Are visions physical now or later?

Are Visions physical now or later?

“It will come to pass in the last days, God says, that I will pour out a portion of my spirit upon all flesh.  Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams.”  (Acts 2: 17).

A lot depends on what category we place a spiritual vision in.  By that I mean is it just a sight of something real but without being able to touch its essence?  Let’s look at different types of experiences one may have and then make a determination.  

As I wrote in my autobiography and adhered to it in a previous article was an incident during my infancy.  To some it may be just a hyper-bole or imagination as I was growing up.  The day was sunny and my mother was wheeling me in a baby carriage near my grandmother’s house in Wilkinsburg.  Since I was born in 1936 and was still an infant it probably was the same year.  As she strolled me up the sidewalk two neighborhood women stopped my mother to look at me.  It was then that I remembered being above them looking down at them.  This was never a dream, or thought later in life, but a recall to this out of body experience.  It took years to realize this and I couldn’t make up a story like this.

Later in life my wife and I visited with Lisa, a niece who was dying from a brain malady, probably cancer, and while sitting in her living room facing her, I saw standing behind her two angels.  What I visualized were a male and female.  The male had a beard of dark whiskers.  The vision lasted only seconds but made an imprint in my mind.  

At another time when my father died in the hospital I visited his room around 5 AM.  As I was standing viewing my father my eyes took in two persons standing a short distance away near the bed.  One was my father with a smile on his face and the angel was the same one who stood behind Lisa, same dark beard.  

While sitting at Marsh’s house while they were away on vacation in New Jersey, we got a phone call that Marsha had been rushed to a hospital with some type of malady.  Joan came out to the patio where I was sitting and told me to pray for Marsha.  I bowed my head and suddenly a vision appeared with a woman lying on a gurney with a man dressed in white facing her.  He placed his hand on her abdomen and some fluid came out of her.  The words to me were, “fear is useless, what is needed is trust.”   I immediately told Joan her daughter would be ok.  Once they got her home and to a Pittsburgh hospital the prognosis was all positive; no sign of the previous diagnosis.  Marsha was a nurse and saw the clipboard on her bed in New Jersey.  The diagnosis then was very serious. 

Putting all of these incidents into perspective we need to take each one and look at the manner it became visible and the individual players who were involved.  

Being in an out-of-body experience is possible in many places as recorded through medical history, but with an infant and the probability of my remembering this some years later places a question to validity.  Yet, I didn’t just produce this action as a way of making a point to something but the memory at some time became visible and the sequence of how it happened was very clear.  

Marsha’s experience was a healing that I had nothing to do with.  My vision simply took a tragic situation and allowed me to view the healing with a clear knowledge that some people pray for healings, and others are made privy to what occurred through other’s prayers.  It was the voice within that added another mantra to my vocabulary.

Looking at angels was a new experience and it happened as a feeling of hope that assured they do exist and can at any moment appear assuring the passage either to come soon, or happening as they guided the passing soul into heaven.  Both visions did exactly that for me.

I never doubted the presence of angels as I have had numerous accidents where I never was injured and felt the very direct touch of an angel moving me or keeping my physical body intact.   Getting to actually view them was a great opening to whom I will see sooner or later.  

Ralph B. Hathaway