Home » Angels, Demons, Miracles and the like... » Dreams and Visions » My Friend John and my vision... (As Above, so Below... Eternally...)
| My Friend John and my vision... [message #2767] |
Sun, 06 October 2013 07:22  |
Seeker
Messages: 244
Registered: June 2010
Location: Las Vegas
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Senior Member |
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The third verse of the song, "If You Could Hie to Kolob" says the following:
Quote:The works of God continue,
And worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter;
There is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit;
...
In this vision, I learned how true these statements really are...
While serving a mission in Ireland, I came across a member named John. He was an odd sort about 45-50 years old. Not much to look at with his missing/rotted teeth, buzzed grey hair and coke bottle glasses... Due to his handicaps he was "on the dol" or government welfare system. This afforded him significant time to work with the missionaries and perform other church services. He was wonderfully funny and could tell the most beautiful stories of his life if you could muster the patience to hear all the details. I will tell you some of his story to the best of my recollection...)
His life was much like a Forest Gump story! He was on of the first to learn and master the electric guitar in Europe. This caused him to meet the most interesting people like the Beetles and he is playing the electric guitar in many of the Records made in England which feature the electric guitar during that era. I think I could tell his story for hours, but instead I will focus briefly on a few of the highlights that lead up to my vision...
John's conversion story starts when he returns back to college where he met the girl of his dreams. After falling madly in love, they plan to get married. Her father was going to perform the marriage as he was a preacher in high mountains of Switzerland. One week before the marriage, his love and her father were traveling in the mountains doing church business and there was an accident involving dangerous weather and they went off a cliff and died. (He was crying at this point.)
He was so devastated that he lost most of his memory of the following week including traveling to the funeral, traveling home and the following week or more sitting in bed depressed. Everything he knows about this period has been told to him by his friends after the fact. At some point, his friends had been worried about him as he disappeared from life. They busted down his door to find him weak in bed having not had food or water for some time. They called the ambulance and he was rushed to the hospital they tried to revive him, but ultimately they were unsuccessful. He was pronounced dead, he died of a broken heart...
He death was a typical near death story where he found himself watching people trying to save his life. But he had no reason to live. At some point he was visited by two people who introduced themselves as "Joseph Smith" and "William Garland ****" who were both ancestors of his. He had heard of William because the middle name had been passed down for generations, and he got it. But he had never heard of this Joseph Smith guy.
They then proceeded to teach him the gospel, the plan of salvation and every lesson you which they would teach in church but don't. He saw vision upon vision of thing that had been and were to come. When they finished, he said, alright then, what am I to do with all this information? They told him he was going to go back and he needed to find the Church that taught what he had just been taught, join it, and assist it as well as a few other personal life mission type things. He was also given "Predictions" which was a major world event for each year from then until the year 2023. (All of which have come true so far.)
So, next thing he knows, he wakes up under a cloth and he can't breath very well. He is extremely weak having become mortal again and having not left his body in a great state. the doctors had declared him dead, and covered his body with a sheet and put him to the side in preparation to send him to the morgue.
Someone saw him stirring and wrote it off as natural twitching, until he mustered all his effort to make a sound. Then to their shock, they took off the cover and saw him struggling to live...
Being dead takes its toll on a body and he was never quite the same. He was slower and had what he called "kinks" in his brain. He remembered everything he had learned with extreme clarity and after a number of months in the hospital, he began looking for the church...
Some time later John was rummaging through his family stuff and found a letter to someone in his family line saying, "He's dead, they killed him, the Prophet Joseph Smith is dead..." There was no church mentioned or anything useful, just notably of interest.
Hundreds of churches and years later, he gave up actively seeking the church having decided that it didn't exist in Europe. He had been ridiculed and cursed for his crazy ideas and told that they were false and evil. He learned to keep them to himself to avoid ridicule from the religious leaders and experts. One day, after moving to Northern Ireland, he received a knock at the door. Two LDS Sister missionaries "had knocked on my door and wanted to talk religion. I said, very well, come in and let's have at it. To which they replied that they couldn't come in. And I said, then why did you bother knock'n my door?" They explained the policy and set up an appointment for him to meet them at one of the member's houses.
...
Some time later, he had receives all 6 discussions, twice... And he had no issue with what he was being told, but he was waiting for them to get past the primary lessons and start talking about the real stuff. They had invited him to be baptized multiple times and he had declined because he didn't know if this was really the church or not. Finally he felt he needed to fish or cut bait and stop leading these nice young women along. He decided to break one of his rules and ask them two questions that would seal the deal. If they were like every other church they would cry blasphemy and kick him out on his ear...
So, at his next appointment, (Saturday night), he had a similar dialog to the following:
John - "Do you believe that there are multiple Gods, perhaps even thousands of them?"
Sister missionary - (Nervously), "Well, John, we don't generally discuss this with our prospective converts as this is a much deeper discussion, but the short answer is, Yes, we do."
John - (Surprised, but still uncertain and bracing himself for their response to his next question...) "Well, Sisters, do you believe that we could become one of those Gods?"
The Sisters looked at each other, thinking that John had gotten a hold of some anti-Mormon literature... - "Uh, well, yes John we do believe that we are children of God, that we were created in His image and if we follow the path He has laid out for us that we can someday be like Him."
John was in shock! He immediately stood up and walked out the door. He couldn't believe that he had finally found the church. He walked the mile or so home and went straight up to bed. The spirit was nailing him hard. He laid awake all night while, "The spirit was banging out the kinks in my brain."
The sisters had no idea what was happening but figured that they would not see him again.
