Category Archives: My Past

Christmas thoughts

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Whew! I’m glad it’s Christmas time. Just to have that whiff of fresh air that comes with the sounds, sights and thoughts of Christmas. I’ve had a somewhat traumatic year. It’s not only been the two major surgeries and numerous teeth removed, it’s been the constant depressing news from both abroad and here in my country.

But that’s why I’m embracing Christmas more this year than at other times. I need to get my mind out of the dismal turmoil of the present and on the verities of the enumerable miracles that occurred at the birth of Jesus, which still resonate and impact our present, so many centuries later.

They say, “the greater the darkness, the greater the light” and that’s how Christmas is to me right now. Medically for me this year, there was lower back surgery in February, several months of dental work and then “full reverse shoulder replacement” in August. And I am so very thankful and amazed to be able to say that those all worked out extremely well, with utterly competent doctors and dentists so that I’m now feeling better than I have in years. I really do have a lot to be thankful for.

But also this year, my heart has been grieved and heavy for the plight of the Ukrainians and those suffering in Gaza. I lived 2½ years in eastern Ukraine and Moscow so I feel I know that part of the world pretty well. It has so upset me to hear of the plight of those dear folks and the utter unjustness of Putin’s aggression there.

And although I’ve never been to Gaza or the West Bank, I have friends who’ve lived for extended periods in those places, in Christian service to try to alleviate the suffering there. And in both the news from Ukraine and from the Middle East, the frustration and heart ache builds up in me to an unbearable degree.

Of course, all the while, we are to “cast all our cares on Him for He cares for us”. (I Peter 5:7)  And I do that. Also I am thankful that the Lord has made a way so that I’ve been able to have material produced in both Russian and Arabic which I air weekly throughout the Russian and Arabic speaking world.

Back, before the fall of Communism, Radio Free Europe would broadcast into the countries “behind the Iron Curtain” to provide an alternative view of realty that contradicted what totalitarian Communism propagated to its captive peoples. And still today, though Communism fell over 40 years ago, there’s still an incredible need to broadcast the truth of God to so many parts of the world that are mostly cut off from hearing the gospel of God.

Bethlehem-at-ChristmasSo, thank God for Christmas. Thank God for a “holiday season”, as it is called now, in which nations hearken back to the birth in Bethlehem 2000 years ago of the most unique Man in history, prophesied to come, born of a virgin, despised by His own people, willingly crucified and raised by God the Father on the third day. CNN will probably not be running a special on this and in some places in the West it’s nearly become illegal to even mention it or openly celebrate it.

Nevertheless, the celestial elixirs of God yearly blow upon us like refreshing heavenly monsoons each Christmas, to refocus our minds on the eternal truths that pull us out of the chaotic present and back in to the saving power of God, to deliver us yet again from ourselves and this present evil world.

And I might add, I’m so thankful for my many friends in many lands who I have known through the years, “companions in tribulation” or Facebook friends who I’ve never met physically, who keep in touch and with whom I can have a kindred spirit and to know that there is a link that unites us through faith in Him.

I hope you have had a good year, even if you’ve had to smile through your tears or even your clinched teeth. Somehow we’ve made it through the year, we’ve kept the faith (at least more or less, ha!) and we’ve been strengthened through our trials and experiences. I hope you are continuing to let your light shine before men, that you are “falling on the Rock” and letting Him sustain you and that you are at peace with Him and those around you.

Your friend in Him, Mark

 

 

Surviving Surgery, and other things

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Here I am on the other side! Twelve days ago I had major surgery on my lower spine; and it was utterly needed to delivery me from months of strong pain in my hamstring muscles, tendons and buttocks. It’s such a relief to be able to walk around and not have that pain that would so take over my leg muscles each morning.

The operation is call called a “laminotomy” and “lumbar fusion”. It took 90 minutes, I was totally unconscious and they had to get down to the real nitty gritty in my lower spinal column. But it worked. Or more actually, the Lord did it and used the expertise of these doctors to “roto rooter” my lower vertebra, relieving the constricting that had heavily pinched my spinal column there. As soon as I was conscious after the operation, I could feel that the leg pain was now gone that had been there since last summer.

And now, since the surgery I’ve been managing the new pain that’s come up after they cut through my back muscles so they could get to where the “severe spinal stenosis” has been. Hats off to my sister who really came through in the hour of trouble, taking care of me at the hospital and then at her house before I got back here at the beginning of the week.

I was aware of a lot of people praying for me at all times. So many things didn’t happen that could have gone wrong. And I’m so thankful that I’ve had peace in my heart and mind through all this. I’ve realized again that “me” is not primarily my physical body. My body really went through the wringer in the biggest way. It seemed like I’d been shot in the back or that a mortar shell had hit me.

