Andrew’s Personal Conversion Story – “A Journey to God’  From Randy’s Original Raw E-mail Correspondence.

The following dialog was a confession of faith of Andrew Smith to his friend and engineering client James “Randy” Little that started in November of 2006 and ended in February of 2007. At that time, Andrew had completed his investigation into Divine Revelation for the purpose of NOT having to go to church and ended up compelling himself, almost against his will, to ultimately become a believer in God per the Jews, a Christian, and ultimately a Catholic. Thanks to Randy who managed to never lose his email records over more than ten years, this compelling story is available now. Andrew’s journey took him three years before entering the Catholic Church from the position of a “religious agnostic” – he says “religious” because he believed ‘religiously’ in Murphy’s Law at the time.

From 11/3/06 to Randy from Andrew:

Good to hear from you. Funny about the déjà vu. Actually, I have sort of a long story regarding the supernatural. Since this is e-mail and you can skip over it if you don’t want to hear (read) it, then I’ll tell you a bit about it. One day, not long after being married to my wife, but before kids, I decided to see if I could find God, because if I could, that might be a good and worthy thing to do with my time and certain analytical talents and it might save a lot of people a lot of trouble. (I was anti-church, also, so I sort of wanted to prove that church wasn’t necessary, as my wife liked to go to church once in a while). Anyway, as an engineer, I began to study regarding “supernatural revelation” as it supposedly might have transpired throughout human history, in chronological order. Looking for something compelling, I studied Hinduism, Buddhism, and various occult (new age) ideas. Reading English translations of ancient documents, I got pretty caught up into Buddhist meditation. It wasn’t too long before sitting with my eyes closed gave me the same sensation as though my eyes were open, except for being weightless and having other bizarre characteristics over normal physics. Very strange, but totally fascinating. I was essentially able to watch a dream kick in from the blackness of closed eyes. Truly incredible. I decided that finding God was too hard and that finding the supernatural might be a better way to improve ones self (and the world – I wanted the POWER). Anyway, at this point I decided to get off the bus of looking for God and on the bus of looking for evidence of the supernatural. I figured, if I could find evidence for the supernatural, I could justify looking further for God, and maybe become a little more talented. I also figured it would, at this point, be easier to find evidence of the supernatural because it is more general, a lower bar, so to speak, than finding God. Nonetheless, at this time, I started having bizarre dreams….

I’m realizing this is a very long story and you probably don’t want to hear it. Let me know if you want me to continue. I may have already told you about it. Do you practice a religion? (you should if you don’t – and I can compel you, haha, you aught to further study if you do)

Randy replies:

You left me hanging! Finish the searching for God story!

11/5/06 to Randy:

Okay. Sorry for leaving you hanging. You know how it is with babies in the house. Okay… So, I started having dreams…. Let me back up a bit…. There were two kinds of dreams that I was having… I was realizing that I was very good at this meditation business, could sit down, be perfectly still for a long period of time, and watch a dream begin. What the ancients would call the ambition of meditation, of which there were “five levels of healing”, I would call “Lucid Dreams”, borrowing from modern sleep science. I don’t think I encouraged regular dreams at this point. That would be the second type of dream. Anyway, these Lucid Dreams were incredibly powerful (try an internet search, but don’t get caught up in it!). Through them, you could literally do anything. Most people have lucid dreams by becoming conscious during a regular dream. I was able to dream, essentially without ever losing consciousness. So, in searching for evidence for the supernatural, I studied, while continuing my self “centered” meditation practices. I examined claims of psychic phenomenon, statistical meta-analysis of historical experiments, chased down anecdotal evidence and bizarre claims looking for some compelling, especially repeatable material. I wanted more than just evidence, I wanted a recipe to duplicate in the lab. I was hot on the trail chasing down every lead. I was amazed of the number of claims, stories, and dead end “evidence” that there really was out there if your really sat down and put it all into perspective. However, besides claims of levitation, bending spoons, and clairvoyance, one thing that I found to be interesting and somewhat credible, was the OBE – Out of Body Experience. These were also professed by those with NDE’s – Near Death Experiences. I figured if anyone had a chance of cultivating an OBE, I would, because of my proficiency in meditation and lucid dreaming. In this psychic phenomena, a person without physically leaving one place could essentially leave their body and visit another place. There were lots of seemingly detached stories around the world supporting this idea, including, supposedly, that even CIA had a division for spying on the Russians using this method but tore it down after only having a 60% success rate – supposedly. If I could pull this off, that would be my compelling evidence for the supernatural and I would be able to resume my course for God, or simply enjoy the new found POWER. I arranged a test. While living in Florida, I called my friend in Arizona and explained what I wanted to do. He wrote a message and placed it on his desk under a paperweight. All I had to do was read the message without physically leaving Florida and I was done! Laboratory confirmed “supernatural” phenomenon. Okay, here’s what happened: I would enter my “zone”, “leave my body”, and weightlessly fly at super human speed over the United States to Arizona. I would arrive at the building of my friends office, quickly say “hello” to the secretary, and proceed to my friend’s office. I had visited there before, so I knew where to go. On this first trip, something unexpected had happened. In my haste, and not having been expected by other employees, I startled some folks, caused a bit of a commotion, bumped into people, and made a huge mess. Everything spilled onto the floor and I was scrambling on my hands and knees looking for the paper. It was gone! Knowing that I had a very limited amount of time to perform my experiment, I lost my sense of peace to frustration and was losing my meditation. I woke up before finding the note. No problem, I would try again… The second time, I flew over again and looked. In this case, everything in the room was re-arranged because of the mess I had made before. The desk was clear of clutter. I went over to a medicine cabinet to look in there, I couldn’t find it anywhere. In my mission urgency, I grew in frustration and my effective meditation time was shortening. I was realizing that I was my own obstacle to success, but I persevered through wit and cleverness. Instead of wasting time flying to Arizona, I had my friend’s building put in my back yard so I could just walk over. Still, there were problems outside of my control. Why all of these unforeseen problems and not my brain just either making up a message for the note or confessing the exercise was impossible was driving me crazy. Discovering that I did not have ultimate control of my own brain was not supposed to be part of my lab experience. Finally, I was going to be super smart. In my next meditation, where I knew I only had precious seconds to make a conclusion, I planned to summon my friend to my bedroom immediately upon entering the “zone” so that I could ask him, point blank, what did he write! To my astonishment and utter demise, he arrived, but only nine years old and had no clue what I was talking about. I about broke down in tears! I had been duped by my own brain! I was simply dumbfounded! I had an eerie sense, although I could not confirm it, that I was not the only one involved in my dreams… there was something bigger and smarter than I. Was it my own subconscious? Was it something else? Why not a simple failure? Why this sort of “duel” and being constantly outsmarted – by myself? I was perplexed! I called my friend in Arizona and surrendered – to what? I explained my failures and we terminated the quest. I knew I could not rule out OBE’s, as a supernatural phenomenon, but I had to, at least for now, admit that I had to rule them out for me. How sad it was. All that time, many mornings, lost. Nonetheless, with this added level of experience, I could examine claims more knowledgeably, more critically, more authentically. I found credible evidence simply incredibly rarely but found everyone making a buck on hearsay, speculation, or lies. (By the way, I did find mathematical evidence for psychic phenomena and incredibly minor lunar influences of human behavior (almost indiscernible), but you practically had to have a PhD in statistics to understand it, so I didn’t consider it “compelling” and it had to be thrown out by my need for “compelling” evidence). Okay, so now, I was starting to find more intrigue in my “regular” dreams, which were becoming more vibrant, realistic, life-like, involved, and interesting in general. I suddenly found them, with their component of unpredictability, possibly more important than my super-human, intentional, power dreaming and meditation, which had let me down. (The dreaming aspect let me down, but I still hold certain objectives of “meditation” in extremely high regard – despite the risk of “escapism” and self-centeredness, “occult” problems, and other potential risks inherent to meditation – hopefully, I won’t forget to mention the ultimate solution to this that I rediscovered much later). I realized that these “regular” dreams were at least outside of my conscious control. Maybe, if I simply studied them a bit, I would either learn about me, or, what if God were actually trying to reach me through my dreams? It was a real possibility! Furthermore, I realized that although Lucid Dreaming had some real, practical values (as the ultimate simulator, people have perfected their golf games, learned to play an instrument better, gotten over personal fears, or simply stayed off the streets due to Lucid Dreaming – personally have worked on electronic designs in my Lucid Dreams, but I’d rather be awake for it so I can be “clocked in”) and although it demonstrated the super-computer capabilities of the human brain to me, it was drawing me more into myself and away from my quest of the supernatural or finding God, and even away from my own world – including my wife! I had to simply study my dreams. How hard could that be? Back to the bookstore! So, I started looking in new areas of the bookstore that I had somehow not been interested in, at all, before. I perused numerous books on dreams. I had considered books such as these as way impractical for real life – utterly useless, like tarot cards or astrology. I realized that I was examining these books looking for something compelling. Would the world have anything to offer me? Dream dictionary galore! Who writes these things? Dream encyclopedias! Thick books with millions of words that are believed to be a code for something else. Why not just have the “something else”? Why the code? Was a thicker book a better book as with normal dictionaries? I had my reasonable doubts. This was not looking good. I couldn’t get myself to buy any of these dictionaries and I didn’t want to buy a “popular” “Freud” book, which seemed like too many eggs in too few baskets. I saw a world tempting me down a road of speculation. I didn’t want to lose my bearings, if I had any left at this point. **** Randy, it is now nearly 5:00 am. I will continue this later. Are you still with me? Or did I lose you?

11/5/06 From Randy:

I’m still with you!

But, Wouldn’t it have been simpler to have your wife write something down and not tell you? Now, that probably would have the same effect as trying to Read your friend’s note. Now here is another experiment: With 2 people meditating, have them try to communicate. Pick a “well known” spot, and meet there and try to exchange: 1) A phrase ( “blue shoes, blue shoes, how old are you?”) 2) A number ( 17 ) 3) A feeling (angry, sad) 4) A hand signal ( “Ok” symbol ) Perhaps one participant would have to concentrate on being a “coduit” and the other “trying to connect to the conduit”.

