The Velveteen Rabbit and Becoming Real

The Velveteen Rabbit and Becoming Real

by Bob Carey

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I’m going to start out again with a section of a story. Many of you have heard this story. It has to do with love. It has to do with how love changes us and transforms us. In fact, in my own life, I really don’t know any other power that has done that. It’s never been my will that’s changed me. It’s always been love that has changed me. And that love sometimes comes through my wife and my children. Sometimes through friends at CFO. Sometimes through people in my church community. But it is God’s love coming to me, because it is that love that I shared with you earlier. At least the definition of that love that comes from M. Scott Peck’s book, The Road Less Traveled. And that is that love that wills, or that is an action. It’s a love that wills to support and nourish another human being on their spiritual journey. One self and another human being on their spiritual journey. And that’s how God’s love seems to me to come through other people. It nourishes and supports me to grow to become the person that God wants me to become. Not the person that you want me to become or anybody else wants me to become. But the person that God wants me to become.

And it’s when I become that person that I’m whole and that I’m free and that I’m able to become the servant of others. The story that I’m going to read to you is… or the section of the story is from the Velveteen Rabbit.

And if you haven’t read the Velveteen Rabbit in its entirety, I suggest that you get hold of the book. It’s a great children’s story. It has some profound truth here concerning older folks, too. In this story, there’s a rabbit who lives in a house. He’s just been purchased and he is put in the nursery where all the other toys are. And he meets a Skin Horse that’s been in the nursery for a long time. And he has a conversation with the Skin Horse. And this is the conversation that he has.

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath. And most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise. For he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger. And by and by break their mainsprings and pass away. And he knew that they were only toys. And that they would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful. And only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced, like the Skin Horse, understand all about it. “What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room.

“Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and stick out like a handle?” “Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse. For he was always truthful. “When you are real, you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been rubbed off. And your eyes drop out. And you get loose in the joints, and very shabby.

“But those things don’t matter at all. Because once you are real, you can’t be ugly. Except to people who don’t understand.” “I suppose you are real,” said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it. For he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled. “The boy’s uncle made me real,” he said. “That was a great many years ago. But once you are real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”

I’ve been talking about the process that we are in terms of conversion, ongoing conversion. And like the Skin Horse, sometimes it takes a while. It’s something that you become. Something that doesn’t happen in an instant. And it is life that teaches us, that molds us. And Jesus is the life, is the way, the truth, and the life. And so it is Jesus in life itself that teaches and molds us. So that we grow. And certainly as some of you realized during the reading of the story, we get pretty shabby by the time we become real.

Sometimes the hair in our head is gone and we get loose in the joints by the time we understand what being real really means. And it does take time. I’ve spoken about the ongoing conversion process from the point of view of healing of memories. And I’ve told you my story in the previous talks.

I’d like to go back and talk about the three loves in relationships again. Just briefly mention them and then move on. I talked about falling in love. I talked about romantic love. And I didn’t really emphasize the fact that what we are seeking, all of us, is not those kinds of loves, because those loves don’t last. But we are seeking God’s love. That unconditional love. That love that loves us. Even when we think that we are not worthy. Someone last night after my talk had been struggling with forgiveness and had said, “Well, you know, I can let God forgive me, but I can’t forgive myself.” And that’s so often the struggle that we have. It’s easy to think that God will forgive us, but we have trouble thinking that we are worthy of God’s forgiveness. But we need to remember that we don’t make ourselves worthy. He makes us worthy. It’s His love in itself that makes us worthy.

We don’t have to be good for Him to love us. He created us. He knows us better than we know ourselves. And He loves us more than we love ourselves. But in the process of being converted, we need to come to understand that love that He has for us, so that we are set free. It’s only then, when we fully understand that love, that we can love others without having judgment and condemnation. Because as long as we condemn ourselves, we’re going to condemn others.