But it’s like I wrote about “You you”, 7 years ago. The real ultimate “me” didn’t get a knife stuck through it and become all sliced up, like my physical body did. It helped so very much to have a Christian perspective on it all and that “me”, me physically as well as my heart and soul were experiencing this. But through it all, the actual real me inside was doing pretty good and something really positive was happening. The cramped, pinched spinal column was being fixed by real experts. That was very good, even if it was a traumatic experience to go though physically, with an operation like that.

Shortly after I was back in my hospital room after the operation, I was aware that I was “on the other side”. There was discomfort but I could already feel then that the leg, tendon and buttocks pain was gone. What a relief and joy!

They had me on strong pain medication and the main one was Oxycodone, a narcotic. It did work; along with adding some Tylenol, the pain level overall was bearable. But it wasn’t long before I was experiencing some stuff that was messing with my thoughts and emotions. As the pain drew down over a few days, I decided to just stop the Oxycodne and also to really dial it back on the other pain killer meds.

After 4 or 5 days at my sisters’, she took me back to my place and that’s where things are now. I wear a back brace about 12 hours a day to keep my back aligned as the new situation in my spine stabilizes. There’s still pain in my back but it’s to a much lesser degree than what I experienced for the months with the leg cramps, before the operation.

I think perhaps the thing that helped me the most through this time was a God-given sense of humor. It kind of surprised me at times that, in very pinnacle situations, I found something to laugh about and to not be overwrought by the events of the moment. Perhaps this was an answer to the many people who were praying for me. I was able to laugh or at least be cheerful and light-hearted through all this and I do feel it was something supernaturally, God-given from the Lord.

And I thought to just give you a little back ground to all this, as my last year has been one of the most unusual I’ve ever had. Last February Facebook suddenly “paused” my ability to use Facebook advertising. I still could communicate with everybody but my weekly ads on Facebook were stopped. For years, I’ve been doing Facebook advertising of the videos I’ve done in many languages. So this “pause” from Facebook stopped my ministry to millions of folks.

Facebook said there was some anomaly with my payment method and they were pausing my account. They told me a few things to do, which I did, and I waited for it all to work out. Days passed and I wrote again. They wrote back, asking me to be patient. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months.

I got increasingly desperate as well as rather hopeless. Facebook has billions of customers and you don’t just call up a representative. But here’s how God answered the prayers of many for my situation. I lived in Brazil in the late 90’s and out of the blue a friend I knew there wrote to say that her daughter, who I knew when she was 12, now lived about 5 kilometers from me and would like to meet me after all this time.

We did that and guess what? Turns out that she had worked for some time in the Meta company, which owns Facebook. I told her my plight and she said she might know someone on the inside. Things moved fast after that and in 10 days my account was restored. To me this was just an astounding miracle when I saw no way I was going to be able to contact anyone in Facebook to get my account back on.

Then, 5 days after Facebook was restored, there was a sudden lightning strike around 40 yards from my desk here. There was sort of a storm going on right then but there’d been no lightning nearby. My laptop was destroyed, my router, modem, the printer, the aircon system in the house and wiring under the house, all were knocked out. Replacing the laptop, which is what I do the video editing and website work on, was a big deal. Thankfully none of us were hurt and the house and cars were not hit. But getting back to where I could work on videos and do editing on a new computer took many weeks.

Two months after the lightning, I was holding on to a tree stump in my backyard that I’d held on to many times before. Suddenly it snapped and I was diving through the air towards the bottom of the garden. I guess I went close to 4 meters forward and 3 meters downward. The full force of the dive/fall was taken by my left hand which transferred up to my left shoulder. The result was that I had a major tear in my left shoulder, so much so that a rotor cuff surgery was not possible. I’m awaiting an operation to replace my left shoulder joint at some point when it can be worked out.

One month after my fall down the hill, in July, I left for my yearly visit to see my kids in Scandinavia. I was already feeling a little funny but not too bad. But when I got over there, I was diagnosed with Shingles. Thankfully it was a relatively mild case but it continued through my visit to Scandinavia.

In August, before returning to Texas, I was briefly visiting friends at a fellowship in Romania. That’s when the leg and tendon problem really took center stage. I’d been having pain in that area for months but it had been manageable. In Romania though, the pain got so bad that I was walking awkwardly and not really able to be a part of the activities. So when I got back to the States in late August, I knew that finding out what the matter was with my legs was top priority

Back in the States, I began in earnest to try to find the root cause of my leg pain which continue to worsen. But no one really knew what it was. The first doctor prescribed pain killers and “muscle relaxants” which were some of the worst things I’ve ever taken. I stopped that immediately. The next doctor said I had “Polymyalgia rheumatica” and sent me to a rheumatologist. At that appointment that doctor said that it didn’t really seem like rheumatism to him and I didn’t think so either.

Of course all this took time, months in fact. I was well into the fall and still kind of flaying around in trying to find out what was causing all this. But the Lord was certainly working behind the scenes. I had a regular appointment with my cardiologist and I was explaining to her how there hadn’t been anyone really knowing what was the problem with my leg pain. She then told me she thought it was my back. I sort of corrected her and told her my back was just fine, never had any pain there.