11/6/06 Reply to Randy:

Hey, Randy. I understand your simpler concept of working through my wife, but I think you are forgetting how anal I am. In a good experiment to determine cause and effect, isolation from all other possible influences that might affect the outcome is crucial. There had to be the least chance of even my subconscious from even merely guessing correctly or nearly correctly from reading my wife’s face, joking with her, or anything else. Other factors are also important, such as motive or the appearance of a motive, as perceived by a third-party critic. Also, at this point my pursuit could have become a silly looking, taxing, enterprise to my wife. After all, I had other obligations besides dreaming whenever I could fit it in. I knew that my long-time friend in Arizona would not ask any questions or make any judgments, simply cooperate with the request and be strictly honest and objective during the process. Besides, I often question how well my keeps secrets and I certainly don’t think she is sneaky enough to really know how to hide things well, especially from me…. Now there was another consideration. (Jumping ahead, this pursuit did eventually tax my marriage, even threaten it. I think intuitively I tried to keep my wife away from it so that I might have more time for it – since I didn’t know where I was headed, exactly! Eventually, through the challenges that my marriage endured from all of this – especially the latter parts which I haven’t gotten to yet – our marriage became many times better than it ever could have become otherwise. More on this much later. Remember, my wife is also trained as a scientist (MD) and I was her husband, I had reason to question her support of this time consuming hobby). About your experiment… keep in mind that I had not just come up with my experiment entirely on my own. It was based on some considerable research. Clairvoyance was always compelling and prominent in literature. It is also relatively easy to isolate and test for. Mind reading is pretty much an all-too-rare and highly doubted, possibly subjective phenomenon nearly always associated with charlatans, in literature. However, if you really wanted to do your experiment, it would be hard to know if you needed one or two psychic people – which would really reduce the likelihood of success in a timely manner, not to mention the practical aspects. If you had success to prove psychic phenomena of this sort, you would know how to define or classify what you had without further, more time consuming tests. Further isolation of the cause, whether due to the abilities of one or two people, would require further testing, and then you may end up having to do my experiment just to get a baseline of each person – but only success would be meaningful. Meeting someone in a lucid dream, or meditation, is a very funny business. First of all, they never believe you when you tell them that they are just in your dream. They refuse to “belong” to you in this regard. In fact, they usually have no clue what you are talking about or just give you lip service to blow off the idea. The few times I had discussions with someone, sometimes profound discussions, the real person’s cluelessness upon waking is truly disappointing to a point of tragedy, really discouraging further R&D in that area. It’s not a place you really want to go without a number of successes under your belt, first. By the way, without good results, successful meditation on something meaningful is very difficult. Concerning oneself about anything during a meditation is truly detrimental to the meditation altogether. It is important to be detached from all things to have a good meditation. There is a great deal to this. There are some excellent “how to” books on Lucid Dreaming (becoming conscious during a dream) which, as a concept, I would strongly recommend. Watching a dream begin, that is, watching the lights get turned on while you know your eyelids are shut, is a fascinating meditative “enlightenment”, but for super-powerful simulation purposes, not really better than Lucid Dreaming. Meditation is in itself good (as I mentioned, aside from the risks), especially for overcoming certain psychological weaknesses (“levels of healing”) but it is actually different from Lucid Dreaming at nearly all levels. Anyway, I digress… enough of that… So, I found a bunch of dream dictionaries and encyclopedias. I looked through them taking mental note of some of my most recent, vivid dreams.

Let me say something about these dreams, especially Lucid ones. Vision in a Lucid Dream is actually sharper than real-life vision. I personally think it is because your brain is generating the signals while bypassing the sensors (eyeballs, ears, etc.,) and all of their defects and limitations. It is amazing to me that the mental abilities seem to be designed beyond the sensor limitations. The colors are brighter and images are clearer. The resolution includes mental zoom and macro lenses, on-demand, built in. It really must be experienced. Everyone should experience a lucid dream at least once, but the Gross National Profit would probably suffer at least a bit and even video game sales would decline some. It wouldn’t surprise me if such dreams were a favorite past time in the ancient days, entered upon through meditation and written about by the “sages”. Walking through walls and such at resolutions better than HDTV – I completely reminisced when I watched the movie “Matrix”, especially at the end where Nero had total control of the universe… it was simply like he knew he was in his lucid dream. At this point I had numerous vivid dreams. Some I considered to be as close to Heaven as I might ever experience on this side, if there were such a place, and I now hoped there were, and they spurred me on my quest. So, looking at these dream dictionaries and such, I was disappointed. None of the interpretations of my dreams made sense. I dismissed them. Then, I noticed a name on a few dream related books that rang a bell. The name was Edgar Cayce. Years ago, I had tried to find that name in a book store, or anywhere, after seeing parts of a documentary on him that my mom was watching on television while I was a kid. During my research of Psychic Phenomenon I tried to find him again. I never figured out how to spell “Cayce” and always gave up on trying before getting anywhere. Finally, I was staring right at the name. Edgar Cayce is considered to be the worlds single most and best documented psychic. He was exactly what I was looking for for compelling evidence of the supernatural AND there were related works on dreams. I examined some of these books, found they actually made sense, and bought some. Now, I was entering a whole new world-view. Edgar Cayce wrote on the beginning of the cosmos, on the supernatural, on formulas for psychic methods, on the world beyond, on certain inventions with crazy effects, just about everything under the sun that I might be interested in. Have you heard of him? Was he truly a door into the supernatural? Did he offer one? Edgar Cayce, in my mind, could just be the mother load! One other thing that Edgar Cayce wrote about was reincarnation. He wrote extensively on it. Now, I had already studied some of Hinduism, ancient Egyptian religions and beliefs, and Buddhism, as well as their variations. I was well aware of the concept of reincarnation. I was also at least somewhat aware of the concept of Heaven. I also thought there might be a “mutually exclusive” conflict between the two. I hadn’t realized this conflict before because I hadn’t thought about it and a good deal of my philosophy at this point was pretty simple… there must exist a universal religion, or truth, that is at least somewhat present in all ancient religions as attested for by the continued success of those religions (anything that’s been around for a long time must have some truth to it) and that if one examined all religions and took what is good in all of them, they would be able to re-create the one true religion, if there was one, from which all other religions must have been born. This didn’t jive with “mutual exclusion”. I had to do more research, who was right? What evidence was there that Edgar Cayce knew what he was talking about. My philosophy was not yet ready to reject one religious world altogether without studying it or knowing what it had to say for itself (the Judeo-Christian religions, as I barely knew them), outright, on the whim of Cayce. I started looking very critically at Cayce, studying him, trying to find an inconsistency or compelling confirmation among all of his many “readings”. With so many volumes of Cayce material out there, there seemed to be enough ammunition for some success after a bit of diligence. Let me know if you know anything about Edgar Cayce and how he worked. If so, I’ll skip some important details. If you have never heard of him, until now, let me know and I’ll give you the quick scoop that a Cayce fan would probably by irritated by (despite his death over 50 years ago, his generally successful writings have earned him a HUGE “secret” following… the “base” is a Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach, Virginia). Andrew.

11/6/06 Randy replies:

I’ve herd the name before, but I don’t recall where. Perhaps a TV documentary?

11/9/06 Andrew responds:

Ok… Well, Edgar Cayce is a major hero in the world of the psychics, clairvoyance, stories of Atlantis, homeopathic medicine, new age methods and beliefs, and reincarnation, the pyramids and other mysteries, and probably dozens of other topics. This guy is referred to as “The other Nostradamus”, but he actually runs circles around Nostradamus (I had already studied him). Here is a little snippet on Cayce from his legacy site (EdgarCayce.org “a Resource for Enlightenment Since 1931”):

http://www.edgarcayce.org/about_edgarcayce/about_edgarcayce.asp

I just now did a good search on Edgar Cayce and am still impressed. The guy was sick as a child and while “sleeping” gave his father the remedy. That was the beginning. For many years he would receive a letter with a ten dollar bill asking for medical advice. He would put himself into a meditative state and his secretary would read to him the question and would record the answer as Cayce would dictate it, through a strange voice. This went on for many years. A copy of the “reading” was kept for their records (they still exist) and a copy was sent out. Most questions were for medical problems, but many were for just about any other mystery. Many people examine those records even today for answers to everything from how astrology works to what the healing properties of different minerals are. Today, gold is used as a treatment for arthritis. It came out of his readings, first. Today, there are theories about the pyramids having been built around 10000 B.C. and that the “openings” point to certain constellations. He came up with that, first. (Doing a google search of 10000 and pyramids shows a lot of support regarding that number, as well as a lot of skepticism). Stories of the lost land of Atlantis were just about non-existent (since ancient Greece), until Cayce, who counted many people as reincarnated from then with special talents. Cayce had tremendous stories to tell about those ancient days and places. The sheer volume of it all, without obvious contradictions, for so many years on-going, was less super-human and more super-natural. He could not only tell someone, without meeting them, the exactions of their malady, but also exactly which shelf the medicine was on in some far off store that he had never visited. This was a regular thing for Cayce. When Cayce woke from his “sleep”, he would often be surprised by his own readings. He started as a Presbyterian but became convinced from his own readings that Christianity was not the whole story and that reincarnation was a normal reality for everyone, explaining how bad things seemed to happen to good people (essentially westernizing Karma for a first time), among other things. Life was a series of lives, spiraling toward its objective perfection, in direct opposition to the live-once mantra of Christianity (giving everyone plenty of room for experimenting in moral failure, during their current life). Cayce was asked to recite his experience while entering this strange realm from which he drew information. He recited all sorts of demons on the way to a room where an old man allowed him to read from the records of a person’s life. For some reason, bits of information like this never seemed to bother his followers. Each recitation, or dictation, was through a strange, deep, monotonic voice, as though he were hypnotized or channeling. Accept for a few recently deceased folks now and then, it was largely always the same strange intelligence that spoke through him, that had some ease over space and time. When I studied him, I was looking for something compelling. What was compelling was his large number of stories that didn’t seem to have inconsistencies in them throughout hundreds, maybe thousands of readings. This in itself was not of human origin, which, as you know, has trouble telling a single story twice the same way if it is not a true story. However, when testing the medical records, despite claims of hundreds of successful healings, all of the patients identities have remained concealed so I couldn’t just call someone up and ask them to confirm that their healing took and remained. (I’m sure many of the patients are still alive). Cayce also had readings about the time of Jesus Christ, especially when a patient was reincarnated from then. He also had many intriguing readings about the future. You can find some on the website. He also had readings related to the Dead Sea Scrolls, arguably the most important religious find of the last 100 years. These documents were not accidentally discovered until after his death. I found that compelling (finally). However, I had all sorts of data on reincarnation and Cayce himself said the Bible supported it. I found this so hard to believe, since the Bible is the very book that Christians (and Jews – Old Testament) use and they don’t teach reincarnation. I realized I had to read that terrible, politically charged, thick, blindly followed, book for myself, critically. By this time, however, I had already been reading English translations of religiously important documents and welcomed the Bible for historical reasons only. So, I grudgingly grabbed a Bible that Janet and I had lying around (we don’t know where it came from) and started reading it, from cover to cover. (As it turns out, I thought Christians were all believing in something and they couldn’t explain or understand why they were believing it, so I thought they were all crazy… for this reason I did not want to read the Bible, since I might be considered to be one of them – so, I read in secret. I didn’t realize that I had avoided reading the Bible all along because I was, deep down, anti-Christian, although my mother taught me once when I was a child that I was of no other religion but a “Christian Protestant” – whatever that meant! (despite having been baptized during a special trip to Europe when I was very small)). Here is where I had my first, partial, “conversion” experience and change of “world view”. I realized the Bible was like no other collection of historical books I had yet examined. It’s authorship defied human nature. Are you still with me or are you getting bored? I told you this was a long story. Andrew.

