TERRY MOSHER
Things have happened where there is no earthly explanation. They started at the age of five and continue on to this day. It’s weird I know. Especially when you are young and these things happen so often you expect that’s part of living.
Wide-awake, stirring off into the distance and suddenly I’m experiencing space and I’m traveling in it. This journey and others like it go on and on and space expands and there is an experience of seeing all kinds of objects, stars or planets as I go past them.
At first, it’s a bit scary, yet I enjoy them too. As they happen my mind wonders does nothing exist? Yes, I said does nothing exist? How far is this nothing? Remember, I’m five years old and already I am perplexed about the vastness of nothing as I make another trip through space, which seems endless and goes into …. nothing.
I have thought about this for over seven decades. How far can one travel into space? I finally had to accept that there is something out there, there has to be an ending. If I or you were given the opportunity to explore space how far could you travel and is it endless?
That’s a tough question because we are used to barriers here on Earth. I can’t move too far in one direction in our house before I run into an obstruction – a wall. I can’t drive a freeway in this country without running into a dead end. The I-90 that starts where the Kingdome used to be in Seattle ends in downtown Boston. You can’t go any further. You are there there, and buildings block any more advancing.
But travel through space, as I did as a young boy, and there is no ending. It’s space that expands into nothingness. Again, how far can you go before running into … a wall?
What if our Earth is part of a space that is enclosed in a glass that sits on a table somewhere? What if my young boy travels went far enough I crashed into the side of this glass, which is actually a Snow Globe.
Could be, couldn’t it?
Space has to end, our Earthly minds tell us. Finally after many years tossing this around in my mind I had to invent something that would stop me from exploring the impossible. So I decided at the end of nothingness there is a stop sign that reads dead end.
There it is. There is an end to nothingness.
On the other side of the dead end sign there is a big mansion where God resides. That Earthly reasoning eased my mind and allowed me freedom to travel without any further anxiety
So if I told you that I was talked to by somebody from the “Other side” would you freak out and call me out as a freak?
When I say “Other Side” I’m really talking about what we Earthlings call Heaven, even though unless you are stubborn and determined that might not exist for many of you. We have become less religious in this country and some of us I believe go to church just because it’s a tradition in their family or they feel it’s an acceptable behavior that is expected of us.
I don’t go to church. I have gone to church, forced by my mother, who tragically for her and for me, died when I was 12. I have gone to church as a mature adult. Well, at least as an adult. I don’t know about that mature thing.
But I didn’t have to go to church to experience somebody from Heaven talking to me. The mystery to me is why me?
I was nine years old, four years after my travels into nothingness, and I was sitting in the second row in from the classroom door in Mrs. Waterman’s fifth grade class which is now labeled the old Main Street School in Portville, NY. (the school no longer exists).
While sitting there I’m messing with Martha Jean’s hair as she sits in the second desk in front of mine. Joan, now deceased, is in the front desk. Joan and Martha Jean, who would later be called Marty and go on to be the dean of nursing students at University of Buffalo, making good use of her PhD, and me are ranked among the top academic students in our class (although I might be fudging just a bit. I was real good in math) and we often cleared out the desk in the back at lunchtime and played Jacks on the dirty wooden flood. We all were pretty good, and I think we were equally talented in the game.
So this one bright late spring day I’m messing with Martha Jean’s hair and all of a sudden a voice telepathy said, and these are the exact words, “You will marry Mary.”
I looked to my left to a gangly girl named Mary that was sitting in the last row by the windows, three seats from the end of the row. I said to myself, “No way” and turned back to Martha Jean’s hair like nothing had happened.
Remember, this happened 71 years ago and I can still hear the voice say, “You will marry Mary.”
There are questions about that even now. Why me? Who from Heaven would want me to know that? What importance is that to my life? I’m just nine years old at the time and I was no more interested in marriage as the man in the moon. I was only interested in girls to tease them on the playground or to mess with their hair or beat them in a game of Jacks.
This reminds me that a year later a girl met me as I was getting on the school bus and said Betty likes you and wants to go out with you. Again, my interest in girls was nil, nada, none.
But I went, to a movie with her and her friend. The closest I got to doing anything was put my arm around the back rest of her chair as we watched the movie. Daring?
No
The next school day as I got on the bus Betty’s friend met me and said, “Betty doesn’t like you. You are not fast enough.”