Paul said that he didn’t even judge himself. That was God’s job. And yet we continue to judge ourselves. And in doing so, we not only keep ourselves bound, but we are not able to set others free. Because we don’t understand fully the breadth and the depth and the fullness of God’s love.

And it is that love, as in the story of the Velveteen Rabbit, that makes us real. That sets us free to be the person that God wants us to be. Now, one of the things that I’ve observed in my own life in this process is that it’s sort of like a circle.

You’re going to have to visualize a circle. Now, this circle isn’t really a circle. It’s a spiral. Because I believe that we’re all moving towards wholeness. But to best describe this process that we’re in, I need for you to visualize a circle. And at the top of that circle, you might put peak experience, or religious, high religious experiences, breakthroughs, or whatever you want to call them. It’s the experience of being set free. And when ego boundaries are dissolved and that we understand that a penny has dropped, we know truth.

Right next to that, you might put a little arrow and it says, “Ego Inflation.” Because right after we usually… right after we have these peak experiences, and we tend to integrate them into our understanding of life, our cosmologies, the way life works, what usually happens is that we tend to think that we know. We think that we are complete and we don’t have to go anywhere else on our journey.

And that is a place that I call Ego Inflation. And it happens to us all, to some extent. We think that our cosmology is complete. We think we know the truth. And then we start to share it with great pride and confidence, talking about our past spiritual experiences, thinking that God is basically through with us. Maybe not admitting that, but thinking that inside, that God is basically through with us. And then what happens is, a little further down the side of the circle, you might put life shock, or confrontation, or crisis. And it’s there usually, lately in my life, that has come in my relationship with people. I find that I’m not loving, as loving as I should be. That I’m not the person that I thought that I was. And that I wasn’t converted as much as I thought I had been converted, or transformed. And I find that I’m not listening to people as I should listen. I’m not being present to people. I’m desiring to manipulate or do the things my way, rather than God’s way. And again, I sense that something is wrong with my understanding, or my belief system, or my cosmology. And my cosmology then starts to disintegrate. And there’s disintegration. And there’s confusion. And there’s struggle. Now this is in…

This doesn’t happen intensely to all the people, but some people you may be able to identify with in some parts of your life where this has happened. During that period of time, there’s almost a schizophrenia. The heart and the mind are not together because you’re struggling, you know, and there’s confusion. And it’s then that, after that disintegration process begins, that we then have ego deflation. That’s the opposite from ego inflation. We seem to fall apart and lose control and wonder what is happening to us. We become humble. We become like a child.

Humility to me doesn’t mean being stepped on and being a floor mat. Being humble means to be teachable. When I’m humble, I’m then open to be teachable. My ego barriers are down and people can speak to me and I can hear. In fact, I’m ready to listen because I know things aren’t working the way I wanted them to work.

There’s ego death. In one sense, it’s the crucifixion in our own lives at that point. We die to self. And that’s at the bottom of this circle. And then there’s understanding begins to come because we stand under instead of trying to stand on top. I think the word understanding is wonderful because it does say what needs to be done to really truly understand. We need to be able to humble ourselves before others to understand where they’re coming from or what truth is. We need to stand under instead of elevating ourselves above others.

And then there’s a period when we start receiving that truth, that God’s grace begins to work in our lives again. And there’s reconciliation, rebirth, and reintegration. And then we reform our cosmology, our understanding. We fit in the new understandings and truths that we’ve received when we were humbled and able to receive the truth.

And then we have this peak experience again. We feel God’s love and acceptance and forgiveness and know that this universe is not really ultimately hostile. It is a beautiful place created by God. We see it in the resurrected eyes of Jesus.

Not through the resurrected eyes of the Jesus who has taken our humanity and, in a sense, baptized it. But then, because of the nature, our nature, we have a tendency to think that we have reached our goal again. And we think we know all truth. And then again there is ego inflation. And we go again through another life shock or confrontation or crisis with reality. And we see that we don’t know and we need to know more. And we go again through this cycle. Now, as we grow, that cycle gets less traumatic. But it’s still there. And we can go through it quicker as we grow and are more honest and vulnerable and willing to become humble and stand under God and others. But that same process continues on in our growth.