11/9/06 Randy replies:

I’m still with a you, keep going!

11/19/06 Andrew continues with Chapter 4 – Beginning the Bible

Okay, so I started reading the bible. I figured myself to be too restless to just sit and read, so I considered reading while on the treadmill (not too difficult if you use your knees to absorb some shock, but of course, you can’t go too fast). Before tackling this, I tested to see if physical activity would help or hurt my critiquing capabilities. I did this by asking myself my favorite riddle, “If the boiler on a ship is twice as old as the ship was when the boiler was as old as the ship is, what is the ratio of the age of the boiler to the age of ship?” Up to this point, I was only able to solve the riddle graphically, whether in my head or not. To my delight and amazement, I discovered that on the treadmill I was able to solve the riddle in my head both graphically and algebraically. I was never able to solve it algebraically before. This was evidence enough for me that I may be able to read the translations of the antique documents (Bible) critically, after all, on the treadmill. So I went, simply beginning with Genesis, since it was at the beginning, assuming (incorrectly) that everything was in chronological order, with the New Testament at the end. At this point, I figured that all Bibles were the same that they might somehow be tainted with modern ideas, but I hoped to read mostly between the lines.

First, I came across the famous “fairy tale” of Adam and Eve. Who could have known their names back in those days? The concepts of creation in seven days and creation from dirt didn’t bother me as much, since I knew that time is relative anyway (days are different in length among planets, for example, so before there was the Earth, how long was a day? Also, I knew that people are essentially made from minerals, water, organic material, etc. Essentially fruit of the Earth, or dirt, somehow animated, chemically if not “spiritually”. So I was okay with those other concepts, but “Adam” and “Eve”? How tellingly fantastic? Also, apparently, there was no “apple” that they bit from, like story books tell us. There are vague concepts and much material between the lines. I figured the modern idea of the apple was one that tainted modern books, but that didn’t manage to slip into my translation of the ancient literature. Perhaps there wasn’t as much corruption as I expected.

Certainly, there were no writing instruments with the first generations to record the names of any first members of the human race. I assumed it fantasy. However, I was bothered by the fact that the concept of Adam and Eve was so boldly stated and that this book was so highly exalted. So, I did a bit of digging. First, the Buddhists believed in reincarnation, as did the Hindus and many other ancient (and not so ancient) Eastern religions. In their philosophy, people always were, and still are, essentially recycled, even through lower and higher life forms. Essentially, the number of people on the earth was never zero, and never two. Adam and Eve, whatever we might call them, seemed more rational than that to me. Edgar Cayce stated that there were actually at least five original Adam and Eve’s. One pair for each “race”, essentially of color: red, yellow, black, white, olive. When they are all adequately mixed, the world would essentially have become more accomplished. As an engineer, of course, I had to consider also what modern biologists believe. They state that there was an original set of parents, call them “Adam” and “Eve”, if you will, and from them all have come and diversity entered the mix over time. This seemed most reasonable to me, since diversity over time and space is more reasonable than similarity over time. This is consistent with the rather universal law of entropy, especially with regard to the Second law of thermodynamics. Well, I guess that was it – the Bible actually won. Eons of years ahead of modern science, it actually agreed with it and scientists now actually use the term Adam to describe the first man. The Aramaic word “Adam”, so I’ve learned, actually means “man”. How about that? I chalked it up as a lucky win, but I believed that the concept was unique to the Judeo Christian religions, so I was intrigued by this direct hit on their part. I also believed the “Big Bang” was true, and again, this “coincidentally” only fits in the Judeo Christian world-view, not really in the reincarnation views, where there is no room for a “beginning” seven days, instantaneous, or a million days in duration.

There were many amazing little concepts in that first book alone. The one that surprised me, and woke me up, in a way, was the concept of having attained “favor” in the “eyes” of God. Folks in strange circumstances of exceptional need would actually appeal to God for a favor, with phrases like “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by.” Now, that was exactly what I was looking for. It comes up no less than some twenty-eight times in the book of Genesis among various folk. All I needed was the manual of how to attain it! Exactly the purpose of my very pursuit was so eloquently phrased! Objective: Find favor in the eyes of God! Where was the “how to” part in the Bible? It had to be in here somewhere! Whatever it was, I was going to test it and be done with it! With so many hundreds of pages left in the Bible to go, I figured I’d eventually come across that secret formula if I just kept reading! It had to at least be somewhere between the lines, if not clearly stated! I was now burning with excitement and desire!

I hope you are still interested.

Andrew.

11/20/06 Randy comments:

Yes, very interesting. In fact, if in the end you end up being very religious, this would make a great book. A book would need more detail.

11/20/06 Andrew responds:

Hello, Randy.

I’m considering turning my experiences into a book (I’ve been told I should – but I’ve never been a “novelist” by any means and never had a clue of where or how to start. I think you’ve given me the opportunity to really put one together, maybe. The good parts are still yet to come. Thanks for listening (reading).

I tried to call you last night to gauge your temperature/interest in my continuing. I suppose it is better I just keep writing. If you see certain details missing, could you please keep notes (of what’s missing) so that in the end I can go back and add them?

Thanks.

11/29/06 – Andrew continues…

Chapter 5 – turning point number 1

Hey, Randy.

These latter parts of my story are somehow harder to write, because, well…

I’ll do my best…

While continue to read the Old Testament, I’m realizing some things about the book. First, although there are many different kinds of writings in the Bible, historical, poetic, general wisdom, etc., nothing is really meant as a fairy tale. It is all written as though very serious, somehow. Much of it is a collection of historical accounts regarding the Kingdoms of the Jews. Some is an expression of various great kings. Some has to do with stuff before the kings and their kingdoms came into play. Nonetheless, it is very historical.

Second, God, as a person, first visible and then invisible, is always present in the books, somehow. He is a demanding God, but only demands a certain moral behavior, the same standard of moral behavior all the time, seemingly. He doesn’t really have a sense of humor, but sometimes what He does or allows is humorous, to me. He definitely accepts negotiations, which is funny to me, but also deeply encouraging on my secret, motivating level of this whole pursuit.

Third, it is at first funny, but then not so funny, that the Old Testament shows God constantly and openly disappointed with the performance of the Jews and is seemingly constantly berating them or accusing and punishing them. I realized, “Hey, this is the Jewish book – these guys couldn’t possibly exalt these writings any higher! They consider them practically written by God himself, yet at the same time, this book could hardly be any harder on the Jews. It is a self-deprecating book – written by the Jews, exalted by the Jews, and accusing the Jews! That doesn’t make sense at all!” By this time, I had already examined ancient Egypt, their religion, their histories – some even taken from the same time periods. The Egyptian accounts are largely typical in that the historian always rights history in his own favor. The Egyptians, according to their own accounts, never lost a war, even though from other accounts of the same regions, it is clear that they did lose wars. Japan leaves out atrocities they committed in WWII from their history books, as does Germany. You can be sure the same for the Sudan and other areas of Africa where there is much slaughter. This is typical. However, contrary to this standard of human nature, the Old Testament is unmistakably different. To me, the Old Testament stood contrary to human nature! I had to conclude that the Jews did not write this the way other histories and books were written, for persuasion or profit. They seemed to write it because they had some higher-order requirement to write it. Without being clear of where my conclusion would take me at this point, and realizing I was accepting a certain risk in doing so, I had to conclude that the Old Testament was a book whose mere existence was a Supernatural sign. I had to accept that the Jews were right, that they were onto something, that their God was a real Supernatural force of some kind. It very probably was God and that they had the real God! This was a turning point for me. I figured it was otherwise simply impossible for the Old Testament to exist. There simply was no way that a human race would write something so self-deprecating and accusing and then say it came from God – simply impossible! It had to be true in the most difficult sense of reality. My reality had to change. I had to realize that there was a higher being, a God, and the Jews had Him!

I wanted to learn more. Of all the material I had read thus far, this was the most compelling as a revelation of God. Now, I wanted to absorb everything that God said and did, like a sponge, and analyze it. How could I chase Him down? Was He still around? Did only the Jews have Him? Did they still have Him? I am so far away from being a Jew – would I have a chance at finding favor with this God? Was He THE God as the book professed?

Now, at this point, I REALLY felt hot on His trail and was going to find him. At the same time, I realized that I also hadn’t met the moral standard that he demanded. Considering my new perspective on life and the Universe as a whole (a bit of a Petri dish to God), I somewhat automatically, responsively, but somewhat painfully and yet exhileratingly “repented”.

