It was spring of 1977and I was sleeping late, after having told Sharon to wake me by 10:00. I had no clients that morning but had other work I wanted to do.
After telling Sharon to wake me at ten, I lay in bed for what seemed like a short moment and then instantly I found myself jogging down Short Beach in Nahant. I could see and feel everything. This was even more real than right now! Everything radiated light. The sand, the plants, everything was incredibly beautiful. Light reflected everywhere and off everything. Looking ahead, down the beach where I was jogging, I saw something that normally is not there. It was a large section of sea wall right in the middle of the beach across from the Coast Guard station, standing upright as if it were placed there.
Running toward it, as I did a huge man, approximately twelve feet tall stepped around from behind the wall and held his hand out to me. I don’t know how to describe the terror I felt. All my breath had been taken away from the fear, but I still kept running straight toward this figure thinking I was going to die. But as I reached him he took my hand by the wrist and the next thing I knew my feet hit the top of the sea wall as we went up into the air.
It was incredible! We were flying north along the seacoast when we turned inland and went west over Massachusetts and then over my parents’ house. He stopped there a moment as I looked down from about three hundred feet at my father working in his garden and my mother hanging the clothes on the clothesline. It was beautiful. And without a word he then took me north very fast.
He never spoke. We started to descend into a beautiful lush clearing with fir and pine and warm sun all around. As we were almost landing, and I realized our flight was almost over, I blurted out, feeling like a four-year-old: “How come you don’t want to fly anymore?” As I touched down into the clearing, I could feel myself back in bed. Something incredible had just happened to me. It was not a dream. After a moments thought, I realized that it was not a hallucination.
I laid there for some time trying to understand what had happened. I then got up and immediately went out in the kitchen to tell Sharon what had occurred. I tried to explain it to her the best I could. As we were talking the phone rang. I went to the phone and heard my mother say hello. As she said this, electricity went through my whole body and I knew what she was going to say before she said it. My father had just died suddenly an hour before while they were on their way to vacation in Florida. He had a massive stroke and coronary while he was driving and died instantly. My mother took the wheel and drove onto the grassy median strip, unhurt.
I began weeping, but it was not from grief. Somehow, I knew that what had just happened to me was God letting me know that there is more to life than what is visible, and that my father was now in the presence of Him. I knew that, down to my deepest fiber, and was hooting and whooping between sobs of grief and joy.
During the whole funeral, before and after, I was telling everyone what I saw and comforting them with what I felt God had showed me. Most thought I was nuts, but I didn’t care. I knew what I knew, and I wanted to share it with them and let them now my father was alive! The neighbor across the street from my father and fellow deacon with my father at the Glenmont Reformed Church, told me at the funeral service that there had been a great change in my father in the past two years and that he had come to a new faith in God and looked forward to being with the Lord. I told him that I knew it and that he was with Him.
An angel was sent to deliver me and impart a message that he gave without a spoken word. The angel took me by the hand and delivered me to a point where I could not stop reading and drinking God’s word and thirsting for more.
It was not much later that I answered an altar call to ask Christ to make a new creature out of me and to come into my life.
Brian Warner. Johanna’s Eleven (Kindle Locations 317-357).