Back in 1999, when I was 19 years old, I was leaving my old job at Six Flags for the night when I looked up and saw an odd bright 'star' in the sky. The 'star' shot off in a spiral motion, then flew out into space at an incredible speed. I was dumbstruck. I had never in my life seen such a thing (and I'm sure most of you haven't either).
At that point in my life, I wasn't ready to see that - or so I thought. A friend of mine told me recently that she remembers me asking her if she had seen the light in the sky that night while leaving the park. I had forgotten that I asked her that - and in my previous blogs when I talked about that 'star', I stated that I didn't mention the event to anyone.
What I found interesting a few days ago while thinking about what I saw that night is that I didn't just come right out and say, "I saw a UFO". You see, I was struggling terribly with my sexuality because I was religious... Deeply religious and also very arrogant. And when the people flying that UFO saw it OK to fly it over my head, I struggled even more. It was just one more thing to hate about myself because I could never honestly say again, "There's no such thing as UFOs", and I could never comfortably say, "Everything in the universe was made for humanity", as I did before. Confusion overwhelmed me. I believed many things from the Bible - even to the point of me wanting to become a preacher, but I could just never hack that image of that moving 'star' out of my mind.
I simply wasn't about to tell a bunch of (religious) folk that I had been attracted to men for as long as I could remember, and I certainly wasn't about to tell them that I had seen a UFO (because UFOs imply intelligent life from another planet - and that was a bit too much for me to consider, even though I saw that UFO and its maneuvers with my own eyes). Fagginess and UFOs did not fit in with my mindset or beliefs at all. Even more, I never knew anyone personally who discussed such things - and I wasn't going to be the first one to bring these things up.
It would be another 7 years before I saw one of those spacecrafts again - but this time for a different reason and under different circumstances. I had stopped believing in nonsense. I had accepted the fact that I was gay, and I had accepted the fact that I saw that UFO back in 1999. I had no longer struggled with myself in that way, and I had no longer struggled with the idea of God - since I accepted the reality of what was going on around me and above me. In December 2005, I went looking for God - without any presumptions as to who or what God(s) is. I was then informed from above that there was one God, and in January 2006 I was informed from above to call God 'Yahweh'. Afterwards those spacecrafts began appearing over my head as often as I went outside at night - even around some of my closest friends. The spacecrafts, or rather the people flying them, had later become messengers of God to me to keep me on a level path, to inform me of the past, present and future concerning Yahweh, and to keep me safe. Goodness always follows me as long as I do good - kindness befriends me wherever I go as long as I am kind. The messengers are brothers and sisters who care for their younger sibling, they guide him in the ways that are right, and they keep him from harm. Yahweh is his mother who holds him by the hand, and She keeps all worries away from him, and She corrects him when he does wrong, so that he has perfect reasons to fear nothing but the One holding his hand.
Accepting reality is a beautiful thing, it is the only way to know God. If my oppressors came to me and chopped off my hands, how could I look up and say, "You love me"? If my disease takes me to death, how could I say to God, "You are my healer"? If my pain overwhelmed my body, how could I say to you, "God is good to me"? Accepting reality is a beautiful thing to do. If I came face to face with the man or woman who were honest about God, I would be as dumbstruck as I was when I saw that UFO all those years ago.