 

This is hard to describe. It is a bit like seeing my life pass before my eyes and at the same time wanting it to pass so that I could be better prepared to meet God. I felt that meeting Him could be a reality, since, according to the books, He could be called on from anywhere and wasn’t far from anyone. Only the Jews, however, were specifically chosen by God to be brought up by Him, as though adopted. Anyone else could appeal to Him, even convert to become Jewish. As with anyone else, the trick was to know Him in order to appeal to Him. The idea of the real possibility of meeting God, made me sort of break down on the treadmill. Afterward, I somehow felt psychologically “cleaned out”. I felt this was a consequence of self-awareness. Now, however, I felt a little higher up, somehow. Less burdened by my own unworthiness. I had somehow confessed all of my offenses to God, if such a thing were possible, “come clean” so to speak, and was ready to continue my pursuit of observation, study, analysis, and hope in finding God. I was realizing also that it would have to be on God’s terms, as my own repentance clarified to me. That was okay, I was still going to go through with it, even wider-eyed, now. At this time I hadn’t given up my meditations. I would still meditate, on “nothing” to clear my mind, to relax, to see what my subconscious might offer to me, if that were a proper way to interpret some of the sensations.  Janet was in the kitchen cooking while I was reclined in the living room.  By this time, Janet had somewhat accepted my meditating and it didn’t seem to bother her much. I remember this very clearly. I heard her call me to the kitchen, so I got up, walked around the counter and asked her what she wanted. To my surprise, she said she didn’t call me. I returned to my meditation on the living room sofa, and again, after a minute or two, heard her call my name again, very clearly. I got up and asked her what she wanted. To my astonishment, she again said she didn’t call me. A bit confused, I returned to my meditation. Again, very clearly, I heard my name called. I got up, but not wanted to look like a total idiot, loitered around the kitchen for a few minutes waiting for her to tell me why she called me rather than telling her I heard her call me again. Wanting to return to my meditation, I had to ask her what she wanted this time, since I knew I heard her call me again. Again, thinking myself a bit loony at this time, she said she didn’t call me. Really confused, I returned to the sofa.

I can say, I also had a bit of a sense of Déjà vu at the time, bringing me back to my childhood, but I’ve never been able to completely resolve it.

Anyway, the next day, something crazy happened. I resumed my position on the treadmill and turned the page to continue my reading. I was to continue with 1 Samuel, Chapter 3. As a shock to my very soul and system, there was something written there that had not been written anywhere earlier in the book in any similar fashion. It was completely new. It was this passage (extracted using the online service BibleGateway, using “New International Version):

1 The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions. 2 One night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. 3 The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple [a] of the LORD, where the ark of God was. 4 Then the LORD called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.” 5 And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”  But Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” So he went and lay down. 6 Again the LORD called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” “My son,” Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” 7 Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD : The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. 8 The LORD called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. 9 So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. 10 The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” How would you feel? I was startled to say the least. I felt like I was being watched, but more so, that I was being anticipated. Or played with. Or that I had bumped up against the wall of reality. It is hard to explain, but it certainly happened to me. I examined the Bible page more carefully to see if my eyes could have somehow read through the page the day before and planted the story into my mind. Given what I knew at this point, that was simply far too less likely. I thought I was finding God, but now I felt like He was finding me, and shook my hand, or my soul, or something. I was certainly shaken. This, my friend, was the single greatest turning point in my life, but there were others to come. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, now, but continue on.

To be continued….
Andrew.

11/29/06 – Randy Responds:

Wow, now that is… I’m not sure what to write here. On one hand it is Super neat, that something like that happened. It is great, as it means that you were contacted by God. It would be scarry for me, for this would confirm everything, and I know that I fall way short of the mark. But then again, had you obviously had not fallen so short of the mark, that you were not “passed by” for “the calling”. I can definatly see how one would be come VERY religious after such a event.

Oh, btw: (In my opinion): God chooses who he talks to (which is a Honor like no other). He also gives them tasks to further his glory. I think you will be writing a book. (might want to invest in a backup device, Probably not be fun explaining that you lost it all when your HD crashed)

Randy

11/29/06 – Andrew responds:

Hello, Randy.
I appreciate your enthusiasm. I still reflect on that particular experience on occasion and am easily re-kindled, but there is SO much more that has happened and that I have learned. There are so many other things that “re-kindle” me. Mind you, up to what I have told you so far happened more than six years ago. I have learned so much, including that God does not abandon, God makes it easy, God does this and many things beyond this regularly, He has been doing so for eons, also, that I am totally eclipsed by the many gifts that I have witnessed others having experienced. I enjoy hearing the stories of other people whom God has given me the grace to run into very occasionally. I have also learned that man is at a point now where he assumes God is as apathetic as anyone else. He is very good at hiding – an expert, but He is far from apathetic.

More importantly, I know a short-cut that anyone can test in their own labs (moments of silence) to see if they can get a hand to reach them from God, one that is actually divinely promised to work for those who actually give it an honest try for some short time. (Really!) It is centuries old and many (millions of) people know of it but don’t usually know how to share it (there is a reason for this, too). There is nothing to fear, on the contrary, everything to gain, since it is liberating, invigorating, effective, and quite remarkable. There are two kinds of folk – those who try and gain, and those who simply don’t give it a fair shake – fearful or lazy. It is far easier than lucid dreaming or meditating at the highest level, and yet the payoff is greater. I promise you that I will tell you about it. I will wish you well with it. However, I digress… and I don’t want to scare you away… it is not scary, but quite beautiful. When we really evaluate ourselves, we are originally, naturally, afraid of the Holy, but it desires us beyond all other things and waits patiently for us, but we regularly and fearfully sell ourselves short, out of convention and habit.

Again, I digress… I will return to my story and include how I stumbled onto that short cut and what happened because of my earnest attempt at it.

At this point in my story, I am changing, slowly. I’m essentially doing nothing but reading. Janet is finding me antisocial and unhelpful in our marriage, but I am now on a mission – I want the story to wrap up soon, so I am reading more rapidly, more earnestly, more devotedly, and constantly. I have put everything else second, including my business. I carry the Bible with me everywhere…

I had come to love God, or what I thought I knew of Him. At many times, I wondered if I should become Jewish. The writings were incredible, full of hope, promise, God’s unending dedication and devotion to man’s best interests – if only man weren’t so stubborn, short-sighted, ignorant, dumb, blind, and as for modern man – uninterested! If possible, I wanted to be one of the favored ones! Was God still active? Would I have to become Jewish to be with Him? I loved the fact that I had these written messages from God and that He seemed to speak to me through them. I was rooting for the good guys and discouraged by the inevitable failures. I was slowly seeing what the good guys should do, how they should act.

Well, something happened. I came to the end of the Old Testament! I read the Jewish Bible and there wasn’t a solution of how to establish the same relationship with God that was apparent in the Old Testament. How dreadful!

Now, all I had was the “Christian opinion addendum” remaining to read, essentially to see how it would compare. My attitude at this point was to laugh at it, thinking it sure had a long way to go to meet the expectations that the Old Testament laid out. Again, I remembered the Christians I met who were always unable to convince me of anything worthwhile. They seemed to always simply get excited over nothing, with no good explanation. What would the “Christian Testament” have to say? Was I sure I was comfortable taking it on? I didn’t want to become “brain washed” and then forget the beauty of the Old Testament. Yes, I was certain of myself, of the convictions of my experiences, then again, I knew anything was possible at this point, and that much is outside of my control. I started reading the New Testament, in this same Bible.

To be continued…

Andrew.

12/01/06 – Randy responds:

You always leave me hanging… 🙂

This is actually the most I’ve talked to someone about religion. When I was growing up, we went to Chruch and “Sunday school”. We sat as the paster gave his sermon, and eventually left. We never talked about what was said. In fact, the only time anything came up was giving thanks before a meal, and that did not happen a lot.

Well, I’m glad to know in the end that your wife did not leave you. More important that work? I know that is saying something, as you are -very dedicated. Sorry about not calling you back, I’m hoping to call you soon.

Randy

12/14/06 – Randy comments further:

Where is the next chapter?

Randy

no pressure 🙂

12/16/07 – Andrew responds:

Hey, Randy.

I’m terribly sorry for the delay. I actually spent several hours writing my reply to your comments regarding how you were brought up and then much of the chapter. A bit to my horror, I was realizing that I wasn’t able to clearly recall the exact order in which things happened in this chapter. The reason is that it was a bit of an avalanche in this chapter. However, it is still important to get the order right because of the cause and effect components that justify the events as logical. I will repair my current document before I send it, but I have to go review certain parts of the New Testament before I can do that. Also, my work has suddenly slowed me down, too. I think about it every day and will certainly get it to you.

Andrew.

1/3/07 – Andrew continues with

Chapter 6 – The New Testament

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Hello, Randy! Since I began writing the following e-mail, I re-read some of the Bible to make sure I had everything right. Here, therefore, is the “approved” e-mail.

Andrew.

Well, Randy, it is with great pleasure that I am able to write to you again.

Let me first respond to your last reply…

Do I keep you hanging? If you only knew what that means for you, you would blush with excitement. Hang in there, bud you ain’t seen/read/heard nothing, yet! In fact, there are very good words in the bible about those few who hang on words such as these. So hang on.

Your Sunday School and Church experience sounds similar to mine, except we NEVER gave thanks before a meal. So, you are up on me!

No my wife did not leave me. She thought we needed a counselor and/or that I was going to leave her. To fast forward on this track a bit, our relationship has gotten many times better than it even could have been.

There were some real amazing graces here, too, with some interesting turns.

Some highlights will have to be part of my story.

Yes, way more important than work. I came to realize that God chose my clients. I’ll get to that, too. (Guess who is in the mix, pal).

Phone: I hope we’ll be able to speak, but with kids around the Christmas season – very difficult. Notice again the time of this e-mail? (Update, this was originally written from 2am to 5:30 am, but now it is 8:50 am several weeks later!).

Okay, back to my story.

Reading the New Testament is definitely a very involved topic to write about. In preparing for this e-mail, I’ve been trying to recall my impressions from those early days and sort through them to put them back into order. Those days were simply busting with sensation. Here goes:

I began to read the New Testament expecting it to be full of obvious cover-ups of deception, modernizations, mangled realities (like walking on water), and other fantasies. It is pretty amazing to me how my life up to this point had somehow, unknown to me, accumulated for itself various suspicions against Christians. I had attended a Baptist Church when I was very young, but we didn’t discuss it and I certainly didn’t enjoy it or get it. I was handed a bible there with my name imprinted on the cover, but my favorite part was the annual itsy bitsy grape juice service and the Life Saver’s I received from a family friend to encourage me to stop fidgeting.