And I think that quite possibly in my life that that process will not end until my death. I’m not sure about this. And I think only the fullness of who I am will be known when I die. Although I get glimpses of that in this life. It may not be until I am fully out of this body that I will know, even as God knows. I don’t know that for sure. One of the things I try not to do is make rules about things that I learn. Because the more rules that I make, I find that the more that I have to let them go. As I was talking about healing, if I make rules about this is the way things are going to happen, this is the way it is in reality or life. And that life itself sometimes will tell me that that is not the way it is. And that I need to relearn and to be humble and receive new understanding so that I can grow. And that my consciousness can be raised or that I can become more awake and understand reality in a deeper and broader way.

Now, that’s a picture of the process. Now, I think that picture is really a spiral and that we’re all moving closer to God. And that life is teaching us. That Jesus is teaching us through life. Who and what we are.

Although, I have had people say that sometimes they feel that they are going around in a circle and they have to relearn the same thing over and over and over again. And I think that may be true, that sometimes we get caught in a cycle for a while and don’t really learn a lesson at the depth that we need to learn to be free from. And that it takes time sometimes to get through that. As it was with my father. It took me seven years to get through that cycle of learning or desiring, in fact, to overcome the self-destructive behavior patterns that were a part of that healing process.

In regard to this process of learning, I want to share something that Fred told me last night. And I think that he needs to be heard in his story as a part of my story. Fred, is he here? Yeah, there he is. Fred said, “You know, I have trouble with healing.”

He said, a lot of people with disabilities, similar to mine, have trouble with healing. Because they feel like they are not being accepted the way they are. That they have to be different to be members of the body of Christ. That they have to be healed completely. And some of them feel that they are uncomfortable where that struggle is going on for people wanting to see them healed all the time, and yet they are not healed. And he said to me, he said, “You know, the greatest thing about the Christian community” to him is the love that comes from that community. The acceptance of him as he is. And I want to share something that has happened to me. In this new church that I have just been called to, I met a young man. He is about 55 years old, and that is pretty young for someone to be dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease.

He is a man that has been a great skier all his life. And all of a sudden he is not able to ski. He is losing control of his body and he can’t speak very well. And he was, he is the president of the Mount Bachelor Ski Corporation. He is the president in charge of that. And he has directed it. And he has built the ski resort in the last 10 years from an empty mountain to a tremendous resort area. And now he has Lou Gehrig’s disease and he can’t even do the thing that he has created for others to do in recreation. He can’t even ski anymore.

And I met him at the church. And he and I became close friends. And he and I meet together and have met together during the two months that I have been there. Once a week. And we eat together or just share some time together. And what God has asked me to do in that situation is to be present to him and to love him. And to pray for him. But not to make it an issue so that if something doesn’t happen that he feels badly that he is not pleasing me because he isn’t being healed. Or that he starts to feel guilty or uncomfortable in my presence. Because I want him to know that God loves him. And that God supports and nourishes him right where he is. And cares for him.

And that’s what he is saying. Now that may be contrary to the faith position that some of us seem to want to be standing in. That healing is possible for all people. But as Margaret shared, we don’t always see that healing in this life. And it may be that death will be the healing for this man.

Poor Fred. Maybe that’s where God can work His healing for these people who we pray for that don’t receive the kind of healing that we would like them to receive. We’d like to see the manifestation before our eyes.

And I think I’ll share that story that I shared that you didn’t get on tape at this time. Because I think that it’s very helpful. When I was chaplain at St. Paul’s Towers in Oakland, I met a woman who was a school teacher who had arthritis and she was legally blind. And she had been an active woman and a very powerful woman in her life, a leader.

And she knew she was 87 years old and she knew she was facing death. I used to meet with her in her room. She was a shut-in. She couldn’t get about it. And she was in a wheelchair. And we used to listen to music together. And I used to share God’s love with her just by being present with her.