But she went on to explain that the nerves that affected my hamstrings, tendons and buttocks all run down through and out of my spinal column. So she ordered a MRI as soon as possible. And that was the breakthrough that was needed.

By then it was the first week of January, 3½ months after I got back from Romania. But at least the problem had been found: “severe spinal stenosis” in my lower spine. As one doctor explained, my spinal column should be 15 millimeters wide at that place but it was only 4 millimeters wide. Quite a pinch. In mid February I had the surgery on my back, what I already wrote about at the beginning of this article.

You thought that was all, right? Nope, I didn’t tell you the other traumas of September through December. I had two loose teeth and hadn’t been to the dentist in long time. Although I didn’t have any pain, I thought it would be good to get the loose teeth checked out. And dear God in His great Providence led me to some exceptionally competent, compassionate South American dentists not far from me.

On my first visit the lady gave me a thorough exam and then rather somberly told me I had 11 teeth that were infected and that the infection was most likely spreading to every part of my body. She said I needed those extracted, plus two crowns replaced, a root canal and various other cavities taken care of. Also there will be bridges top and bottom to replace the pulled teeth.

Actually, by this time, I’d been under such an onslaught from one side or the other for months that this didn’t really faze me very much. So through October into December I had the 11 teeth pulled and almost all the other things she mentioned were taken care of. But it all was made so much easier by these two amazing Christian sisters and their touch of expertise, as well as they gentle ways. And of course the mighty grace and mercy of the Lord.

Well, I hope it’s been ok to tell you about all this. Many of you keep up with me on Facebook and I have been posting prayer requests about these things. I don’t think I’ve ever had a time like this that’s happened to me over this last year. And so it looks like I have come through and out of this intense period and now I’m in a rehab after the operation. They said this would take 4 to 6 weeks and it hasn’t been 2 yet.

Possibly some of my friends are going through similar things currently: shake ups in their health, severe and long term challenges across multiple fronts, personality changes as we enter new periods of our lives. I’m so thankful that I have been able to remain rooted to the Christian foundations I’ve had since I was 21 and to be able to stand in Him, through it all.

And I’m so thankful for the many of you who’ve stood with me in prayer during this time. I’m utterly sure if I had not had the Lord and His continuing strengthening in my soul, I certainly could not have survived all this. I could write much more but this is already long. I hope this is a blessing for you. Many are going through medical experiences in these times and perhaps this is a help to some to know how the Lord took care of me through it all.

God bless you, thanks so much!

Mark

II Tim 3:11  “…but out of them all the Lord delivered me.”

II Tim 4:18   “And the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work and shall preserve me unto His heavenly kingdom.”

 

“It’s all by your grace Lord, cause somebody prayed.”

 

 

 

Talking to angels

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What’s it like talking to angels? On the street? The first thing you notice is that they can read your thoughts. So you begin to realize that something is really up. Something strange is going on and you grasp more and more that this person in front of you is very unusual. But you’re also aware that this person is not malignant, they are benign. And it just grows on you: as soon as you think something, they know what you thought.

So you’ve been talking to this person and when you say something, their immediate response is so complete, so all encompassing and so precise that it nearly takes your breath away. Then again immediately it’s happened to me that, before I voice a thought and respond to the “person” in front of me, that they respond.

Sometimes it is verbally, as humans do. But also it can be a thought, a response that appears in your mind, that this person answers you back, “at the speed of thought”, without going through the normal human channel of verbal communication.

This can be really surprising and …shocking, as I search for a word to match that experience. In fact, this is where things quickly go. Because you are sucked up into an upper level experience that is basically beyond any normal human experience.

There may be words exchanged. But you are utterly aware that there is a channel opened, a thought exchange unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. As you think a thought, the “being’ in front of you, who looks human, is communicating back to you in your mind. This is in real time, physically, person to person.

And the answers are not gibberish and confusion. But they’re incredibly “spot on”, to the point, uplifting, enlightening and of a caliber and richness that you didn’t think humans could convey. It’s just hard to describe. It’s like they are talking to you from some kind of place of light, a place of sanity, clarity and even overwhelming common sense that puts all else you’ve experienced into a lower realm of clouds and haze.

How long does it last? For me it didn’t last really long. I wrote about one experience I had in San Francisco when I was nearly 23 which was the longest I’ve ever been in that kind of atmosphere. Needless to say, my experiences like that, if I try to count them right now, come to around 5 to 7 times, from in my 20’s til now. But to be in that realm, where the supposed human in front of you can read your thoughts and respond before you’ve hardly thought you thoughts, is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.

These were not demons. I’ve had encounters with demons too. You become aware that the person in front of you is not speaking of themselves but is being spoken through. Often this is with extremely vile, vulgar, aggressive, sickening language. But you are just aware that “something” is speaking through the person in front of you, who seems to know your weaknesses, fears and inner thoughts but who is your violent enemy, out to destroy you through confusion, astonishment and other such things.