That was short lived. My parents flew my older sister and I to Holland to be baptized “Dutch Reform” and I never knew what that was about. To show how much my parents conveyed knowledge of church, my youngest sister never got baptized because the church in Holland eventually burned down beforehand. I remember watching my older sister get re-baptized in the Baptist church and never figured out what that was about, either. I had attended an upbeat Catholic Church when I got older because my friends did and it was more of a social club than anything else. I eventually left it because I felt like it was not appropriate for a pick-up joint to be in a Church, and there was a girl in whom I wasn’t interested that wouldn’t leave me alone. Either the Church was wrong, or the people were, or both. It was not for me. As I may have mentioned earlier, my older sister took me to a bible study where folks ooh’d and ah’d over various scriptural passages but didn’t really explain why an explanation was even important, much less offer a rational explanation of anything. The final “revelation” to me was when they read that if they had the “faith of a mustard seed” that they could “move mountains”, and again, they’d ooh and ah. I was thinking, “Well, if in 2000 years no one has moved a mountain, these guys don’t have the faith even of a mustard seed! What am I doing here?” Case closed. That was my last “Bible Study” for some twenty years perhaps. So, with all of this baggage, I read. Interestingly, the first book of the New Testament read a bit like a newspaper. Like the Old Testament, a lot of sensational things happened, but there was no “sensationalism”, like in modern persuasions, books, and television. I noticed that the author, Matthew, was a Jew because he kept referring to the Old Testament. His knowledge of the Old Testament seemed so vast that he had to be a Jew. In fact, much of the this first book seemed like an extension of the Old Testament. In fact, it was an extension of the Old Testament, referring to the “Law” in the Old Testament, referring to the many characters and stories of the Old Testament. I was impressed by how well the author knew the Old Testament and how well he could refer to it. Honestly, I had no idea that a guy from 2000 years ago could have been so well versed in so much literature – he was very smart! Truly, after my profound appreciation for the Old Testament with all of its stories of how God was trying to reach out to Jews who refused him and didn’t appreciate him, the author of this first book of the New Testament was going after my heart. It was, among many things, a final blow of how the Jews would reject humility, my pet virtue from Buddhism. The author kept mentioning, while describing the events of the New Testament, how things were fulfilling prophecies of the Old Testament. The author did a very good job of simply explaining to a knowledgeable Jew how to realize that prophesies of the Old Testament were fulfilled, particularly, somehow through the movements of a character named Jesus. I had heard of Jesus, but I never really placed him or understood him. I heard of fables that he loved people so much that he “spread open his arms and died”. These statements never told me much, but I knew vaguely who he was, as a sort of mythical person. I realized how I completely learned nothing in Sunday School but waited for it to be over. Anyway, amazingly, the author of Matthew specifically shows how the actions, behaviors, and things that happen to Jesus outside of his control somehow fulfill prophesies. Matthew points out the prophesies of the Old Testament roughly 31 times. Most of these prophesies come from the most important of the Old Testament prophets, Isaiah, but truly they come from other places as well.

Matthew was stating the life of Jesus as a matter of fact, without any sensationalism at all. In fact, where it is described that Jesus walked on water, I was perplexed. I remembered hearing from modern commentators, somehow, somewhere, that the water was shallow, or that he stayed near the shore, or otherwise giving some rational explanation clearly indicating that Christians had somehow exaggerated and bent out of shape the original or true story. Yet, here it was, here in my modern translation of an ancient document. Clearly, Jesus simply walked on water and helped Peter do the same. Nothing sensational, just the facts. Perplexing. It must be a gag.

As a gag, the book didn’t make sense, because what was its point? Who would profit? There was no specific “school” that would profit by teaching how to walk on water. In fact, the one guy who could really pull it off dies at the end of the story and supposedly disappears into heaven, leaving a handful of witnesses. As far as I know, good stories are either about people having bad things happen to them because they did something wrong, or about good people persevering in hope and being rewarded with fame and fortune or something else good. I couldn’t put my finger on this Jesus guy in the story. He gets violently, unfairly accused and killed, and yet, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find a single place where he went wrong or did something bad or hurt anyone. In fact, what sort of writer would endow a character with so much power and not let him unleash against evil and all of the obviously bad people/characters? What a depressing story!

As super-human as this guy was, the super-human stuff died when the guy died. Furthermore, he seemed to take a stand as though he were God, so he had to be crazy, but he didn’t do anything to show that he was crazy. Why bother with the fantastic life after death stuff that is slightly mentioned in the same book thereafter? Why not have the character endow others with the powers? I couldn’t place this figure, it was bothersome.

There were many problems with the book that were difficult to figure. A significant source of my mounting frustration was that it was a two-thousand year old manuscript possessed by many Christians and it still didn’t have an answer key at the back of the book for all of those parables that Jesus used when he said things! How could I critically analyze the document if it was written in code? It specifically spells out that the witnesses of Jesus received the explanations to the parables and that other folk would only get the parables without the explanation. Well, where were my explanations?

Only a small handful, were actually explained and their explanations were limited to more Jesus quotes! The few explanations were incredibly good – enticing! There were one-to-one correlations between objects in the parable and their meanings. I had to find answers in order to see whether or not this guy made sense or was inconsistent or self-centered! Where was the answer key to this darned, laughable, two-thousand year old manuscript that was crawling under my skin? Were all the centuries of Christians too stupid to know the answers or too stupid to write them down? I was getting pretty angry. Remember, I started this quest undoing a riddle before taking on the Old Testament. Now, I’m getting my butt kicked by a two-thousand year old document with things like “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” (Matthew 13:33). What has that to do with heaven??!?!?! I live in the information age! I will find the answers! I was motivated before, but now I was insulted! Where should I go to find answers? My mission was taking on a new turn! The humility I thought I learned from the Buddhists was going out the window. I don’t mean to leave you on a note of anger, but Jesus was making me mad.

I read the next book in the New Testament. Mark. It was even more dry, more factual, just as mysterious. In this version, however, there was no resurrection. Ah hah! Maybe they added that in Matthew, made it up!

Finally, a contradiction. Then I read Luke. The same story again, now with more details. Not enough details! I figured Mark was too much of a wimp to convey the fantastic part about the “resurrection”, it had to be part of the story. The same and more parables and fewer explanations and a clearer proclamation that the answers exist and were given to the twelve disciples!

Who was this Jesus guy? Why was he so puzzling? How could a story be written of a man who seemed to do everything perfectly humbly, without a fault, who dies so terribly without vengeance from anyone anyhow? I went over the stories over and over. I realized how similar the three versions were, from the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Why were they so much the same yet different and in this collection? How could three people tell their own stories and have them match up so perfectly? If a man tells the same fictional story over and over in testimony, it always changes. Even a single person cannot lie and have the story hold up so perfectly. The consistencies and perfect little differences between several authors who respectfully knew the Old Testament rang somehow as truth. Yet, how could the stories be true and be so loaded with miracles and yet Jesus doesn’t seem crazy? I started to like Jesus, despite my anger, as a sort of nemesis. I knew that historical books as these didn’t waste paper – authors vested much in their writings. Every word was important so as to not waste the animal skins that they were written on. In this case, as history would tell, the authors swore on their scriptures even accepting death that they were true stories. To the point of death, like with Jesus, there seemed to be nothing in it for them except to proclaim the truth and not tell a lie to the point of death! I saw that figuring the parables was my own problem, not that of Jesus, and that I simply had to settle down and move on some how. Jesus, despite my anger, seemed to have perfect humility, the stuff that the Buddhists speak of, but he went so far beyond the level of humility that I had ever seen written down before, he actually was humble to the point of accepting death from heathens. As a perfect example of humility, I didn’t want him to die.

Separating out the facts of Jesus and sorting them, finding nothing incriminating, I found that I couldn’t deny that he fulfilled certain prophesies in a very short period of time. It then became an apparent “divine coincidence” that the prophesies he fulfilled were all collected together in the Old Testament, despite the fact that it took one thousand years, written by various authors, for the Old Testament to come into being.

It was also a “divine coincidence” that despite Christians always celebrating the New Testament, I had the Old Testament and had freshly read it and saw how it fit into the New Testament. I was starting to feel watched again. I realized that I was in the precarious position of personally seeing how Jesus fulfilled the prophesies in a most profound way.

The number of literally pointed-out prophesies was staggering. This was not like one or two “great” prophesies being fulfilled, as in other religions like Hinduism, that seem to anticipate a few things, this was statistically somewhat impossible. I had to accept divine intervention as a miracle outside of the all of the specifically penned miracles. The writings of so many authors of the past had their prophesies sewn together by a single man, mostly in the course of only 3 years of his life. He was recognized by the scholars and the correlations were penned by the generation that knew the man personally. This man had to be the incarnation of history! That’s who Jesus was, he was the incarnation of the history as chronicled in the Old Testament. Well, that didn’t make sense, history has no personality, no person. I was then thrilled by my next logical conclusion, Jesus was the incarnation of the author of history – and I suddenly became petrified.

Good God, I found God, declared him, and in the process declared the rest of us as pawns in a greater picture, peons, slaves to the penmanship or thoughts of some great and awesome God who came to life in Jesus Christ. I had allowed myself the question “What if Jesus were God?” and suddenly all the miracles made sense, everything made sense! I couldn’t deny the depth to which the words of I had read came together into some massive mosaic.

Good God, I was crazy, delusional! But I could see it clearly, clear as day! I realized I was a Christian by being able to declare Jesus as God! I thought people just blindly declared it, never really knew it! God help me!

I was the worst of the worst! Who was I? Where was I? What was going on?

I was the most privileged of all people on the planet but had set myself up for complete social self destruction. I could go no where with this. I must be crazy, I must be institutionalized! I was the only person on the planet that knew for a fact, an unconditional truth of history, that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of God! I was still alive. I had profound, deep, joy. I could laugh at anything! Yet, I knew I was nothing. Yet I knew everything around me was part of a bigger game! Everything around me might even be pre-destined, controlled, tailored by a supreme being! I knew I was not alone! I felt God. I was crazy.

Every single puzzle piece had a fitting place! Every contradiction was resolved. Was I nuts? How could I ask that question? Every contradiction made sense only if he were God! I felt truly insane. Man could not become a God, but God could become a man! Even the Gospel of John finally really made sense, it wasn’t just crazy poetry.

I truly felt like a total misfit. I had destroyed my social wellbeing. I had condemned myself forever as having some secret, unusable, incompatible knowledge. I realized that to capitalize on this knowledge could bring me riches greater than any worldly goods, but how? Certainly no one on this planet would listen! I had to continue to hide – I had to finish reading my bible to find refuge in it, to find companionship in it, to find sympathy among the characters in it. Did I need to finish reading the Bible? I didn’t think I needed to, if I were arrogant before, I was really arrogant now, but I would choose to. I was completely free, but I had no place to go but to complete my reading.

