(Warning: This is one of those crazy mystical posts.)
There are plenty of times when God changed His mind, and let someone know.
In the Bible, time was not viewed at all the same as we do here in the Postmodern West. There in the ANE, time was all about ripeness. Time was not something to be sliced and diced and weighed out in microscopic increments. Scheduling was pretty flexible unless you were at someone else’s beck and call. People actually had an attention span in that ancient world. They didn’t mind running through their lives with thousands of loose ends hanging, if the time for decision wasn’t right. But they would still manage to pull it all together when ripen it did. They knew how to wait for things. I’m trying cultivate this, and it’s quite a struggle.
Our concept of perfection is probably all out of whack, too. We have this crazy notion it requires something static, something which cannot be supposed to change because it was already perfect, no? That’s okay if you are a kid, but real adults might understand things are never so simple. Those concepts might apply if we were dealing with something perfect on this level of existence, but in the Spirit Realm, things are decidedly different. Indeed, I can only describe things in symbols and parables.
Too often in the past few years I’ve sensed the Presence of Decision. Something came very close to happening, but at the last moment, turned away. That is, so far as I was concerned, something didn’t happen that could have happened. Who knows whether it would have affected anyone else? I’m quite sure something happened somewhere else, because things are always happening somewhere in the world. But I’m sure there are a great many more things which could, and even came up close, but turned away.
I doubt anyone knows what caused the turning, what made it different for God’s decision. Maybe it was nothing at all on this level, but something we could never understand, much less discuss.
It happened again today, though. Some potency stood very near me, then moved off somewhere else. How else can I explain it? It was like turning suddenly to catch a glimpse of someone’s back as they strode off in the distance. Was that someone I knew? I could feel how close they were, even though I didn’t see them at the time. But this was not like missing an opportunity, given I sense the Divine Presence pretty much all the time (when I’m paying attention). It was more like someone I might have recognized, but they were too busy to stop, or simply decided at the last moment it wasn’t the right moment. Or maybe they waved as they passed by, smiled and winked, and kept going. “Maybe next time, Bud.”
Now, aside from the real possibility of serious delusion, I have to wonder if this ability to sense such things is fairly unique, or something commonly available to folks in the right frame of mind. I lean to the latter. I just don’t believe I’m all that special. At any rate, perhaps you can use this notion. It’s a lot like smelling invisible rain. It’s on the wind somewhere, but it never comes within sight on the horizon. You know it could have, maybe in a certain sense should have, but either way, it almost did, but just didn’t happen.
Go ahead and laugh at me, because I’m sure God has a sense of humor, too.
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ehurst@radixfidem.blog
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I can’t laugh at you, but will certainly embrace the joy of the unknown with you.
English is poorly suited for this conversation. We don’t have the nuance to talk about that which is not empirically measured and defined by the periodic table and our chemistry and physics labs. That said…
I think we agree there is much more to reality than that which Western concepts of sanity allow for. I know there are times I “see” the mysterious in ways which aren’t properly “eyesight,” but some other sort of knowing a nearby presence. I also think the rods and cones in my eyes do occasionally pick up data which is always there, but rarely accepted by the brain as allowable and therefore trashed.
Beings other than human? Thin places in the space/time continuum? Glimpses of the reestablished kingdom hidden below the base layer of creation? I couldn’t begin to tell you what you saw today, but I believe you saw it and believe it was real, even if not understood.
I don’t know how many people /do/ see such things. I’d guess there are many who see but are unwilling or unable to believe and therefore stuff it away. I believe we are all meant to see it, we are all capable of seeing it (though at some level tied to our willingness/receptivity to grace), and eventually all will see it (though for some of us, the sight will not be ultimately welcome).
Occassionally I have a sense that something is afoot. Often I lunge at it, getting close enough to make a partial ID, then it escapes. I finally figured out that I did this to impress someone, even myself. Now, if I am on my toes, conscious and alert, I watch it unfold in silence and satisfy myself in the edification it brings to know God has spoken to me. However, this does not, never translate into an ability to recognize promptings of the Spirit. In that realm I am deaf, blind or to say, without any spiritual senses. Everything is a prompting or everything isn’t. Its paralyzing.
Mike, it takes time to reorient because we in the West have been bathed in assuming without thinking it’s all intellectual. The basic rule is we read the spirit through our convictions, that part of your character which God Himself installed at spiritual birth. There are things you simply cannot walk away from, and they aren’t mere emotions which tend to come and go. Your conscience is simply your intellectual awareness of those convictions. You start getting better at reading your convictions by comparing whatever you encounter in terms or moral questions. For prophets, there are times when the convictions pump out actual assertions for others to hear. There are times I simply must declare something. While I can hold it in, it never goes away even when my emotions change. That’s how I began to discern the subtle differences.