The Day I Told It, “Go Away!”

Have you ever been just going through your day, doing nothing in particular, but then, everything changes? What was familiar, ordinary, suddenly shifts, becomes not exactly unfamiliar, yet is not what it should be. Shifted, off kilter a few degrees in a direction that you cannot name. Then, just as suddenly, snap, it is all normal, familiar again. Comfortable. Or, perhaps, instead you are doing something you have not done before, you are in a place that has never been graced by your presence, but in your head, you know exactly what is going to happen next, what words someone will speak, what action someone will take. Does that happen to you?

For years, both things happened to me.

I hated it. But it was what it was, I had no control over these happenings.

But there were worse things, at least from my perspective.

Things like seeing my Grandfather on his way out of here, mere moments after he died 300 miles away from where I was.

That event was a culmination of experiences over years, experiences of seeing that which wasn’t there, though not quite really seeing. Just flashes, momentary glimpses. But when I saw my grandfather, that was not just a fleeting experience of an unfamiliar shape in the dark. It was a full figured, fully speaking, conscious figure of a man, a man I knew very well, but who had just breathed his last a few moments before, far away from where I slept in Tennessee.

From that time forward, for several years, the annoying experiences of shifts in perspective, of degree, of knowing the immediate future, before it happened, of seeing fleeting figures in the dark, or even full light came more often, more confusing, particularly since I never again during that time experienced anything so real, so clear as seeing and speaking with my grandfather that morning in Tennessee.

Then one day, several years after my grandfather died, I could no longer stand the flux, the unsteadiness of life with all these, well, experiences. So, in my head, as I prepared to go to sleep one night, I said to myself, quite firmly, “No more of these things, no more seeing, no more hearing, that which is not there.” And then I slept, with no dreams of things to be, no experiencing of that which was not.

That night was nearly forty years ago. I remember how comfortable the next two decades were, of being so free of the flux, the snap, the shifts, the foresights.

But then, something happened, something not so comfortable. My wife, Alice, went home to the Lord, having bravely, with God-given grace and strength, fought the fight for life against the force of cancer.

I mourned Alice for a nearly a year, my life a chaotic, roller-coaster non-thrill ride through the space of infinite loss.

Then something snapped, not like that old kind of snap, because the world snapped, shifted, but it stayed put, calmed out in the new perspective. I could see clearly, I knew I needed a partner, someone like Alice, but not. This time, this time, I knew I needed children as well.

And so I prayed. And she appeared. My Yvonne. On the Internet, at a Christian match-making site.

And we were married.

All was good. All was well.

Except.

No one, no one had said to me, “Bradley, you do know, do you not, that she, your wife, Yvonne, has the Gift of Discernment.”

And so it began again. I was seeing that which was not there. I was hearing that which made no sound. There were beings that peeked from the family room into the living room. There were beasts that bounded across the family room at night. There were trolls that walked down two flights of stairs from the top floor to the ground floor, then disappeared. There were seven foot figures that walked out of our walls in broad daylight. There were entities dancing in shafts of light in our living room. There were children talking, laughing in our home. Children who were not there. There was a woman who was being followed, a woman, you understand, who was not there, but was, and was being followed, by someone, who also was not there.

Twenty-years now, of that which cannot be. But is.

You explain it.