The Greatest Things
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Before the joy of the season fades, I want to start this new year by sharing a few things that reinforced my sense of joy and wonder recently. I hope you like them.
Imagining Heaven
Recently I heard John Burke being interviewed by Eric Metaxas. I listen to Eric only occasionally, because I get impatient with his frequent riffs on different tangential topics while the “interviewee” sits and waits his turn, and by the frequent commercial interruptions. But he sometimes has amazing guests, and manages to let them talk. And this time the topic interested me, so I tuned in.
It was captivating! Burke had written a book entitled Imagine Heaven. In it he tells us many stories of people who died - as in, they were clinically dead, with no heart beat, no brain waves, nothing - and came back to life as they had known it. And surprisingly to me, 1 out of 25 people have had these experiences.
And all who did were profoundly changed. Most of them struggled to describe the indescribable - beauty, a sense of love and belonging they had never felt before, and meeting loved ones that had died along the way, each one fully alive and in perfect body and mind. Most of them also encountered Jesus, even those who knew almost nothing of Him before dying. And the encounters are shockingly similar, whether coming from people well grounded in the Christian faith and theology, or from people almost completely unfamiliar - as well as being uninterested - in anything about ‘religion’ or church or Jesus.
What they all describe is a being from whom light shone - brighter than the sun, although looking straight at Him was good and not at all dangerous. They struggle to describe a difference with this light, though. It’s like the light is also love, which permeates and envelopes everything.
We usually refer to these experiences as ‘near death experiences’ (NDEs), and we equate what the people are experiencing as going to Heaven. Neither characterization seems adequate to me. Was it Heaven, or an intermediary stopping off point? Were they near death, or fully, actually dead? Whatever you call them, they seem to me to be like windows God opens for a few witnesses, to give them a peek into a realm on the other side of a veil, and to come back to tell the tale.
For me, what it did was to intensify my desire to arrive at the destination I’ve been travelling toward my whole life. I’m content to wait here in this ‘valley of the shadow of death’, because what I’m expecting, when the wait is over, is now so much more vividly desirable and real, that I know I will see it all as being worth every moment of pain, heartache and suffering I’ve ever encountered, and in a way, each of those seemingly undesirable things served to make me that much more grateful.
I’m reading - no, savoring - the book now, and looking forward to getting and reading the sequel when I’m done.
Assuming I don’t go home first.
Water Life
New scientific discoveries are showing us that our world, our creation, is not properly understood as a mechanism, perfectly designed though it may be, but as more of an organism, with properties that are somewhere between life and non-life.
One category of these new discoveries is water. Watch the short, fascinating video from Greg Reese by clicking here. Water, which is essential to human life, is not simply an element with unique properties. It interacts with aspects of our lives heretofore not even considered. Recent studies show that water is transformed when exposed to human word, thought and sound.
Click the ‘Read More’ button below to read the article or watch the video.
The Mysterious Human Heart
This follow up report may be more fascinating than the first. I love the cliché ‘The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart’. But the heart of this matter is that the fundamental reality we are immersed in, is ‘alive’ in ways we have little understood or appreciated.
The heart, new research suggests, it not just a pump, but possesses properties that depend on the fourth phase of water. Watch the video and/or read the report here.
The other 99%
Catherine Austin Fitts interviews Dr. Joseph Farrell, and the topic is the book he recently published titled The Demon in the Ekur., subtitled Angels, Demons, Plasmas, Patristics, and Pyramids.
It’s fascinating stuff, and not just for science geeks.
In the introductory video here, (full video for Solari.com subscribers only) he expresses the astonishing discoveries being made by plasma researchers. The two most astonishing, to me at least, are that 1) plasma may actually be alive and sentient, and 2) it comprises 99% of the stuff in the universe. Add the fact that plasma does not adhere to the ‘rules’ that solids, gasses and liquids do, but march to their own different drum, and you come to the realization that most scientific discoveries are confined to the stuff that is not plasma. In other words, we’ve almost completely left out the study of the 99%.
The full video gives more, of course, and no doubt the book will reveal even more.
The connecting thread with all of these is that although the reality in which we are immersed is wonderful and endlessly interesting - and yet it is not our ultimate home.
Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! Romans 11:33
For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Romans 1:20