When you meet an angel on the street, their communication has a “oneness”, a composite clarity, order, height, depth, richness and utter edification. When you meet a person who is demon possessed who talks to you, you are aware at some point that the person in front of you is not speaking of themselves, that another entity has been able to take over the human in front of you and to speak through them.

An evil spirit has been able to posses or take them over and use that body to speak to you. But an angel speaks of themselves, an agent of the God of the higher realm, who has been assigned or allowed to communicate with you.

guardian-angelsAdmittedly, this happens rarely in my life and probably most people seldom ever experience these things. Or if they do, many of us are dull to what is happening at the moment and don’t really catch what is going on. They/we experience these things but recognize how strange it is and that they/we can’t tell our friends or family because they won’t believe us. So they/we keep it to themselves, sometimes the rest of their/our lives.

Have you ever had an experience with an angel? Or demon? They both exist, now and in our present world. Sometimes the Lord wants to expand our horizons by letting us experience these things, to deepen us, to open our eyes to the mostly unseen real world we actually live in, and to make us stronger for him. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unaware.” (Hebrews 13:2)

Angels in Austin

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I’m happy to announce that I’ve started making audio recordings of my blog articles. It’s a new thing for me to produce this kind of material but I thought it would be good since so many people nowadays listen to pod casts and recordings.

This first recording is about supernatural experiences I’ve had in Austin, one around 13 years ago and the other two when I was going to university here. These are articles that on my site, markmcmillion.com. My hope and plan is that this will be the first of more audio shows like this, where I narrate the articles that, Lord willing, will be interesting and be a blessing to you.

All the best to you,

Mark

Here’s the link on YouTube

So, Mark, are you religious?

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“So, Mark, are you religious? Do you think that religion will solve the problems of the world today?”

You’ll hardly every find me using that word, “religious”. I think that word is only twice found in the Bible. I’m not religious, but I found out by severe experience that there is a spiritual world. That Satan, Lucifer is real and so is the God of the Bible.

You don’t like that? I know how you feel. But when reality and truth raised their strange heads directly into my life, then the wise thing to do was to just accept it, whether it was my former viewpoint or not.

That’s how it is for me. There is a spiritual world. The most severe, taxing, words-fail-me-to express experience of my life involved coming to find that there is a spiritual world, inhabited by good and bad spirits. And I had to make an immediate decision at that time as to which group I wanted to align myself with.

That wasn’t religion; please don’t demean me and minimalise me by using that now-hated word. But truth it was; the most fundamental battlefront and expose of truth that could happen.

I don’t come here to discuss religion but to tell you what I found from the most existential personal battle I ever experience in my 70+ years of my life. Don’t talk to me about religion. You are seriously missing the point. It’s the spiritual world I found was real and which I love to talk about, whether it be the miracles I’ve experienced or the fundamental truths I’ve based my life on since I was 21.

Face it. You are trying to trivialize me and mock me when you talk about religion. If there is a spiritual world, and that is what I found, then YOU may find that YOU’re ill-prepared and on shaky ground, if you’ve no knowledge or experience of that realty.

And probably a little “PS” needs to be added. It’s possible that someone reading this might think, “Why did he get so upset? Wasn’t that just a simple, innocent question Mark was asked?”

What I wrote above was the result of a conversation and experience I had with someone. In that situation, it was clear through the tone of voice and overall demeanor of the person I was talking to that it was not a sincere, seeking question but a snarky, veiled attempt to hang the “religious” label on me.

I can see how that question asked by someone else, seeking to understand me better and what I stand for, might have said the same thing. In that case, it would be easy to hear the sincerity in their voice and in that situation I would have answered completely differently.

 

Restored!

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I’ve had quite an adventure with Facebook recently. And there’s been a surprisingly happy ending. It started nearly 3 months ago when, out of the blue, Facebook notified me that they’d “paused” my ability to use Facebook advertising. I still had my account and could communicate with everybody. But my ability to post weekly ads on Facebook, to “boost” the videos and articles I’ve done, was stopped.

As some of you know, I’ve done a series of videos on the prophecies of Daniel in English and afterwards 3 of them have been done in 14 other languages. This is all part of a Christian ministry the Lord as led me into, to “feed His sheep”, as He told us to do. But primarily the method I’ve used to propagate these videos and blog articles to many countries has been Facebook.

At first it didn’t bother me as I’ve had things happen before with Facebook in the last 7 years I’ve been boosting videos with them. At those times, I complied with what they asked and things were resolved in a few days. This time it looked to be the same. They said there appeared to be some anomaly with my payment method and they were pausing my account for my protection. They told me a few things to do, which I did, and I waited for it all to work out. Days passed and I wrote again. They wrote back, basically asking me to be patient. Days turned into weeks.

