Believe it or not

I have a confession to make. I believe in ghosts.

And if we are all to be sincerely honest, there aren’t a lot of people who don’t. But I’m going to be brave and admit it.

This admission comes from the novel I have just begun to write. A ghost story. A ghost story with a message – that God is bigger than we can possibly wrap our minds around and to assume that all we see is all there is significantly sells Him short.

I’ve definitely discovered this truth as I’ve started to research this ethereal subject. The more stories and experiences and yes, even proof, I examine, the more questions I have. The more unsure I am of what I even really believe.

Before I began this project, I was already something of a ghostie. As I recently mentioned, my favorite show growing up was X-files. I like to think about things unexplained, about what everybody scoffs at. But I had my ghostly belief system firmly in place. Seeing an apparition was a time rift. (My sister has a more colorful name for it, ask her if you dare.) Seeing something that happened in another time and place. The theology for this? God is not bound by time. When God sees us, He sees everything that ever happened, everyone that ever lived, every moment of every day of all of existence - all on the same level.

We are so much less powerful, our sphere of reality can only exist inside the time and place He has assigned us. (At least for now!) But due to the imperfect nature of our world, even time can get messed up. So you know that ghost you saw when you were a kid and never told anyone about because you didn’t want to be labeled as crazy? Well, it may have been someone from another time unknowingly peeking in on the present time in the same location. There have also been many reports of the opposite – of people who unknowingly momentarily stepped back into time – becoming the ghost on unsuspecting citizens of the past.

Before the skeptics take aim at my sanity, think about all the proof there is of this phenomena. Pictures taken in old places with lots of history that unexplainably present you with something you can’t explain away – a shadow that shouldn’t be there, a mist that envelopes the smiling face of your loved one, a blurry face of someone you don’t recognize peeking over their shoulder. In the past we blamed this on film and exposure. Now with the rise of digital photography, there aren’t a lot of excuses left.

Next, how else do we explain the noises you blame on your imagination in the middle of the night? How else do we explain the sound of children laughing where there are none, the sound of crying or tapping or bumping of furniture, of footsteps falling heavy upon stairs that are vacant?

Now we move more into conjecture than fact. These things do happen. And I believe a time rift has been all but proven for a good number of these experiences. Why? What makes some events in history so memorable that they must replay over and over again with unrelenting energy? My theory (not just my own, but the one I subscribe to at this moment) is that unrestrained, intense emotional events, whether positive or negative, can leave a sort of imprint on time. Which is why so many ghost stories herald wailing women and murderous crimes and crying children or babies. Which is probably part of the reason why we fear them, even though common sense tells us they will not harm us. I also think that our own intense emotional times might open us up to these strangers who share our experiences. To see what we otherwise would not be able to see.

But since I began this journey into the world of the paranormal, I have let go some of my former assumptions. I used to think that any entity that interacted with us was demonic. And there is plenty of evidence of the dark side of the spirit world manifesting in this way. But if we haven’t been trying to conjure the dead or worship the devil or any sort of activity such as this, and there is an event where a ghostly voice is heard on a recorder answering questions or is seen moving objects or turning electrical devices on and off, what proof is there of evil?

This is where I’ll lose some people. And that’s okay. I’m writing this more to organize my thoughts than to convince the world of the other worlds that exist just out of our realm of vision. When you read my novel, then I’ll convince you. Right now I’m posing possibilities. And what if one of those possibilities is that the dead are able to communicate, once in awhile, with the living? What proof do we the living have of what death is like?

This is where your assumptions, traditions and accepted social ideas kick in. Even as a Christian, you’ve been taught certain passages of the Bible mean certain things. Even more, you’ve been taught to ignore the evidence in the Bible of the other two worlds that exist – of other times, and of the spirit world, both demonic, angelic and Sheol – the realm of the dead.

I first site the passage in I Samuel 28, where Saul asks a witch to conjure up Samuel so he can ask him what to do. Yes, God said not to conjure up the dead. He’s against it. For reasons we don’t need to contemplate, we need to trust Him, and probably have to do with our inability to discern between all the warring entities that are involved in the spirit world. But this passage proves that it CAN be done. Samuel floated up out of the dust and lectured Saul about bothering his rest.

The second story in the Bible to take a good hard look at is the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Matthew remembers something very interesting about what happened the moment Jesus died. Something we gloss over or ignore. I’ve never heard a preacher mention it in any detail. It seems as Jesus gave up his spirit a whole lot of dead people got up and starting walking around, appearing to people. Was this different than the raising of Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. But it says they “appeared,” it doesn’t say they stuck around long term.

The other is a definition of ghosts that comes to us from Jesus himself, as remembered by someone who reported it to Luke. “Look at my hands and my feet… Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.”

So, Jesus seems to have believed that ghosts were real. In fact, so did all the Jewish people that grew up around the murky, haunted depths of the Sea of Galilee. It was said to be a portal to the world of the dead. Creepy.

My final piece of evidence comes from the exact same verse I’ve heard referenced my entire life to disprove that the dead can interact with the living. It finally hit me recently how illogical the leap really is. The verse is from 2 Corinthians “Absent from the body, present with the Lord.”

Okay, that’s a wonderful thought. And I am of course looking forward to that moment when I am finally with him. But why would this tell us that to die is to completely vacate? Isn’t the Lord here? And why do we have this vision of the afterlife being lightyears above our world? What verse claims that notion?

I do believe that those who are present with the Lord have better things to do with their time than play games with the living. But the sad fact is that not all the dead are with him. They are in holding pattern for a different fate. And they may have plenty of time on their hands, or even as the rich man begged Lazarus, want to warn the living of what is to come.

So that’s what I think so far. I’m not saying how I envision these things is how they are. I’m just saying.

Next time I’ll tell you my personal experiences that made me interested in these things in the first place.

One last thought to leave with you.... why do you think that you've never heard a ghost story featuring someone from the future? If time is imperfect, shouldn't we be seeing the folks with flying cars and vacations to Mars? Daniel and John did in the Bible. Why doesn't anyone anymore?

Think on that a few minutes and see what you come up with.