Should I move on and read or should I untangle the parables? I decided to tackle the parables of the books I had read. I started looking everywhere for answers. For some reason, while in the car, I even scanned the radio thinking that answers might jump out at me. Indeed, a woman’s voice was explaining the parables. Her voice rang out pure truth in answer to parables. She was a nun – how did she get on my radio? What is a nun, anyway? What is all of that religious baggage she carries with her? How did she get so good at these parable? She was explaining how the mountain to be moved in the Bible was us. We would be moved! She went on with other parables. I couldn’t believe it, I still felt God’s presence. I continued to feel delusional and could laugh at anything. I didn’t know to laugh or cry and did a bit of both. I knew I must be crazy, I never felt so crazy before.

At another time I was flicking through channels on the television. This time, I saw a nun. She was speaking more about all the stuff I had just read and I continued to understand clearly and found immense consistency with what I believed to be true. I froze in disbelief. I was actually enjoying what this old nun lady was saying. She was unfolding parables, calmly, as though they were common knowledge. Who was she?

I started to listen to this station more, wanting to further untangle the parables. I even searched the internet but didn’t know how to find answers there.

I found the radio station to full of great information. It was like no other radio station. It was not Christian music or preaching or bible banging, it was simply gentle talk explaining the Bible. I couldn’t get enough of that nun! My new found love of God, along with the help of the radio station, was allowing most parables to unravel automatically. I went over the parables again and again, I was suddenly understanding their meanings, or so I thought I was. Their meanings seemed to change as I changed. The gems in them were found at deeper depths each time I visited them. At the same time, I was still listening to the radio.

Then, on the radio, I started hearing things that upset me. One thing it said was that there was a concept of “purgatory” and that it is supported in a book in the Bible that was removed from the Bible in the 16th century.

What? What was my bible but another tool of Christian political propaganda? I immediately went to the book store and searched for the biggest, fattest bible with the most books you could buy! I found one! I learned that the Orthodox Bible has the most books, then the Catholic Bible, then the Protestant Bible, then of course, the Jewish bible with the fewest books.

There was that word, “Protestant,” something my mother had once told me I was when I was a kid. Well, now I was a Historical Christian and I didn’t need a Church!

Now, the parables and solving them was taking on more importance than anything else. I kept seeing and realizing things I hadn’t noticed while reading before. I now actually wanted Jesus to be the incarnation of God and believed it to be so, and I was excited about it, and I was hanging on to his every word, but I found something. Luke 24:27, it said: “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” This to me was a serious contradiction in the Bible. I had to put Jesus to the test. The statement proposed to make Jesus even more than he was – more than I was willing to give him credit for, past where I drew the line. I would have to test what was once again a concept of God in Jesus – if I were to be true to the science. One blemish in the New Testament and the whole books falls to suspicion. Jesus wasn’t even born yet when the Old Testament was written!

Any idiot could see that! Was this a hoax after all? My doubt was easy coming. On top of this, the statement was made by Jesus supposedly AFTER his resurrection, so maybe it was thrown in as an after thought by later, blind, Christians! Or, was he still a teaching intelligence after he passed on? Again, he explained it only to the “disciples” and the Bible falls short, again, of spelling it out. Well, besides more books, my new Bible had something my old Bible didn’t have, coincidence or Divine providence? Cross references and footnotes. On each page of the bible, there is a paragraph of very fine print with little letters and references to verses and chapters of other books. Looking carefully, you can see the same tiny letters scattered throughout the scriptures of the same page. These were like footnotes, but they were lettered and not numbered, and they only referred to other books. The footnotes themselves were verbose, but the references were not. More closely examining this, I found that most verses in the New Testament were tied to verses of both the New Testament and Old Testament. It was pretty impressive and the more I examined it the more amazing it was. For example, the last words of Jesus while on the Cross are pointed out to be the original name (first verse) of Psalm 22 that actually describes a man dying as Jesus did on the cross, despite the fact that Psalm 22 was written eons before people were even executed on crosses. The end of Psalm 22 promises that the “Lord” would consequently be remembered forever. As another example, the apparent arbitrary number of three days in the tomb are pointed to in the book Hosea. Page after page the New Testament was connected through to the Old Testament. But the connections, the mere quantity of them is overwhelming and simply uncanny! My new Bible had hands down pointed out the passage of Luke 24:27 to be true and God proved out to be real, again – and even greater than before! Reading the books more carefully shows that even the names of characters from the Old Testament and the New have similarities. How could this be? In the New Testament, Judas is the traitor for 30 pieces of silver. In the Old Testament, Judah is the traitor for 18 pieces of silver. In the New Testament, Jacob is the father of Joseph, Joseph spares his family persecution by entering Egypt… in the Old Testament, Jacob is the father of Joseph, Joseph spares his family persecution by entering Egypt. Different families, same collection of books, all are fulfilled in Jesus for some reason, some how. Lo and behold, even the arbitrary stories of the Old Testament that were not explicitly prophesies turned out to be parables in themselves that anticipated, as prophesies, the story of Jesus Christ as told in the gospels. Well, I guess I sort of expected this to happen, but not to this extent. I also learned that more carefully studying the stories of the Old Testament in light of the New Testament revealed certain hidden meanings of the New Testament. However, who put the footnotes in my new Bible? Hmmmm…. What was this “purgatory” business? Whatever happened to reincarnation – was it a misunderstanding? What would the rest of the Bible that I still hadn’t read yet tell me? Why were so many Christians involved in organized religion (my new Bible pointed out the Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant)? Weren’t they just the blind being led by the blind? Now, again, that I knew for a fact that Jesus was the incarnation of the living God, how would I get along in the world as a normal person ever again? I kept reading, and studying, now with greater excitement than ever before.

This was the GOOD stuff! I would study and learn the secrets! I could honestly feel God guiding me! I could almost cut through some sort of substance. I could taste God! Or, was I just crazy?

Stay tuned!

1/8/07 – Randy replies:

Sorry for the delay in responding.

Happy New Year to you too. I’m eagerly awaiting your next e-mail.

Randy

1/21/07 – Andrew continues, with

Chapter 7 – Searching for a Church

Hello, Randy!

Sorry for my delays. My business is busier these days than it has ever been, plus we’ve just finished interviewing nannies, still waking up at wee hours with the baby, it is a wonder and a grace I am doing this at all… but at times like this it feels like I have all the time in the world! Okay, so, at this point, I realized I was a Christian because I knew enough to know that to be a Christian you had to be able to profess that Jesus Christ, the historical character, is the incarnation of God (there are some other bends and twists, historically and currently, with respect to certain denominations as to what it takes to be a Christian, but professing that He is God is definitely a slippery-slope starting place in that from there much else falls into place, especially when coupled with the compelling sense to study exactly what He said).

Now, I’m seeing the New Testament to be very relevant to me, personally. I see that Jesus offers basic verbal teachings of advice regarding how to live a moral life, a life important to God. I decide to take up the challenge personally, especially since He gives promises of payoff (I was still testing!) He gives encouragement to the down trodden and warning to the comfortable. He advises to try to pursue living a “pure” life and even reject anger. He teaches God’s perspective on divorce, oaths, revenge, love (especially of enemies), charity (practically turning no opportunity down), and even how to pray – spelling out a prayer specifically. I got excited enough to memorize this prayer and recited it often – surprisingly, it began to feel like music. He teaches briefly about fasting and acquiring “treasures in heaven”, he speaks much about money on earth and uses it and many other things as metaphors to explain spiritual realities. He insists on dependence on God and admonishes worry. He warns against playing God by judging others. He teaches the “Golden Rule” (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you). He speaks of how God answers prayers. He warns about the future and gives advise regarding how to live a more satisfying life despite it. Lots of weird things happen, too, such as miracles and the teaching of strange parables in addition to ones that I was learning the answers to and others that seemed to make perfect sense to me right away.

There were things I understood mixed with things I didn’t understand at all.

I figured I would keep reading to get as much of what I understood as I could. I just sort of got past the stuff I didn’t understand. Some parables would drive me crazy as great riddles. I insisted on not getting stumped by any. I found that some parables made sense when word substitutions in the bible were used. I realized that since God can’t or doesn’t or won’t lie, that pretty much all of the Bible is true somehow and that word and phrase substitutions are possible much like formula substitutions in a math book. This really got me excited. The challenge was to understand the Bible to the point that there were no longer apparent contradictions. This was difficult, but definitely doable. Once this happens, the “worldview” becomes that of the historical “Christian” and life becomes a great deal easier, less burdensome, and more “graceful”. I found that it is somewhat common for parables to have “layers” of meaning. With each increase in understanding, the parables would improve or change in meaning. The Bible is very dynamic in that sense, as it seems to grow as the reader does. Some parables were as clear as day, but others were very perplexing. I found that the meanings were often of certain very profound and far reaching truths that permeated deeply as I understood them, giving me a deep sense of joy – as though knowledge were joy, but here, a deeper joy.

Now, there were certain statements made here and there regarding baptism and the “Spirit”, but it was difficult to understand it completely. I just had to hope that my continued reading of the Bible would paint the complete picture. The book called “Acts”, immediately following the four “Gospel”, testimonial accounts of the life of Jesus (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, named according to their historically attributed authors, three of whom were direct disciples of Jesus) really surprised me. It spelled out an early community where folks were for the first time called “Christians”. I was baffled by the fact that there was such a description of the lives and times of early Christianity after the death of Jesus since I never knew of anything to even try to imitate it as I was seeing it. It seemed very foreign and impossible to find. I figured it must not have been necessary because it didn’t seem to any longer be around. Also, the early days of Christianity were filled with miracles, as though Jesus were still present.

A new “force” was in play, the “Holy Spirit.” The document clearly spelled out that hundreds of people would convert to become Christians because Jesus appeared to them, personally, even simultaneously! This didn’t seem to happen these days. I figured the old Christian way would have to start again – the thought actually crossed my mind that maybe I was the one to do it since I felt some incredible pull and felt I could now prove Jesus was God – but I knew it wouldn’t work somehow, I had to at least keep reading (crazy!). Who would listen to me anyway? No one! I had to just go it alone. Me and my reading!