And one day she said to me, she said, “Bob, you know, I’ve been a Christian all my life and I believe in life after death and I believe in eternal life. But I’m a little bit apprehensive. I’m a little afraid because most of my understanding is intellectual. And it’s really not a deep spiritual and emotional understanding of life after death. In one sense, I think I know about it, but I’m not sure about it. And could you pray with me or help me understand it?” And I said, “You know, the best way for one to understand life after death is to experience that understanding personally. And not to have me just talk about it or quote biblical scriptures, but for you to have God directly speak to you. And so let’s pray that God will, in His grace, will speak directly to you about what life after death will be for you.”

And so I prayed that and I went home. And she called me up the next morning. She said, “I had this dream.” It was difficult for her to use the phone. So I knew that something important had happened. And she shared this dream with me. And this is the dream. She dreamt she was a ship on the Atlantic Ocean. And that she went from port to port. And she went from port to port. She gathered barnacles. And those barnacles were her blindness, her arthritis, her unforgiveness in her relationships with other people, her struggles with life, and the sins of her life that somehow she had not been able to… to be released from, negative behaviors, anger, things that didn’t seem to be fully healed in her life. She saw all those barnacles gathered on the bottom of her ship. And then she heard the captain of her ship, who was Jesus, say to her, “Go to the Panama Canal.” And so her ship headed to the Panama Canal. And the ship went through the locks of the canal. And the initial locks that raised the ship up are saltwater locks. And they raised the ship up to the highest of the locks, which is a freshwater lake. And she discovered at that time that barnacles don’t live in freshwater.

And so all the barnacles that she had gathered had fell off of her ship. They died and fell away from the ship. And she was set free from those. Those barnacles. And then the captain of her ship led her down the other side of the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean, or the peaceful ocean. And she saw then that death was a healing. And then it was a healing.

I wanted to share that and share Fred’s concern, because I think that it is an important concern. I also have a friend I told you about, who was a drug user who became a paraplegic in a motorcycle accident. He was paralyzed from the waist down. And I prayed with him often. And he has not been fully healed. And he is still paralyzed from the waist down. And I don’t know, as Margaret said, what the mystery is. What is going on between him and God. But I know that I need to love him, just as he is. He is my friend. And that is what Jesus is calling me to do. And I think that we need to be willing to do that. And to accept people just the way they are in our journey. And that may be difficult at times. But it is something that needs to be done. It is a call that we all have to be present to those who are not like us. To love those who are different from us, as Jesus said.

And I know it is uncomfortable for us to be around sometimes, to be around people who have disabilities. We don’t know how to act. But we need to allow the Holy Spirit and His love to guide us into deeper relationships with those.

As I shared the process of my own inner healing, I wanted to share with you some of the journey that has concerned my family. Some of you may remember when I first went to CFO, Christopher was a little boy. He was, I am not sure whether he was six or seven years old when he first went to the CFO. Maybe he was younger than that. But anyway, he fell off the stage at La Honda.

And Cliff Custer and I don’t know if some of you may have been there and remember that. And he broke his arm. This was in the middle of a CFO meeting and we are all talking about healing and everything. And then I hear Christopher falls off the stage and breaks his arm. And here is this little boy in all this pain, you know. And here I am, a father, experiencing all this anguish about Christopher having this pain.

And Cliff and I, Cliff Custer and I, went over and laid hands on him. We prayed and nothing happened. And so we got into a car or station wagon that somebody else offered to us and drove down to the hospital. And Christopher had to have his arms set and he was brave during all of this. And it was a sort of an excruciating experience. And for me, and I was angry at God for allowing this to happen in the midst of, here is all this religious stuff happening. And I got real angry.

And I want to share with you something that is not new. It comes, it has its basis in grieving, the understanding of the five stages of grieving, but also has its association with forgiveness and our own ability to deal with life as it comes to us. But there is in our life experience a denial stage to some extent that we pretend, we pretend when we are hurt that it doesn’t hurt or that something has happened to us that it didn’t hurt us.

