Saturday, December 18, 2010

Communications from the Lord far more believable than experiences of heaven

Scott Johnson told these stories in his report for December 16: one about a listener of his who had just lost her daughter, and the others about the deaths of his own parents.

The audio stories.

The PDF to the stories.

The link to the listener's You Tube song .

These three stories all involve coincidences and symbolic events that are far more convincing to me as communications coming from the Lord than any of the visits to heaven I commented on in recent blog posts here. These are events of a sort that many Christians have experienced many times, often in connection with the death of a loved one, or in general when reassurance is needed -- or just as a reminder of His presence or a token of His love. It's one way the Lord Jesus communicates to us. It's very touching when He does it, reminding you that you are His, that your loved ones are His.

And HE is the communicator in all these instances, in fact He is the message itself, whereas in the "heaven" stories it's almost as if He's an afterthought or just part of the furniture. He's there in the scene, some bogus version of Him anyway, but He's not the whole point of Heaven as in reality He would be.

In these cases reported by Scott Johnson they pretty clearly came from Him for the purpose of reassuring the survivors that the person who died is safely home with Him. No visits to Heaven, although there was one event sort of like a vision seen by two people, but otherwise just touching coincidences that add up to meaningful communication for those who belong to Him.

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I think I'll just add one of my own experiences of this sort of coincidence although it's nothing compared to the stories told above, and didn't involve anybody's death. On my fiftieth birthday -- a LONG time ago now -- a friend left a bouquet of flowers on my doorstep. The bouquet contained specific flowers that had special meaning to me as representing my family and me, along with a palm leaf which of course represents the Lord Jesus Himself. An odd bouquet, not exactly standard: Tiger lilies, carnations, tiny white daisies and the palm leaf. I immediately knew it was from Him because of what each of those flowers signified to me, about which my friend hadn't the slightest clue -- she'd simply picked up the bouquet in the floral department at the market.

When I was a child my father told me that tiger lily was his favorite flower. I suppose he made up a favorite flower to humor me but I drew pictures of tiger lilies on birthday cards I made for him for years from then on. I'd never seen a tiger lily so I had to find pictures in books, and in fact I don't think I ever saw a real one until I was grown -- I almost want to say until that bouquet but I'm not sure of that. The carnation happened to be my favorite flower at the time of my 50th birthday, as I'd gotten into the habit of buying one or a few at the market to put on the table just for myself. The rest of the story is that I had woven tiny daisies into my daughter's hair for a dance performance when she was six, and they've represented her to me ever since. There's no meaning beyond the flowers representing me and my family, three generations, and nobody would have known any of this except me. And with the palm leaf it was like all of us being gathered under His wing. My father died without Him as far as I know -- that was years before I became a believer -- but I still took the tiger lily as symbolic of my whole family with him as its head, and all in the Lord's hands according to His will. It was like He was right there with me as I thought about the meaning of the flowers.