It became apparent that the document spelled out that the early Christian community started to become organized. They even elected people, strangely, by essentially drawing straws. They shared everything in common. Those who held back and lied about their contributions might even have died on the spot by some unknown cause! What sort of “community” was this? I figured it must have disappeared long ago. I found it strange that I had heard of “ancient Rome” and such, but never of the “ancient, biblical Christian community” that fell or anything else like that. Maybe it was myth? What was this book – the book called “Acts”? It sure seemed real! Also, in this book, Christianity was opened not only to the Jews, but also to the “gentiles”, or non-Jews. I felt fortunate, but then I was giving value to the book of Acts. I didn’t know the true Original Christianity was for Jews only! I was a bit humbled and shocked that I missed that one. How cruel was Jesus to save only the Jews? How could I make better sense of this? I had to keep reading.

Lo and behold, after the book of Acts were a collection of tons of letters from early Christians to other early Christians, from basically the first century A.D. This was not just a historical account, it was full of admonishment, explanation, depth, encouragement, one-on-one type of material for the Christian edification of the reader! This was good stuff, it was filling in some missing gaps! It was also full of mystery that I knew I could only have understood after having really pursued the sort of humility and self-denial demanded by the teachings of Jesus – which at this point I was trying to do at every turn but wasn’t very good at it. The letters were making sense, though. They were harder to understand than the other books because I really had to put myself in the shoes of the authors to “get it”. These letters changed much about me and my understanding of humility and acceptance and Faith.

To my great disappointment, things sort of came to a screeching halt when I got to a certain point in the letters. It was the book of Hebrews, just before and at the beginning of Chapter 6. It stated “Although you should be teachers by this time, you need to have someone teach you again the basic elements of the utterances of God. You need milk, not solid food. ….

Therefore, let us leave behind the basic teaching about Christ and advance in maturity, without laying the foundation all over again: repentance from dead works and faith in God, instruction about baptisms and laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead and eternal judgment…. ” I had to read this over and over to understand it, or believe it, in order to fully accept it. It seemed to state that it was going to explain things that were very basic, but not as basic as baptism and laying on of hands, etc., but not advanced, either! First of all, I wanted the advanced stuff, I also needed the basic stuff! The middle stuff was going to be explained, but where was the explanation of the other stuff? How could they consider “laying on of hands” so basic when there was no explanation of it anywhere else in the Bible? It was admitting a sort of “mystical science” but it wasn’t going to explain it to me! I started to get crazy again! I knew that someone laid their hands on a great character of the stories named Paul and he was able to get his sight restored and afterward, Paul could lay hands on people and they would get the “Holy Spirit!” This was important! It was required to get into the community. In fact, one letter warned not to be too hasty in laying on hands to just anyone. Obviously, I couldn’t lay hands on myself!!  Where were these guys? There had to be a succession of folks laying hands on down the line onto members of this Christian community, but the Bible didn’t spell any of it out! Were they all dead long ago? Was there no hope for me? Was it all lost?

I knew that in many letters, and the book of Acts, the Christian community was identified as the “Church”, which I thought was interesting. I now decided to search through the bible looking for that word to better understand it. Jumping about footnotes and cross-referenced connections in my new Bible, I found the first entry to be in Matthew, the first book of the New Testament. Somehow, I had either completely missed it or simply not cared about it before! It was short, but I had to read it a few times to make sure I understood it. It states, in Matthew, chapter 16 verse 18, what Jesus is saying to Simon, now being named “Peter” (which my Bible notes clearly stated to mean “rock” from the Greek) “And I tell you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.” My mind focused on the “gates of Hades” part.

This clearly meant to me that it had to last forever – it had to be indestructible. It had to be somewhere on the planet at all times after Christ, even if it were passed on down the generations to now be run by a single guy in his garage somewhere!

The first thing I did was go to the Internet and find an overview of Christianity. Yikes! There are some 37,000 Christian denominations worldwide and some 25,000 denominations in the United States, alone.

Basically, all of these guys profess to be THE church and yet are all somehow different and disagree with each other somehow. I figured it was clear from reading the Bible that Jesus instituted ONE SINGLE church. Therefore, as seemingly unbelievable to the normal Joe, clear and simple, all but only one had to be wrong! Indeed, a daunting task to study them and prove them one at a time to be wrong, in some contradiction to the Bible, but that would be the only way. Well, I lowered the bar, again. If I spent the rest of my days looking for this single, authentic, original, Divinely instituted, possibly tiny church, and even never found it, at least if I died, I could tell God that I died trying to be a part of what He laid out for me and from what I knew of him, he would surely value that! I figured I would never find it but that it would be worthwhile to die trying.

So, I developed an approach for the simple process of elimination. This will be mentioned in the beginning of the next chapter…

Still interested?

Andrew.

1/21/07 – Randy replies:

Yes! Please keep going. I very much enjoy reading this.

I think the reason I take to it more than other things is how you are able to keep the message of a personal journey. Most of the things I have ever read, had always been stated as “facts” from a person who expected you to blindly accept it as fact (If you don’t understand then you just don’t get it). It makes it quit enjoyable that you include the frustration of trying to understand. Perhaps it is because of the way you are “going alone” instead of being traditionally instructed. No bias, just straight out of the bible learning.

Randy

2/13/07 – Andrew continues…

Hello, Randy! Unfortunately, this is not the next chapter, but I just wanted to reassure you that I haven’t forgotten. All the really important stuff is yet to come. (The treasure hunt is exciting, but the treasure is more important – you will hardly believe it!). I’ve been so busy lately – I’ve never been this busy – ever! I think maybe the bad angels are trying to distract me in hopes that I’ll forget. 🙂 Hahaha. That will never happen. Last night I worked until 2:30 am and then I was up at 4:40 am to feed the baby. I’m making excellent progress on my work, however, and should be able to resume in the very near future.

Best to you and yours!

Andrew.

2/14/07 – Randy comments:

Thanks for the update. I hope being this busy is good for business.

Randy

2/16/7 – Andrew comments:

Being this busy is good for business and probably better for helping me build a company that I can pass onto my children. The problem is, it is no longer my driving priority. There are too many other things to live for, work is certainly not one of them. 🙂 Anyway, I consider it a blessing to be as busy as I am and it is always a struggle to keep everything balanced.

That seems to be the thematic challenge these days. For this reason, my correspondence with you is actually a top priority. I suspect that you, too, are very busy, judging by how succinct your e-mails are and the business that family brings. What are you guys up to these days? (and then I’ll get back to my story).

Andrew.

2/24/07 – Andrew Continues with

Chapter 8 – Final Chapter (for now)

Randy, I haven’t heard from you, either. Are you okay? What do you do these days? Are you also very busy? Things going well? How are your wife and children?

I have been wondering how to finish my story. My work has finally settled down in time for the weekend and I have been reading and realize I should be writing. I have decided to finish it very directly. Much of this material will be hard for you to accept, possibly even understand – but I hope not.

The truth is that I found the mother load of miracles and other evidence of the supernatural and God. These items are real treasures. Much of what I am about to say may seem too hard to believe. I have actually checked much of this material out from every angle just to have it confirmed over and over. I had my own additional experiences, and now collect evidence, real evidence, of the supernatural, as a sort of hobby, bringing others closer to God. My conversion story never really ended, although at a moment, soon after my first daughter was born, I was given a copy of an authentic document that was printed before the birth of Edgar Cayce, warning that Cayce would draw many away from God’s true church and faith. I identified him by his description and methods, not his name. At that very hour, I was also given a rose petal by someone else with the image of the Mother of Jesus somehow miraculously impressed into it. By this time, I had already found God and clearly identified his church, and I had felt quite led by the Mother of God herself, Mary. The rose petal was the beginning of a new beginning for me and because of her image, the rose petal was very personal.

If you get through this entire e-mail, let me know and I’ll send you a photo of it (It is laminated and I keep it in my wallet).

Jesus Christ announced the creation of His Church in Matthew 16:18. He also promised that it would not be overcome to destruction. His Church exists today – the same one that He Himself started. If you were Satan and could not completely destroy His church but didn’t want people to find spiritual healing and divine life there, either, your only hope would be to coerce man through the temptation of pride into establishing decoys. This is why today we have 37,000 denominations but that the original still remains. This is in fulfillment of Luke 1:51 that the “proud” be “scattered”. Of all of the denominations, only one was instituted by God Himself through Jesus Christ.

The rest are man made, consequently robbing us of understanding and hope.

Of all of the Christian communities mentioned in the Bible, the Philippians, Colossians, Corinthians, that of Antioch, the Church of Jerusalem, the Ephesians, the Galatians, etc., only one remains today, after 2000 years.

There is, in the Bible, a letter to them – “Romans”. It has outlived every continuous government on the entire planet since its inception. All of the other Christian communities have been destroyed by natural disasters or other major catastrophes. Not only does it remain today, but it has a visible head, like a king, and is the largest body of faithful in the world. This is in fulfillment of Mark 4:30-32 that says: “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest seed you plant in the ground. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds of the air can perch in its shade.” For God’s kingdom to be on earth, it must have a visible head, like a king, or it would not be called a “kingdom”, whether it is “of God” or “of man.” The visible head is now the 265th (well documented) since the Apostle Peter was the first Bishop of the community. The denomination is the only one with a presence in every country of the world. It also has the largest number of Christians world-wide, making it most fulfilling of Christ’s request for unity among Christians (John 17).

This Christian community is the only one that has had its loyal and faithful leaders continuously elected by the prior faithful, not by someone imposing themselves as a leader or starting a new church out of dissatisfaction with the one established. This is in fulfillment of Christ’s decries that “whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me; and whoever accepts me accepts the one who sent me.” (John 13:20, referring to God the Father). Likewise, it is the only Christian community not warned by his statement in Luke 10:16 “he who rejects [the one I send] rejects me; but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me.” This unbroken line of faith, teachings, traditions, and essentially “secrets” in the Church go all the way back to the apostles of the Bible, making their faith “Apostolic” The traditions of this particular church are the only ones in Christendom that can explain essentially every verse of the Bible, including those that are real stumpers for nearly every other denomination, including 1 Corinthians 15:26, which states: “Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?” In this particular Christian denomination, it is well accepted that once baptized into it, you become empowered with such friendship to God that you can even offer prayers on behalf of the dead, for their final delivery into heaven. It was the practice to be baptized on behalf of all of the dead ancestors and loved ones, as well as ones self, in order to offer prayers and supplications on their behalf, that they may enter Heaven.