Years later as a young adult a friend and I were hitchhiking and a car with two women in it stopped for us. Once in the car I recognized the driver.
Betty!!!
I didn’t say anything. She didn’t either. Years later (I’m a little slow) I said to myself, “You should have told Betty, ‘Hey, I’m fast enough now.’”
But I’m a good guy. I kept silent.
It was C.S. Lewis who self-discovered God when he was an atheist in his younger years. He researched the subject in a friendly argument with J.R.R.Tolkien, the English writer and poet, and came to the conclusion God existed because from birth we know on instinct that which is right and that which is wrong.
I know God exists for another reason, but more on that later. I have felt since those early days traveling through space that my life has been guided or at least protected from the other side. We are put on this Earth with a spiritual plan laid out for us. That does not mean we have to follow it. Thomas Aquinas deducted that we are open to Free Will and despite out spiritual plan we are free to deviate from it. I, for example, was off my spiritual path for at least 36 years from the death of my mother in 1953 to 1989 when I began to walk into my dark years in which I raised myself (and did a poor job at it).
I’m not going into all of that again. I have written about it before, but basically I became a different person and while I did no wrong I simply slid into the background, subduing by ego and allowing myself to be taken advantage of and to be thought of as a neutral kind of person without any depth, which really wasn’t true but that is how I projected myself.
In that context, I made fun of myself by telling others that I always preferred, figuratively, to ride in the back of the bus with dark glasses, a Fedora on my head pulled down over my ears and wearing a long black trench coat. I would slump down in my seat and try to appear invisible and listen to the sounds around me without ever uttering a word in response.
This is a true story from that period. I was in a political science class in the top floor of Old Main at Western Washington in 1964 and the professor would try to get me to talk to the point he even asked me who the current President was.
Silence. I refused to open my mouth.
Our first big test in that class was multi-choice of 100 questions. When the professor announced results he made it a big deal, asking the class, and there were about 20 of us, who they thought had the top score.
When he finally announced that it was me (I think I was like 92 or 93 out of 100 correct) the class went silent for a few moments. They were stunned. I was not. I am not dumb. My IQ has been measured on the low genius graph.
Suddenly, a friend who still is my friend raised his hand and asked if by chance that test was out in the public (Western had an area where you could go and research previous tests given by select professors. This professor did not have any on file although there was a literary professor that had plenty on file and was the main reason I got through his two classes, which I needed to graduate).
The professor hesitated and then said to my friend, “It’s possible”, which demeaned by intelligence in front of the class. I knew in that instant I would never speak in his class. Never. I also knew that his next test would not be multi-choice and would be the toughest I might ever take (it was, and I got a C on it).
So those were my dark years where I harmed myself on purpose and have taken years to recover from. Those dark years were entirely my fault. My mother died, my father remarried a year later and we moved at that time from New York State to Ferndale, WA. where the new Mobile refinery was built on Cherry Pt just outside of Ferndale.
My father’s new wife did not like me much and I took the blunt of everything. All mistakes were mine (to be honest, some were) and I went from a good student to a mediocre one, went from participating in athletics —baseball, football and basketball — to becoming a watcher. I was a good athlete at my old New York school, one of the best for my age, maybe even the best. But I was nothing in Ferndale. I was nothing in class in Ferndale. I was not social in Ferndale. I was in my dark glasses, wearing a Fedora and a long, black trench coat and simply disappeared.
I did some stupid things – I walked three miles to school and three miles back to school for three years until me moved into town when I was a senior in high school. I drove my dad’s DeSota about as fast as it could go (140 miles an hour), sat along the Nooksack River that was raging with a spring thaw of Mount Baker and thought about swimming across it (a bad idea that I finally rejected, but just barely).
Short story long, I moved off the spiritual path I believe we all have once we are birthed her on this Earth. It wasn’t until May 26, 1989 that a sudden jolt threw me back on my path, which is where I’m at as I write this.
A granddaughter — Junior, I called her – was killed in Idaho on that date. She was 3 ½ years old. She talked to me after her death — telepathy. I have written about this numerous times. She told me, “Don’t worry about me, I walk with the Grace of God.”
Like C.S. Lewis, I went on a research binge (which is how I came across Lewis), trying to figure out why this happened and what she meant with her words. After a year I came to realize that she was an Angel sent here to straighten out me and my family. She basically died for our sins.