I think that that is followed by anger. Some people move through the denial stage into the anger stage really quickly as I did in my feelings about God. I denied, I began by denying the fact that this could even happen in this situation, and then moved into anger with God, and then started to blame God, and blame the young people who were standing around Christopher, who had been a part of the situation where he fell off the stage.

And then I went into a bargaining stage. And that bargaining stage usually in our confrontation with the life crisis, usually is a place where we demand that others change before we forgive them. And that is what I did with the kids and with God. I wanted God to change the situation, and I wanted those children who had been a part of the incident to repent and to tell me they were sorry, because I was angry at them and at God.

And then there is the fourth stage, which is the depression or regret stage, where we start to get angry at ourselves for even thinking those thoughts. And then we start to condemn ourselves. We blame ourselves. And then there is the fifth stage, which is the acceptance stage, where we forgive not only ourselves but the others involved in the… and open ourselves up to God again and accept God and His love. And we learn in that situation. And we learn how to accept what life has for us and to say yes to life’s realities. And life sometimes doesn’t give us what we want.

And we have to learn to say yes to that. And that is a part of growing up. And in the midst of these kinds of struggles, what happens is that God also gives us some experiences that help us to go through these difficult times. Later on in Christopher’s life, I was… when I was a priest in Oakland, we were… I was taking Christopher to school. There was a Christian school. Christopher was in the back of the car with some other young people his age. I’m not sure what grade it was. But they were discussing whether they believed in God or not.

And I heard Christopher say to one of the children in the car, he said, “I don’t know, I… you know, I think I believe in Jesus because… I know that… there was a person in history named Jesus. And so I believe in Jesus, but I’m not sure I believe in God. I’ve never seen God. I don’t understand God. You know, it’s too big a concept for me.” And here I’m… a priest in church, and I’m supposed to have a family that believes in God, you know. And so we’re gonna set an example for the rest of the community. And here’s my son saying, “Oh, I don’t know if I believe in God. I’m not sure about all that stuff. You know, that stuff may not be real, you know. And I’m not sure that it’s… it’s not all a bunch of…

“Conceptual thought stuff that… I don’t think it’s even necessary.” He wasn’t very old, and I thought that was a pretty profound way to articulate what was going on inside of him. But it bothered me, you know, in the car. And the Spirit told me not to say anything at the time.

And I think that… it began to bother me that my son, who I had taught the Lord’s Prayer to, was denying God. And so I decided, though, at that point, led by the Spirit, to trust in the Spirit in him, that he would work through that.

Although that I was tempted to want to say, “Oh, Christopher, you believe in God, and this is why…” and convince him that God was real. But I knew that he wouldn’t be able to hear it from me. I really heard that from the Lord, that it wasn’t something that I could teach him, but that God could teach him, and that life would teach him. And that I needed to trust that life is the teacher of us all.

So, later on, and then several years later, not having dealt with this directly, although in our house we prayed together and did things together, I never asked Christopher directly whether he believed in God. And one day at breakfast, I took the risk.

Whenever I tell the story, it embarrasses Christopher a little bit, and he’s sitting back there, but I think he understands why I tell the story. I said, “Christopher, do you believe in God?” He says, “Oh, yeah. I believe in God.” And I said, “You do?” He said, “Great.” I said, “Tell me…

“How you believe in God? What enables you to believe that God is real?” He says, “Oh, I talk to Him all the time.” And I said, “You do?” I said, “Tell me about it.” He says, “I even see Him. I have visions. I see Him.” He said, “Sometimes when I’m lying in my bed and praying, I look up, and God appears to me. I see Him.

“He appears to me in different colored robes.” I said, “Well, tell me about one of these experiences.” He said, “You know, one day…” He said, “You had accused me of doing something that I hadn’t done. And I was angry at you.”