It is the only Church where evidence exists for the striking Truth in Christ’s otherwise impossible words when He shared his last meal with his disciples while holding bread “This is my body”, or while holding wine “this is my blood”. Matthew 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-24, Luke 22:19-20. Indeed, this gift is pertinent to his role on earth for all of mankind, as he stated so in John 6:53 while referring to Himself as the “Son of Man”: “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” Fortunately, the flesh and blood come to the Christian faithful of this community in the forms of bread and wine, but many left him because of the difficulty of believing or accepting this. Even today, nearly every denomination rejects the idea as truly literal, except for this denomination. It is the biggest secret on this planet, but it is not supposed to be. Today it can be known that the flesh is cardiac tissue (don’t let me lose you, hang in there!), as, appropriately, God loves us and gives us his heart. The blood is type AB, as confirmed even by the miraculous burial cloth kept in one of the churches of this denomination in, Turin, Italy. Here is an example scientific paper on the unique features of the Shroud of Turin (burial cloth), which are inexplicable:

http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/aldo2.pdf (you don’t have to read the document if you don’t want to). Here is an actual miraculous example of “bread made flesh”: http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html You can do your own Google search on “Eucharistic Miracle” and find many other examples of this very present miracle – food from heaven intended to nourish man for healing of the soul.

This Church is one of very few Christian traditions that highly recommends meditation – is there a wonder why? They actually have specific material for meditating on, which is far better than the Eastern objectives. I have now continued to meditate on these same “mysteries” for years. This Church is the only one that fully satisfies the statements and commands of the New Testament. For example, gazing at and meditating on Jesus on a cross (called a crucifix) provides a doorway into spiritual healing according the Bible’s book of Numbers, chapter 21 and John 3:16.

This Church is the only one that can invoke God in Heaven to forgive a person’s sins to the point of lessening that person’s sufferings on earth and afterward or improving their rewards, or both. This is in fulfillment of John 20:23. In fact, the only way to have sins forgiven with any real certainty is to track down the folks mentioned in John 20:23 – it is a good thing that the Church still has these folks!

This Church knows how to involve its members in legitimate, effective, good offerings to God.

This Church has throughout it many artifacts of evidence of real miracles on display.

This church also is one of the few to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus, as members of this church are more closely brothers and sisters of God than in nearly any other denomination, accepting Mary as their own spiritual mother in fulfillment of the scriptures, specifically John 19:27 when Jesus states “Here is your mother..” These Christians thus honor her by applying the Ten Commandments, “Honor your father and your mother”. Of course, there is much more to Mary, since she also fulfills the scripture: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into a large amount of flour until it worked all through the dough.” Where the yeast is “teachings”, as explained in Matthew 16:12 and the dough are those Christians willing to learn, as explained in 1 Corinthians 5:7 (as the Bible is all consistent “truth,” word substitutions are possible, like a math book). Likewise, Jesus himself states that “you know a tree by its fruit” referring to how to discern how productive a person is, or how “good” one is (for God). He states this in Luke 6:44, Matthew 7:20. Mary is the only person specifically referred to as to having produced “fruit”, which is specifically God, or Jesus, Himself (Luke 1:42 earlier translations). It is clear also, from scripture, that this honor could not be without the plan of God (John 15:4). History clearly attests to the miraculous fact that Mary appears to her faithful Christians. Here are some accounts:

http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/approved/appariti/lasalett.html (appeared in La Salette, France, 1846)

http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/approved/appariti/lourdes.html (appeared in Lourdes, France, 1858)

http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/approved/appariti/fatima.html (appeared in Fatima, Portugal to 3 children in 1917)

http://www.theworkofgod.org/Aparitns/Aparitns.htm (appeared in various places at various times)

http://www.medjugorje.org (although still being officially investigated by the Church, still appears even today. See her message from the 25 of last month, here).

Do a Google search for details of any of these: http://www.apparitions.org

What is Mary’s main message? She recalls us to the Bible to become closer to God (we are actually all called to be Saints) and does so by inviting us to meditate on the prayers and mysteries of the Rosary. Remember when I promised you a short cut to finding evidence of God? The answer is to heed the call to pray the Rosary. It is a bit time consuming at first, maybe even a bit complicated, but it is actually very simple, profound, effective, and loaded with divine promises. You don’t even need to “officially” belong to the Church Jesus founded to have the prayers work for you.

Traditionally, the rosary is prayed with beads to help limit the time spent meditating on any “mystery”. Here is what the Rosary looks like and how to pray it: http://www.nd.edu/~flynn/catholic/rosary.pdf Here is more on how to pray it, with some artwork on the “mysteries”:

http://www.medjugorje.org/rosary.htm . There are divinely instituted promises in connection with these prayers – I know it is hard to believe.

They are here: http://rosarycreations.com/rosarypromises.htm Promise number one is a “signal” grace – this is a signal to you that you are getting through to God. Try it! (Three rosaries a day and your life will actually get easier!)

The Christian community, as you may have learned or guessed by now, is the Roman Catholic (means “Universal” from the Greek language) Church. It contains over one half of all Christians worldwide. The remaining billion Christians are divided among 37,000 denominations, but even they are slowly discovering what they have been missing. I have studied the history of the Bible, the history of the Church, the history of apparitions, special prayers, I have videos of miracles including a real stigmata, a Eucharistic Miracle, books of many sorts of Miracles, bleeding and tearing statues, deceased people that won’t decay (called “incorruptibles”) you name it (even levitation and even weirder stuff). I have read miraculous documents – papers that shouldn’t exist, but do. What does it all mean? I read into it and did my best to comply. Needless to say, my life has improved, changed. My wife, who was resentful of my conversion at first, found herself better loved and joins me now in praying the Rosary at least weekly. She was actually born Catholic and thought she lived it but eventually realized she had some superstitions mixed in with her understanding. As you know, we have three children now and our lives could hardly be better. I owe it all to God.

There is so much more to say, but perhaps this is enough for now.

As you guessed, I am religious (dedicated to God, technically called “devout”). My wife is not as “religious” as I, but she just experienced her very own personal, miraculous sign from God on Ash Wednesday, just a few of days ago. (A cross miraculously formed in one of her bottles at her vanity – I can send you photos of this, too). She feels the moral assurance that God will not leave her behind.

God bless you, keep you, love you, and care for you and your family.

🙂

Andrew.

2/26/07 – Randy responds:

Wow, I’ve looked at some of the links for the miracles… very compelling. I wonder why Mary never appears to the pope or in the Vatican. Then again, when a pope is elected, he goes into a room and puts on his robes and emerges as the pope. I’ve also understand that they are always crying. Perhaps she does make an appearance and gives the same general news that she gave the 3 kids in Portugal.

I have a lot to think about. Do you have a link about the rosary prayer? Specifically, the 3 kids in Portugal were told to say this everyday (along with other things).

2/26/07 – Andrew responds:

Hello, Randy.

The problem is only 1/6 of the world is Christian. Only one half of them are Catholic (just over a billion) and honor the Pope, Mary, ancient Tradition, etc. Even if Mary lived in the Vatican, most people wouldn’t care or believe it. The Vatican has an arm whose job it is to thoroughly investigate all claims regarding heavenly visits (they are the only denomination with these official duties). Often, some are man-made frauds for an extra buck. Some are supernatural, but from the lower (deceptive) angels (Edgar Cayce, Mohammed, various Christian spin-offs), few are actually authenticated, but when they are, it is important and the Church does not demand that they be believed, but offers them to its “laity” for their own edification. Today, there are so many claims of visitation that the Vatican has actually issued general rules so that others can apply some level of discernment before they are passed on to them. Currently, Medjugorje has been “visited” for some 25 years but the Vatican can’t make its final decision until the messages are over. In the meantime, surprisingly, they have made it clear that it is okay to visit there (this is a type of approval) and to study its messages.

Examine more of the links I have given you; they include the Rosary. There is no doubt in my mind that Mary has visited popes in the past. Pope John Paul II, the most prior pope, has always credited Mary for guiding the bullet away from his vitals, during the assassination attempt against his life. In fact, he understood the third secret of Fatima to have been fulfilled on the day of the assassination attempt, which occurred on the anniversary of the Fatima apparition.

For the rosary prayer: Good links regarding “how to” and “what of” the Rosary are the last three in the last e-mail. The Rosary is a very powerful prayer. The best way to go is to have a little book that spells it out.

I’ll be happy to send you one (and even a blessed Rosary) if you send me your address.

Let me know what other questions you may have about anything. I’ll do my best to give you very accurate answers.

Andrew.

2/28/07 – Andrew continues:

Here are the photos of the makeup bottle (I bought Janet a new bottle yesterday so we can see how long this phenomenon lasts) taken on the day (Ash Wednesday) that the Catholic Church initiates its commemoration of Christ’s fasting in the desert for 40 days (Lent), when the image first appeared. Normally, there was a black cloud floating in the otherwise clear fluid. On Ash Wednesday morning, Janet noticed the cloud was gone and all of the material had somehow settled to the bottom in the form of a perfect cross – in the appearance of some sort of ash. I could not have produced a cross like this in her bottle even with sand, since the neck is too small to tilt a tube of material, much less with stuff that was a cloud only moments before. In other words, I couldn’t have faked it if I wanted to. At the very least, this is another sort of “affirmation” that “God” is present, but the cross traditionally signifies the challenges in life, such as what “Lent” is supposed to make us especially cognizant of. Well, we had no trouble being cognizant of the cross this Lent.

Andrew.

2/28/07 – Randy replies:

Wow, that is great.

2/28/07 – Andrew replies:

Yes, the miracle cross is something. The truth is that it had some earth moving meaning for Janet because it came at a special time for her. What is truly great is that the Catholic Church is in just about every neighborhood of the world, with a priest, usually, who can forgive a person of those activities that have drawn him/her even unknowingly away from God, helping him to restore the relationship. (Gospel of John Chapter 20, verse 23).

However, that gift of restoration does not come cheap. It requires a worthwhile, profound consideration and commitment to God, at least through His Church (He will do the rest). The priest will not give it to you without it (or a blessing might become something bad). Through these “Sacraments” that the Church offers, a person can grow dynamically, internally, toward God, like a plant toward the sun, in proportion to their “disposition”, that is, desire and understanding. That is the true miracle.

Try knocking on the door through the Rosary – see if anyone is home – or make an appointment with your neighborhood priest. Or, ask me anything!

Andrew.