God visited me one Sunday as I boarded the ferry from Bremerton to Seattle to cover a Seattle Mariners’ game for the Kitsap Sun (I covered the team for nearly 30 years). A friend who is extremely religious and a follower of Jesus told me that is what happened to me that day.
Once I got on the ferry in my car, my world suddenly changed. Colors became different than anything I have ever experience on this Earth. Those colors overwhelmed me with their beauty and a sense of pure love (we don’t have pure love on Earth. Pure love is just that, pure—there is no agenda involved) that filled me with a joy that I can’t describe in human words.
This whole episode lasted until I drove off the ferry in Seattle. I rolled down my car windows so I could let what I was experiencing flow over others so they could also experience it. I didn’t want it to end. I now know what Heaven is like. Love is supreme there. All living things from trees to animals and birds and souls like us all live together in harmony with pure love for each other (I get a sickening feeling when I see large swaths of trees being cut for the next housing project; I killed a spider the other day that scrambled around in fear trying to get away from me and I was depressed and prayed to God to forgive me for the killing).
Being told I would marry Mary, Junior talking to me, my experience that day on the ferry and other experiences I have had, including defensive mechanisms coming out of the top of my head and I having a complete understanding how each one was constructed and how they protected me during my dark years, and two other experiences which defy explanations because they are so out of character with the rest of them, convince me I’m being watched over from the other side.
The larger question is why?
For instances, those two other experiences involved horse races. I love watching horses race. I was at the now defunct Longacres trying to figure out a race as I sat in a cafeteria underneath the bleachers. It was about post time and suddenly I heard this voice telepathy tell me, “Summer Sunshine.” I looked at my racing form and sure enough there was a horse named that in the race. I raced to the betting window and brought a $2 ticket (many years later I asked myself why I didn’t bet maybe $10?). The horse won and paid off at 17-1 odds, or $36.
I love watching Triple Crown races and in 2009 I was viewing it on TV from our living room. The talking heads were beginning to announce their picks to win the Belmont Stakes, the third race in the Triple Crown.
As they began talking, I was told telepathy, “Summer Bird.” That’s all the voice said. Because by then I had gotten accustomed to being communicated from the other side I was not fazed. I just started yelling at the talking heads on TV, “Summer Bird, Summer Bird’, you idiots. None of them picked Summer Bird.
Being told in advance the winner ruined the race for me. I sat in silence as Summer Bird went from ninth place and down the stretch erased six lengths in the last half-mile, swinging six-wide and won by 2 ½ lengths as a 11-1 underdog.
All the talking heads were shocked. I was not.
I don’t know what it is about horse races with whoever is talking to me from the other side. About a month ago I was watching TVG, which has horse races from around the country each day. I was watching a race that was about half-way through when a voice said, “Number 5 will win.”
I looked closely and No. 5 was 6th in an eight-horse field. But then No. 5 began to come on and, yep, you guessed it the horse won.
I have a simple answer how that voice knows what is going to happen, I just don’t know why I’m being targeted. I believe everything is linear in Heaven. From there you can see the start of life and the end of life all at once. There is no such thing as time. A 24-hour day here is just a notation on a straight life line. So a soul there can look at my Earthly life line and know what has happened, what is happening now and what will happen in the future. It’s all there in plain sight. So what I am going to do in the next five seconds is already on that linear line, as is a horse race.
If that Heavenly soul is sitting there reading life lines that soul already knows who is going to win the November 3 election, and could tell me right now (but hasn’t).
So God exists and our futures are already known on the other side. Those life lines can be disrupted from the Earth. I was off mine for 36 years so God knows how messed up I made it for them over there (remember, according to Aquinas we have free will). It’s no wonder Junior came down as an Angel to straighten me out. I was screwing up my life line.
What I can’t figure out is why I am being closely guided and guarded. I don’t think of myself as very special (remember my dark glasses, Fedora and trench coat) and certainly I am nothing more than a grinder as a writer (most of my family are better writers than I am).
Maybe it’s because I pray constantly for guidance. Maybe it’s something else. I just don’t know, except I do appreciate it. I know I’m far from perfect. We are all here to reach perfection and melt back into God, and frankly I may be at 40 percent away from perfection, and there is always the chance because of free will to take steps backwards.
Well, that’s it for today.
Oh, I forgot. Mary and I have been married for 53-plus years.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there.
Have a great day.
You are loved.