And perhaps I should explain why this began to get personal to me. Everyone talks about identity nowadays. So many now say, “I identify as a …”. OK, I identify as a Christian missionary. That fundamentally is who and what I am. And I’ve been thrilled over recent years to see how the Lord has made it so that I’ve been able to make these videos and articles and then to be able to publish them to a worldwide audience. There’s been nothing commercial in this; I’ve never monetized the material. But it’s been deeply rewarding to know that there have been a lot of people who’ve viewed the videos and shared them with others.

For this cause, it sort of began to get to me that this means and method of making the videos available worldwide had suddenly stopped. It was soon into the second month of not hearing back from Facebook. And, yes, thoughts did begin to arise in my mind. Had Facebook cut me off? Was my material too radical, had my local activities somehow raised red flags?

At length I began to explore some companies that are specialists at resolving things like this. Basically it comes down to finding some way to communicate with a business so big that they do virtually everything through algorithms and it’s almost infinitely difficult to contact a live person. I talked to one specialist and he mentioned that I’d perhaps been “shadow banned”, a new word to me. It seems it’s a little like what I wrote about in “Ghosted”. Sometimes you just get cut off or cut out by a person, or a company, and you never really get a straight reason why.

But when I looked again at the message Facebook had sent me, it didn’t come across like that. They said it was some payment issue, some kind of glitch that could be easily resolved if perhaps some human being just looked at it all briefly. And just to mention it, during this time Facebook has been going through a major internal restructuring and has laid off thousands of staff. This may have been a factor in what happened to me.

I was into my second month of not hearing from Facebook. Meanwhile I was praying desperately and asking others to do the same. And the Lord really answered and came through, here’s what happened. Over twenty years ago I was on one of the many mission fields I’ve been on and part of what I did there was to teach Bible classes and do home school teaching to the children of fellow missionaries there.

One of my students was a young lady, 12 years old at the time. I’ve kept in contact with her mom over the years and a month or so ago she mentioned that actually her daughter now lives in the same city as me and that she’d like to meet up with me, if that could work out.

So we met up and it was great to see her again, now all grown up. We talked for hours and she mentioned in passing that she’d worked for one of the largest technology companies in the world. So I shared with her what had happened with me and Facebook, mentioning to her that it seemed like I’d perhaps been “shadow banned”.

It was something she knew something about. And then she told me she had a friend who works at a company and that perhaps she could talk to him about my problem. Bingo!! Well, it wasn’t bingo right away but it was a glimmer of hope that I’d not had till then. In a few days she contacted me to say that sometimes these things really almost never got resolved. But that there were ways for ones on the inside to sort of “push people up the queue”.

Long story short, within a week or so I began to get feedback from Facebook that I’d not received up till then. And within about 10 days, everything was resolved! Now that may not sound like much of a miracle to you but for me, it was a pretty big deal. I’m now back to doing my weekly Facebook ads to countries and language groups around the world and it’s just a huge relief to be restored to the place I was 3 months ago, to be able to continue to minister in the way the Lord has provided for years now.

I really did get hit with a lot of conspiracy theory thoughts while this was going on. And I’m not discounting that nefarious stuff goes on all the time. But in this case it’s just been so encouraging to see the Lord come through with one of His “tricks” , putting me in contact with someone who knew someone who was able to do what needed to be done, when all other avenues had failed.

I hope that’s an encouragement to you. Even in this increasingly clouded and techno-dominated world of now, the good God is still able to intervene and fix things when it’s according to His will. Glory to God!

Going to hell

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The pinnacle experience of my life was going to hell when I was 20. I’ve shied away from talking about it over the years because it was so unspeakable. But perhaps I shouldn’t. Near-death experiences are rare and ones where the experience is a horrific one seem to be even more rare. But that’s what happened to me.

Many scoff at the idea of hell. I smile when I see things like that. Through that experience in 1969, I was delivered from severely entrenched atheism. Back then, I was an “evangelist” of atheism; I found joy in defeating weak, vacillating Christians in debate. But entering the spiritual world, utterly naked and without any protective covering that salvation in Christ gives, I experienced the full onslaught of the afterlife outside salvation.

I don’t know if I’ve ever really described that experience. Perhaps I should. You may not be able to relate to it, it may seem like gibberish to you. But life after death for someone without salvation in Jesus is going to be a very, extremely, strange world, as it was for me.

Without salvation in the afterlife, I was like a person without diving equipment, 150 meters (yards) below sea level. There was no oxygen. It was a strange, foreign world. There were beings there that were in their realm while I was not in mine. I was in extreme panic and in great confusion. But worst of all, there was no way back. It was too late. The level of fear, confusion, despondency and utter hopelessness defies explanation in words we have in our present realm.

It’s an incredible thing to enter the spiritual world. One thing I saw so clearly is that it’s really “all by faith’. We say that glibly here in our realm. But in the spiritual world, faith is utterly the coinage of the realm. And I endlessly gasped for even a whiff of faith. Everything is inside out, compared to this present world we live in. Materially things there are completely secondary, if they register at all. Elements of the soul and heart are the substance of that realm and your spiritual condition is the only thing that matters.