The next morning, (Sunday), he "floated" the mile to church. The Sister's were shocked to see him there! They rushed over to him and he straight way told them he would like to be baptized at the next available service. (We don't get many baptisms in Ireland, so, there were lots of openings...)
After having this little dialog with the Sister missionaries about becoming Gods, he figured that everyone knew what he knew, like the Sister's who knew we could become Gods but didn't say anything. So, the Sunday after his baptism, he was sitting in Gospel Doctrine class and they were discussing the Millennium. The teacher asked, "What are some things that will happen in the Millennium?" After a few others had answered, he raised his hand and said, "At the beginning of the Millennium, Christ will return with his wife, and together they will..." When he saw the teacher's eyes, he realized that he must have done something wrong... So he ended abruptly...and the teacher reiterated that Christ would return and moved on...
After a few instances like that, John learned to stop commenting and just listen to the lesson...
Years later..., while eating lunch at his house, my companion and I are talking to him. I being one to enjoy a good deep conversation and egging him on trying to get him to squeal and tell me all the goo stuff he knows... He was telling me how some people think that Joseph Smith literally saw God the Father and Jesus Christ in the grove. He said, "It must have been a vision or something because he couldn't have possibly seen God. How could God have possibly fit in a little grove? How could Joseph Smith have possibly have been able to see and comprehend God? It would be like an ant looking at you and comprehending you and having a chat, or like you going down to a cell in you big toe and saying Hi, how are you and carrying on a conversation with a cell in your big toe."
!!!! What is he going on about? !!!!!
My companion thought he was off his rocker and didn't put much stock in him. My companion enjoyed playing his guitar and seeing picture of him with celebrities, etc., but once he started talking deep doctrine or even new doctrine, he blew him off. I on the other hand believed his story and knew much of what he said or at least knew about the topic like Christ being married. I just couldn't comprehend what he was saying right now about Joseph Smith's First Vision ... It confused me. He was supposed to have extra information and I couldn't even fathom what he was trying to say...
It really bugged me!
As my companion and I traveled to our next appointment, we walked through an unkempt grass field. I was mauling over what John had said and trying to make sense of it. Suddenly I was caught up in a vision. I was flying through space at tremendous speeds. Stars were whizzing past me until I saw countless galaxies. I continued on watching galaxies whiz past me until I reached a part of space where there were no more stars. I kept moving out into the void, further and further. I turned around so I could see the galaxies that I had just flown past getting farther and farther away. There were so many of them. More stars than I could imagine. It was like I had just passed through a wall where the stars/galaxies just stopped. On one side of the wall there was void. on the other side of the wall were countless galaxies full of countless stars.
The further I went away from the galaxies the closer they appeared to get until I couldn't separate them anymore and they looked like a single solid object. The object was huge! I kept going out until I realized that the object was a being/person. A Giant being/person!!! Then I realized that this being/person was interacting with other beings/people in a room in a house/building on a planet full of people. I was an infinitely tiny spec in their world. I was told that this "Person" or being, was God and was in tune with and governed everything in my "universe". (Each of these beings was a universe.) And that the planet these beings lived on was full of beings/people in an endless universe of planets and stars and galaxies similar to the ones I was familiar with but on a Macrocosmic scale. I was told by the spirit that as far as I was concerned, I could continue up and out of that universe to see another being created of/by it and that I would find the same thing happening an infinite number of times. And that as much matter as I thought was in the "universe" or being which I belonged to, there was infinitely more matter than I could comprehend.
I then flew back toward the arm of the being I came out of until I again saw the galaxies and then into one galaxy as the stars again separated and could be individually distinguished and I was again passing them at incredible speeds. I finally came to the planet earth and flew down through the sky until I saw myself walking in the field with my companion. I was frozen in mid step. Everything else was frozen too, but I only barely noticed that. I flew at my own body with incredible speed and then it was as if I got smaller as I approached my body which instantly got bigger and I could see tissue, then cells and their tissues and then eventually clusters of atoms and then electrons circling the nucleus's like planets circling stars in solar systems. I flew through them like I had the stars until I came to a particular electron and sped down to it where I saw life forms living and dying whole life times in fractions of seconds. I was told that I could go down further to infinite levels of microcosmic world inside microcosmic world.
Then I was instantly back in my own mind walking in a field. My companion was oblivious and the whole thing had happened in less time than it took to take a single step. It was an amazing vision!
With that in mind, the song "If You Could Hie to Kolob" takes on deeper meaning and a very personal relevance. The song is now about my own personal experience and has rich and deep meaning. I hope you can now appreciate it as much as I do.
Quote:1. If you could hie to Kolob
In the twinkling of an eye,
And then continue onward
With that same speed to fly,
Do you think that you could ever,
Through all eternity,
Find out the generation
Where Gods began to be?
2. Or see the grand beginning,
Where space did not extend?
Or view the last creation,
Where Gods and matter end?
Methinks the Spirit whispers,
"No man has found 'pure space,'
Nor seen the outside curtains,
Where nothing has a place."
3. The works of God continue,
And worlds and lives abound;
Improvement and progression
Have one eternal round.
There is no end to matter;
There is no end to space;
There is no end to spirit;
There is no end to race.
4. There is no end to virtue;
There is no end to might;
There is no end to wisdom;
There is no end to light.
There is no end to union;
There is no end to youth;
There is no end to priesthood;
There is no end to truth.
5. There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.
There is no end to glory;
There is no end to love;
There is no end to being;
There is no death above.
Text: William W. Phelps, 1792-1872
~ Seeker
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