He said, “So when I was up in my bed,” he said, “I was praying to God, and God appeared to me. And He had an orange robe, and in the middle of His chest was this bright sun, and the sun was shining out of the center of Him. And I told Him what my problem was, and He said that I should forgive you.”

And then he said to me, he said, “You know, Christopher,” He said, “tomorrow morning, your face will be shining like the sun.” And Christopher said to himself, he said, “You know, what I thought was going to happen is that because I had forgiven you, I would just feel good inside. I’d feel better because I had forgiven you.” He said, “But the next day when I woke up, and I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror,” he said, “you know, my face was shining like the sun.”

And I said, “How wonderful, you know,” here’s God teaching him directly in the Spirit about forgiveness. And I thought back, and I said, “But yet, you know, something had happened early in my relationship with Christopher. And I don’t know if he remembers this, but one day, when he was very young…

I had been angry at him and spanked him, and had been manifesting some of that behavior that was the unconscious behavior that I talked about, that was in relationship to the healing that I needed, the trauma that goes back to… that went back to my anger with my father. And that was just being manifested and directed towards Christopher.

And I knew that something was wrong with that. And this had been going on for quite a while. And so one day, after having been at a CFO, in fact, and writing a letter to Christopher asking for forgiveness at a creative…

Writing session, I went to Christopher and I said… Christopher… I said… I knelt down in front of him and I said, “Would you pray for me? Would you lay your hands on me and pray for me? I need your forgiveness. Because I’ve been angry at you, and that anger was not just anger, it was not righteous anger. And I’ve been projecting this stuff on you that I’m not even in control of. And I need your forgiveness.”

And at that time Christopher laid his hands on me and he prayed and said, “Jesus, please forgive my father.” And he started to cry. And I felt that he understood at that point what forgiveness was. I think it’s really important for us to be able to humble ourselves before our children as well as before our adults. And I think that we think that we need to be in control of our families. But I think that we need to understand that the Holy Spirit and that Jesus needs to be in control. And that we need to be honest and expose ourselves. And I think that’s part of that process of growing, is a process of being… coming more vulnerable to everyone around us. To exposing who we really are. Being honest about who we really are to everyone, including our children. Because it sets them free. It sets them free to grow and to have the visions that Christopher was unable to have at a later stage in his life.

I want to share one more of those visions with you, because I think it’s a fun one. He said, one day when he was praying that God appeared to him, and He was sitting on a stool, a little wooden stool, and He had this wonderful bright colored robe.

And Christopher said to Him, he said, “Why are you sitting on that stool? What is that stool?” And God said to him, “This is My throne.” He said, “The stool is Your throne? I didn’t expect Your throne to look like a wooden stool, a common wooden stool.” And God said to him, “They didn’t expect Me to ride into Jerusalem on an ass either.”

But he had quite a number of those kinds of experiences, and I’m sure that in a lot of different ways they have been formed his life. One of the reasons I also believe that he has him… is because Joy and I have been very open about that spiritual reality is real. You can have visions and experiences like that.

One of the experiences that I had after I received the Holy Spirit, that he has heard me talk about, was the experience that enabled me to understand that the visions and dreams and visions that I was experiencing on drugs were available in the Christian walk.

And that it was by… it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that those things can come to us. And most of the visions and spiritual experiences that we have come to us because we need them. They’re based on our need. They’re not so that we can say to other people, “I’ve had a vision, and I’m a holy person,” or “I’m special because I’ve had a vision.” It’s not so that we can elevate ourselves above others. None of the healings that come in our life are for that purpose. They’re because we have a need, and God is willing to meet that need.

I want to relate to you this experience before I end. This happened when I was praying in the commune, the Christian commune in Oregon. And I was praying to Jesus. And I think I just finished saying the Lord’s Prayer. I was praying there, and in the midst of this deep prayer time that I had every day, I prayed for long periods of time in the commune alone, an angelic figure reached down and grabbed my hand from the spiritual realm and pulled me from the physical realm into the spiritual realm, and I could see myself. I was out of my body, and I could see myself sitting and praying.