Jesus talked about the man who came to the wedding feast without a wedding garment. (Matthew 22:12) That’s how I was. I didn’t have the garment of salvation, the transformation that makes life in eternity possible. So I was utterly unprepared to experience the spiritual world.

Did I understand all that then at that time, as I somewhat do now? No; really, really I didn’t. I was in a prolonged terror, experiencing things that I totally didn’t understand and didn’t even have words to describe what was happening to me. I had virtually no understanding of what I was experiencing or the words to describe it , which I came to find after becoming a believing Christian and reading the explanation of life that the Bible gives.

Time, as we experience it here, ceased to exist there. I was in eternity. But also in utter confusion, utter hopelessness, utter lack of truth. I do believe that this is within the element and range of what the unsaved experience in the hereafter, in hell.

The apostle Paul talked about, “Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord…” (II Corinthians 5:11). No, Paul was not in hell in Acts 9 but he was suddenly face to face with the Lord, who told Paul, “I am Jesus who you persecute.” Paul was utterly on the wrong side of the Lord and that was his introduction.

You don’t find many preachers talking about Paul talking about “knowing the terror of the Lord.” Talking about hell in these times is very passé. It’s just not done. It’s not cool.

Be that as it may, I feel I should speak up more about how that is what I experienced. For me, it was totally what I needed to stun, shock and sear me out of my unbelief. Nobody could talk to me. I was always the smartest guy in the room, at least in my own eyes. So the Lord let this happen, in His mercy, so that I could get a real glimpse of how very far away from the truth I was.

And truth was actually what I’d been looking for all along. So God gave me this experience, outside any contact with others, not a pastor, not my grandparents, not a church, but just me alone. And it worked.

I was so stunned, shocked and almost in unbelief that I was able to return to this realm where we all now live, after experiencing so horrific a place, that it was like some kind of Sci-Fi movie where someone comes back to this earth and world, after a prolonged absence. That might sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not.

If this is just outside your realm of understanding, I can give you the text to two songs that rather well articulate the atmosphere of Hell. The Eagles wrote in the last words of “Hotel California”, “You can check-out any time you like, but you can never leave!” That’s how hell works: you can never leave.

Similarly, Bob Dylan sang in one of his songs, “There must be some kind of way outta here, said the joker to the thief, there’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.” As the song says, you look for a way out but it eludes you. Meanwhile, confusion engulfs and consumes you. Snippets and dark glimpses of hell, brought into contemporary music.

I’ve been happily encouraged through the years when I’ve read of others who’ve had near-death experiences, that they too have had very similar feelings to mine. They don’t even want to talk about it. They don’t think anyone will believe them. They struggle strongly even to find the words to describe what happened to them. It’s a very personal thing that often their friends and family can’t believe and it makes them estranged from their loved ones, since it all seems so farfetched.

I’m glad I’ve been able to put this on paper, so to speak. Experiencing hell was what it took to lay a foundational event in my life that prepared me to receive the message of salvation from young “Jesus People” a few months later. And it was this experience, that the spiritual world is fundamentally the real world, that made the decision to follow Jesus and to take up my cross in service to Him to be the only “common sense” thing that I knew was the high will of God.

This was all when I was in my early 20’s, long ago. But looking back, I see again how pivotal that experience I had in the spiritual world was, even if it was in the dark side of it. I was there, thrust there by God, because of my hardness of heart and repeated resistance to the Holy Spirit which was trying to reach out to me.

I hope this is somehow a blessing to someone. The spiritual world is real. Unbelief and atheism are your worst enemies, at least they were mine. There is no depth that God in His mercy cannot reach to find us in our worst condition and to lead us back out of that blackness, even virtual insanity, back to the glorious light that is in Him.

 

 

What has the Lord already done?

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So often Christians pray but the Lord’s already answered. Moses was almost overwhelmed by the calling he was given by God and he knew his own weaknesses. But God told him, “What is that in your hand?” (Exodus 4:2)

In Moses’ hand was his own old, personal staff. But when Moses cast it to the ground, it turned into a writhing serpent. The lesson is, so often the Lord has already given us what we need for our calling and battle. But then we don’t recognize it or even see it.

It’s just so fundamental: you’ve got to see God. In this case it doesn’t mean to see the Ancient of Days in His glory but you really do have to see what the Lord has done and is doing in your life. And I think almost all of us Christians are somewhat deaf, dumb and blind to a degree in the things of the Lord.

In one of the greatest crisis of my life, in the aftermath of my divorce, I was so much groping for understanding of it all and desperate to be free from the bitterness and hurt I felt. I knew I had some deep problems but I couldn’t find the way forward and really get any kind of handle on what the Lord was doing.

In abject desperation I looked again at the only really clear verse in the Bible that talks about bitterness, Hebrews 12:15. “Looking diligently lest any man fail the grace of God, lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.” I had reviewed that verse so many times and so many people had shared it with me that I was almost sick of it. But still I was floundering .

