a new student in the training center say, "Sure, I know that blind people can do most everything," and then later hear that same person say, "By God, I know that I can do anything I want to do!"
That little step from knowing to believing can be the biggest step we ever take.
So, today as an Agnostic, what's my spin on my vision?
Who cares? It accomplished its purpose. I have seen and experienced other strange happenings that had no link to religion. I think the setting was right for me to leap out of the hole. But...who knows.
Carl Jarvis
***
WallStream" media, its all the news that is fixed to print
-Frank Ventura
-Frank Ventura
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