Shining Stars

Our websites all have the background of a dark sky full of stars.

There is a reason. Almost 33 years ago, right after I got out of the Navy, I moved back to East Texas where I had purchased a little home on Steinhagen Lake. My new life as a ‘civilian’ was just beginning. I was single, living down the road from my parents and my brother and his family. I was fixing up my little A-frame, painting it, putting carpet and new furniture in it, and trying to figure out what I was going to do. My home and car were paid off, so I was in no rush. But, I was by myself a lot of the time.

One night, after having slipped a bit in my walk [not much by most people’s standards, but enough to make me disappointed in myself, again], I was standing out in my back yard looking up at the starry sky. It was a beautiful, clear summer night. I was just wondering at the vastness of the universe. As a boy, science was never really my interest, but as I began to study the Bible at 22 years old, I had taken a new interest in the universe, mostly by subscribing to several science magazines, “Omni” being one of them. I was looking to see how much of the sky I could recognize, as living in the country now made it very easily viewable. I then began to wonder how far out there it was to get to God’s throne room, the ‘Seventh Heaven’. In thinking about the marvel that God could hear me, and that He took mind of me, I wondered if He was ‘looking down at me’ at that moment. I asked Him, just in my inner being, ‘What do You see when You look down at us?’

I did not ‘hear’ anything, but I ‘realized’ that He sees US, those of us who are His, as LIGHTS in the darkness, and that what I was seeing was very similar to His view of us, since He ‘sees’ also in the realm of the Spirit. I then wondered how bright my light is, worried a bit because of my recent lapse in judgement. Suddenly, my eyes fixated on one star, not the biggest, not the smallest, in the northern sky. It was as if He said, ‘there you are’…

I had never once in my life, at that point, seen a ‘shooting star’. So, I asked if I could see one. As fanciful as it may sound, immediately one shot through the northern sky, west to east, if I remember right, in the northern sky above ‘my’ star.

As simple a night as it was, it was burned into my memory, as I sit here nearly 33 years later having most of the details very clear in my mind. And it was that night that I went to bed and dreamed, if indeed a dream it was.

I was asleep in the loft of my little house. The sound of a shofar BLASTED, and I ascened through the roof of that little house. I was suspended in the dark night sky with all these other ‘lights’, glowing beings who had also just ascended. We were gathered in a circle in the air, surrounded by a ‘host’ of beings in a larger concentric circle around us, with one being in the center; I simply ‘knew’ that it was Yeshua.

He spoke to all of us in the circle:

“The time is near, but it is not yet: Go and tell them I am coming”.

And immediately I sat bolt upright in my bed, wide awake. I’ve often wondered if anyone else had the same dream?

At that time, I was in the midst of writing a fictional book about His return; I think I was about three or four chapters into the writing of it. I understood more than most people at my young age about prophecy. Admittedly, I had a lot to learn of the details and the means of studying them out, but I had a decent, basic understanding of what was going to come on the world. That ‘dream’ helped to motivate me to study, and to write. But, I met my wife, began a family, and started in a new career in SCADA, so it took another ten years before that book would be finished. That was 23 years ago.

I have been telling people ever since of the nearness of Yeshua’s return. [Another similar dream happened about three or four years later]. One year, in 1997, I was so hoping it would happen that year, and thought that it might. I told my closest friends; I called people whom I had left behind in the Navy and told them, simply because I wanted them to be part of those who escape the wrath of God. Most of them were honored that I reached out. Some of them mocked me. I get it. They mocked Noah, too.

I still believe Yeshua is coming back sooner than later. What I wish people understood is that when He takes His Bride away like a thief in the night, it is not going to be the disappearance of every person who confesses His Name. It will be the very few who obey Him by walking in His Halakha, His ‘Way”, the way He observed the Torah of God. It is going to be those most intimate with Him.

Yeshua effectively signed a “Ketubah”, a wedding contract, on the night of His last Passover Seder. He spoke of the Wedding Chamber, and told us that He would come and take those who partake of Him to be with Him there, in His Father’s house. {John 13-14} Only those who follow the Ketubah, the Written Word of God, will be His intimate Bride. Others who are ‘lukewarm’ will stand on the precipice of decision when it will be most terrible a decision to make. “If you have run with the footmen, and they have wearied you, then how can you compete with horses?” [Jer 12] In other words, if you cannot follow Yeshua while it is easy, how will you do so when the world is under the overt spell of the Adversary? Religious people walking in error will be the first to do obeisance to the False Messiah. They already are.

How near is His return? My human guess is that it is within a generation. It could be either the very near term, or another 50 years out. But it doesn’t matter: I will do as instructed and be a watchman on the wall, a herald of His Good News, and encourage people to live according to His Will. Because NO ONE knows the hour of their own death or demise. It is utter arrogance and folly to think that just because He is not ‘obvious’, that His plan is delayed. It is the utmost ignorance to think that God does not exist at all, and it is willful stupidity to deny Yeshua as the Risen Son of God and the Savior of those who do repentance and walk in His Way.

We are, all of us, indeed, supposed to be light in this dark world.

“From now on, my beloved, just as you have always been obedient … work out your own Salvation with reverence and trembling, that you may be sincere and blameless, like innocent sons of God in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world.” Phil 2:12

“And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn the many to righteousness, as the stars forever and ever.” Daniel 12:3

“Do not err, my beloved brethren: every good and perfect gift is from above, and comes down from My Father of Lights, with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of change.” James 1:16