Finally I thought to try to go back and squeeze that verse again, like if you do a second or third squeeze of an orange. Was there some juice in that verse I was missing? I looked again at it slowly and deeply. “Looking diligently lest any man fail the grace of God…”

What does that mean? How in the world can you “look diligently..”? But the verse goes on to say that if you don’t “look diligently”, then that is when you “fail the grace of God” and a root of bitterness springs up. Therefore it must mean that the antidote and prevention of bitterness is to “look diligently”.

It came to me that it means that you have to see God in things. You have to look and believe that there is something there from Him for you, a lesson, a way of escape, some “grace of God”, as the verse says, that can be missed if we don’t look diligently.

So I realized more deeply than ever before that we have to “see God”. We have to see the Lord in things and what He is doing, in spite of what it really looks like that people are doing. Joseph in Egypt told his brothers,

“You meant it for evil but God meant it for good.” (Genesis 50:20) An incredible verse and possibly one of the best examples in the Bible of someone not getting bitter because he truly “looked diligently”.  Joseph really saw the hand of God in his life, regardless of what his brothers had done to him.

We just have to do that. We have to see what is already in our hand, what has God already given us, or what has God allowed and His hand even ordained, even though it looks in the physical and temporal to be totally against us and even contrary to God’s will.

So one of the greatest things we can do or strive to try to do is to see the Lord in things. The story is told of a man in the flood, on his roof as the waters rose. Some locals came around with a boat to rescue him but the man refused, saying “No thanks, I’m trusting the Lord!” Two more times that happened and then the floods rose and the man drowned.

In heaven the man was questioning God. But God said in return, “What do you mean? I sent that boat around 3 times!” The man didn’t see what God was doing and very often we don’t either. We don’t recognize the hand of God in our lives, or His input, His answers, His provision, His outstretched hand with the answer to our needs.

God help us all to have seeing eyes and hearing ears. He’s so often already answered prayer, already answered or is answering. May He help us all to be spiritually awake enough to recognize it and to go forward with his answers and provision.

The horse latitudes

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In the time of sailing ships, they’d often get stuck in “the horse latitudes”, a place in the Atlantic where the winds were often calm and the ships would stay for weeks, without wind in their sails. They’d end up having to get towed by row boats of their crew to zones where the winds would be there again.

Sometimes we ourselves are in “the horse latitudes” in our lives. It reminds me of what the ancient Jews said, “We see not our signs”. (Psalm 74:9) God seems to be silent. Our ability to “discern the times”, as Jesus called it, evidently has diminished. (Matthew 16:3)

Before, we were swept along by the mighty winds of God’s will and were able to see the hand of God closely guiding our lives. We felt at the apex of history, a part of it and willing to do what we could to further the cause of Christ and to see truth and justice triumph over darkness and deceit.

But then we find ourselves in the horse latitudes. The clarity, so strong in other times, appears to abandon us. Everything feels to be relative. You are stilled, like a ship in a calm on an open ocean.

Perhaps earlier, a calm is all you prayed for, as a respite from the storms that were assailing you. But now you pray for clarification, for the hand of God to even send lighting on a dark night to illuminate, for wind, for direction in your surroundings, to help you know where you stand, what’s around you and where you are going.

I’ve certainly been in the horse latitudes for periods in my life. It’s like the verse about how “the Lord will restore the years that the locusts have eaten”. (Joel 2:25) But I suppose there must be these pauses, these stops, even as there are in a piece of music, to complete the symphony of our lives.

Maybe the Lord does it to see if we’re satisfied, if we’ve gone as far as we want to go. Are we ready to quit? Had enough? Ready to throw in the towel and to sink into somnolent surrender?

Or are you looking for a breath of wind? Are you looking for the next leading from God? Are you looking for the wind to blow, the lights to come on, for the vision in the night, like Paul experienced when he saw a man of Macedonia in a dream saying “Come over and help us”. (Acts 16:9)

Paul and his companions could have just thrown in the towel. “Well, the Lord has stopped leading us. We tried to do this and that but He’s not leading any more so I guess it’s all over. Time to go back to Jerusalem and get my job back with the Pharisees.” No, Paul didn’t say that, even though he might have felt at that time that he was in the horse latitudes, unsure which way the wind blew and feeling in a bit of darkness at the moment.

But then it came; the wind began to blow. A direction and the presence of God began to be made manifest, as He’s done so many times to His servants. Elijah, alone in his cave, thought that he was the only one that was left of the faithful in Isreal. But the Lord told Elijah that “7000 have not bowed the knee to Baal”. (I Kings 19:18) “And besides that, Elijah, I’ve got a new direction for you. You need to get up and get moving”, just like Paul needed to do some 800 years later.

The Lord sends the wind after the stultifying calm in the horse latitudes. It’s not the end; just a bend in the road, a lull before the magnificence of the next stanza in the sympathy of our lives.

