Day Seven: So Then, Is There a Heaven?

I'll be the first to admit it. I ask way too many questions. Never taking anything at face value isn't something I do on purpose either. My thought process is coded deeply into this shelled up electrified meat bubble. It has become nearly impossible to coax me into simply believing. I prefer facts, reality, honesty, hard evidence. Being a victim of gullibility is not for me. Waiting lines are long enough at the Canadian hospital. I'm not even sure our facilities can treat the brain damage closing the mind causes.

So here I sit, feeling confident in my current version of truth bubble. Yet I still think about these three events. Three times in my life I've had to witness something incredible. Each one gave me no choice but to simply accept it. Denying the existence or trying to explain it away with what if's would truly mean I'm forcing blindness upon my life experience.

I am not writing this to convince anyone of anything. Not here to start a truth vs truth battle between believers of different beliefs. These are mine, and you are free to your own conclusions. I don't want to choose an order of significance, so I will just start from the first glitch in the matrix, and end with recency.

I was seventeen years old. Grew up on a farm and used the same highway to commute back and forth 95% of the time. Ten to fifteen minutes was the usual amount of time these journeys would take. I was out one evening with friends. It was a school night and I was given until ten o'clock to get home. A generous curfew. Yet somehow I find myself running late. I still wanted my weekend privileges, being late was not an option. Let's just say my parents at the time could be very intimidating. I wasn't living an ideal life according to their standards. Any little mishap didn't just mean something was being taken away. A very aggressive verbal smacking was also on the horizon. I feared those. So I put that 1985 Mazda 626 gas pedal to the floor. This wasn't the first time I pushed that car to it's limits either. That highway was always dead during the late evening and into the night. The sign said "maximum 100 kph", which was a clever suggestion, but I'd get the car up to nearly 170 kph on a regular basis. I had become complacent traveling that fast.

9:55 pm, very dark. Just as I suspected, the speeding was helping. A buzzer beater, but I'm nearly home. White Zombie cassette loaded in deck. I wasn't all about that bass though. This was the late 90's. The trunk rattler crowd wasn't quite settled into my small town yet. The factory system just pushed out "loud" and I loved it. Volume cranked, nearly home, things are looking up. Suddenly I hear something. A loud, slow whisper directly into my right ear. "Keep looking....too fast." Somewhat muffled but clear enough to understand, loud enough to hear over top of the deafening all treble sound system. It gave me the skin crawl feeling, chills, much like the ones you've had recently. It took one or two seconds to register. Stunned, my first reaction was to quickly glance to the right as well as behind me as far as I could. I thought someone was in the car. Which made no sense, because I knew I was alone before this whisper. Startled and confused, my next reaction was to quickly hit the brakes so I could slow down, maybe pull over, and process this. The words still didn't really register. The shock of the whisper was all it took for these reactions to take place. It was instantaneous. Whisper, me looking back, nothing, then hitting the brakes all happened so fast. I was losing speed fast as well, then my focus was drawn to the deer. The deer that I did not even know existed until that point of slow down caused by my reaction from all this. Large buck, a hunters dream, confidently staring down my headlights.

I was forced to use the rest of that brake pedal. Came to a nice controlled stop with only a minor chirp of the tires at the end. I would have hit him hard, that little car would have taken some serious damage...I might have been killed factoring in the land speed record attempt. Swerving would have caused some serious problems as well. I connected the whisper with saving my life immediately. In that moment there was nothing else to think about. I was completely stopped and pulled over, pumping adrenaline. Lit a cigarette. The words registered. I felt like I understood it. Time to go home...hmmm, Looks like I'm late. Unbelievable right? I'll never attempt to explain it.

I've not ruled out the possibilities though. Maybe the whisper was just a by-product of overly loud music. A distortion of the actual music. Then I'm forced to call it all a very convenient coincidence. The story as a whole isn't something I'd normally bring up in conversations. It has come up though. Dependent on their belief systems, they all have their own answer. A friend who just so happens to be a christian told me it was God. Another spiritual friend called it a guardian angel. Others claim it's a spirit of someone who was close to me. I'm sure if I traveled the globe, everyone would have an answer. Nobody will ever truly know, but I know what I know...and that's good enough for me. It's all of those things, along with everything else we can think of.

The next two are not as intensely profound, yet on the top three for a good reason. I've also the added benefit of being with people during these strange times. I cannot pinpoint a day. Roughly 5 years ago I was enjoying the company of my two children. We were all hanging out in my apartment and I believe it came time for them to leave and head back to their mom's place. My youngest one dropped something on the floor and needed a light turned on to help see. The older reached for the main kitchen fixture switch...but that light hasn't worked for months. I knew a new bulb wouldn't work, but my kids both insisted I at least try, because whatever was lost was very important to them. They looked, while I tried and failed with a new bulb. Sorry kids, this light won't work but what was lost was found anyway. I can be a real joker at times. We were all having small talk about what could be wrong with the light. In the meantime I was pretending to do some hocus-pocus focus some energy into my hands thing. I then pretended to be fully charged, so of course I shoot my pretend energy ball at the light. Maybe I was playing too much Oblivion back then...but the damn light turned on. My oldest was completely blown away, she saw it, she got the joke. She did not get how the light turned on. I didn't know what was going on. The youngest saw. We all had big eyes together and then began to chuckle. What more could you do? The switch was in the on position. I shut it off, flipped it back up. No light. It went back to being dysfunctional.

So that happened, we all saw it. Not even going to try to explain it. Another convenient coincidence, again. I even warned the kids about how nobody will believe them. I felt forced to remind them people might actually bug them if they said anything. That stuff doesn't happen in this world, right? For three people, it happened in their world though. They've grown a lot since then, they remember it well. We stopped wondering a long time ago.

Lastly, two years ago. Again, I was with my children. We were enjoying the lake. Their grandparents own a nice cabin there. Beautiful place. Evening walks were a common thing. The three of us were just strolling along, having a conversation, nothing unusual. Until an orange ball of light appeared low in the sky. I noticed right away, pointed it out and asked them to stop walking. Our perspective was blocked by trees and cabins to the right of us, which was south. We were facing east. Looking north and east, we had a clear line of sight. Wide open sky. Another orange ball appears, again coming from the south behind all these trees heading north. These things are bright but don't illuminate anything around them. The first one stops, the second one stops. Two more of these orange balls of light come from the same direction, same heading. It's like were traveling single file. All four hung around for a little while in our view to the east. All four then began heading east. One by one, nearly single file. The first would disappear on the horizon, then the second, third, then fourth. So what's that all about?

When I saw the first one my immediate thought was maybe it was a floating candle lantern of sorts. Those exist. I've seen them before in person. The observed flight physics didn't seem to match though. It was not windy either, so I can't explain the sudden change of flight path. ...and all four acting the same? Another convenient coincidence... They also appeared to be one to two kilometers away, about a mile. If people flew some lanterns, they would have appeared much, much closer to us in the sky. Same warning went out about talking about it. Just another thing for us to enjoy, probably best leaving it at that.

I'm the biggest skeptic I know. I don't live in a world with monsters. Spirits are on "reality" tv shows and detected with ghost buster like devices. Aliens are ancient news. Magical powers work best when the controller is fully charged. That is the world I live in...so what's all that up there? The things best left unsaid. Maybe they will lead to miracle number four. Much like those stories, this one in it's entirety will fade away into my life experience. This story exists in my life, most won't see it. Imagine if I woke up tomorrow only to find out people did read it, and liked it. How would I be able to explain that one? I'd just call it heaven.