And this figure of light said that it was going to take me on a journey. It was going to show me the beginning of creation. And so I went with this… This figure, this person of light, because I couldn’t see any distinct features. I knew that it was a human being or it was a human person in human form, but it was just so bright that I could barely look at him. And this angel, or whoever he was, took me to a time and place before time and before space or the time and space continuum even existed. It was the Alpha of all creation. And I saw God, and it’s very difficult to describe because I can’t really describe what I saw. I can just tell you in words that I saw God, and I saw out of God’s heart, His love. It was like light, a tremendous light that was warm and filled with this love that I had… was incomprehensible to me. But I just was awed by this love. And out of this love shot these sparks of other light. And out of these sparks, these little sparks of light, these little sparks of light became human souls or souls and spirits.

Now, I’m not sure this is what reality is like in the spiritual realm. I’m just trying to describe to you what I saw. And I saw my own soul created. And I saw Jesus chosen from the beginning of time to do what He had done. To do what He was called to do by God. And I saw the sons and daughters of God shout for joy at the creation.

And then I saw those who chose to be with God stay with God. And I saw some fall away from God. And I saw my own soul fall away from God. And then I found myself alone in darkness. And then I saw that all the things that I had done in my experience, in my life’s experience leading up to this particular time, when I was having this experience of this vision, I saw all those things, all the times that I… all the painting and all the sculpture, all the papers I had written, I saw all of those things as drawing people to me rather than as giving glory to God. I saw everything, all those experiences. I saw the drug experiences as being experiences that were not of God in His fullness.

Everything leading up to this point. Not that I didn’t learn from those experiences, but I saw them as not being His light in the fullness of His light. And there I was in darkness, and I saw how much I had hurt people, and how much pain I had contributed to in my life, and unconsciously had hurt people, and myself.

And then in the distance I saw a light, and I saw a little light in this darkness, and I said, “Oh God,” and that light came closer, and then it was larger, and I could feel the warmth and the love coming from that light. And I said, “My Lord and my God.” And that light came and entered into me. And I experienced another conversion, another renewal of myself, an understanding of God’s love in my life. And I was in this room in the commune and I got up because I felt such joy and such acceptance, love and acceptance again, as I had when I received the infilling of the Holy Spirit, that I got up and I started to dance for joy in the Spirit.

At this time, a bunch of people came into the room and they saw me dancing in the Spirit and praising God. And they thought I was crazy until I explained to them what had happened. But it was a wonderful experience of an experience that was brought on by the Holy Spirit rather than by the taking of drugs. And I understood then that I no longer needed the drugs to experience the reality of God. It was then that I was completely released from the addiction to the drugs.

Now, I just want to finish up with the fact that God’s love is all around us as we began with. And God is calling us all to become more than we are at the same time that He’s accepting us just where we are. And you know inside of you what it is that He’s calling you to work on, to deal with. And it’s my prayer, and I hope the prayer, and I think that’s the reason for CFOs, is so that we grow and we become closer to God. And so, as I end my time with you, I’d like to pray with you for that continued healing, for continued conversion, for the continued revelation of God’s love in your life. Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank You that You are bigger than we can possibly conceive even now, that Your love is greater and more magnificent than anything that we can possibly imagine. And that You are calling us to enter into that love more and more, to understand in a more wonderful and powerful way who You are, and what it’s like to live in the kingdom of love.

And I know, Lord, that You continue to work in our lives, and I pray that You continue to open us up to make us more vulnerable to life, so that life can teach us what You would have to teach us, so that we may grow and become the fully manifested sons and daughters of God, and share Your love, not only in life after death, but even now. Lord, to share Your love in this world that is broken and in pain, to be present to those who need us to love, and to share Your healing and Your power. Set us all free, Lord, to be Your sons and daughters, and not just Your children. And we ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, the first fruit, the Son of God who came into this world to let us know Your nature and our nature.