Are you becalmed in “the horse latitudes”? It almost reminds me of the verse in John 5 about the man by the pool of Bethesda, “waiting for the moving of the waters” (John 5:3). You have to admit, the things of the Lord do sometimes work that way. I think about Cornelius in Acts 10, a man evidently faithful all his life.

And then one day the angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Your prayers are come up as a memorial before God. Now send men to Joppa.” (Acts 10: 4 & 5) You can read Acts 10 to find out how that turned out and how the history of Christianity and human history itself was changed by the Lord honoring the faithfulness of that man.

But if you’re in a calm and stillness, when you’re hoping for the leading and intervention of God in your life, do keep holding on. Keep praying, keep believing. God’s delays are not denials. Wait till the lights come on. Wait for the winds to pick up and for the Lord to set your sails again with the wind of His will.

If you’re in the horse latitudes, just hold on. It can be scary, it can be almost suffocating. But the Light of the Lord and the wind of the Lord never fail to show up in our lives, even if there are pauses from time to time. “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thy heart.”  (Psalm 27: 14)

An Answer from the Lord

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I got a little answer from the Lord today to a major question that’s been on my heart a while. He’s so faithful to get through to us with some new viewpoint or insight on what’s been a personal dilemma. For me, it’s been about how much I should be involved in what many could consider just worldly, secular politics.

Politics is the background I come from. I was planning for a political career before the Lord really “rang my bell” with a horrific near-death experience while I was in university that thrust me from atheism into being a startled believer. Months later I came to Christ and became after that a missionary abroad for close to 40 years.

I embraced the words of Jesus that He spoke to His disciples and took those to be His words to me. His cause became my cause, His solution to the problems of individuals and the world at large became what I’ve held to be the highest and best path for all mankind.

But for a couple of years, I’ve been deeply concerned about situations happening in my local community. I wrote about that in a recent article, “Checking your local school board”.

All the while though, there’s been this gnawing question on my heart, “Are you getting tripped off? Moving from your calling as a Christian missionary and disciple back into your former ways and mindsets?” It’s been a real question on my heart as I try to be certain that I’m following the Lord’s leading and not my own personal inclinations.

Today though, I feel I’ve had a breakthrough with this uncertainty. So often with these things, it’s just a simple thought that comes to you, a new viewpoint that you’d not had before that brings light and simplicity as well as clarity and relief. The Lord put this whole question about involvement with the local school crisis into a framework of what some have called “consider the poor”. This comes from the verse in Psalm 41:1 that says, “Blessed is he that considers the poor, the Lord will deliver him in the time of trouble.”

The whole Bible is full of this, as was the life of Jesus on earth. He said for us not only to love God but to love our neighbor. To explain, He told the story of “The Good Samaritan”. The Samaritan stopped on his way to help a man who’d been beaten by robbers. According to Jesus, several very religious priestly types had already passed by before but they’d done nothing for the beaten man. In other words, taking personal, physical action to alleviate the wrongs we are confronted with in this world is definitely what Jesus did Himself and what He taught in the gospels as well.

And this morning the Lord brought back to me a time when I was in my early 30’s, a missionary in Vienna, Austria with my wife and kids, trying to reach the nearby closed-to-the-gospel countries of Communist eastern Europe. We’d taken some clothes and food to a nearby camp for Romanian refugees who were in very meager circumstances. It was a way to get to know them, to try to help and to try to bring the gospel message to those folks.

But it created a stir among some of our missionary friends who thought we were going down a strange path, getting off into social work and humanitarianism, rather than really sticking to evangelism. Then, back then, someone shared  some wise council with us on this subject. It went something like this, “Feed the poor and cloth the needy if it gives you an opportunity to share the truth and love of God with them. But don’t let feeding the poor become your main occupation. Continue to primarily follow the example of the Early Church in putting salvation and ministering the Word first.”

This was such a help at that time to clarify the place and priority of this kind of activity. And it was a very similar feeling I had in the Lord’s thoughts this morning. I came away with the feeling that the Lord approved of my concern for the situation in the schools near me. It doesn’t have to be a trip-off or a departure from Christian discipleship to be involved and active in that.

But at the same time, there’s the gentle guidance that it shouldn’t become my all in all. And I do approach it as an activity that the Lord is leading me to be involved with, rather than as a political activist of some political party.

And meanwhile I still have plenty of other things that the Lord has done in my life, such as the two web sites and the YouTube channel in many languages that I’ve been maintaining for the last few years.

It just helps to know that I’ve gotten a word from the Lord on this, some direction and guidance on how a measured approach to these present distresses in society around me are things that He approves my taking some time and involvement with.

Maybe it’s like what Jesus said, “These ought you to do, and not leave the other undone.” (Matthew 23:23) I feel freer to go forward with these things but to also keep it all in perspective within the overall plan of God in my life. I hope it’s ok to share this personal lesson and victory with you as we all individually keep looking to the Lord for His daily leading in our lives. God bless you!