The Wild Man

Today is the anniversary of the first time I saw Jesus.  This all started because two of my friends saw Him, and if they could see Him, then so could I (and therefore so can you).  I started letting Him know that I wanted to see Him, making myself available on a daily basis, and trying to see.  It wasn't working out so well.  I knew that it should be simple and that I was getting in my own way, but I didn't know how to try, but not try too hard.  I had been not trying for years and that hadn't got me anywhere.  Eventually my pestering and trying was starting to work.  I could see His form, or maybe His feet.  That was progress and no less His presence, but I kept on pushing for more.  Then I finally saw Him on the mountain.

First we need to back up as to what I was doing on the mountain.  Our town is situated around a mountain.  Town curves around the base and is bordered by two rivers.  It's geographically interesting. 

Anyway, several of us were having dreams and visions regarding this mountain, but we didn't quite have all the pieces together.  Then I woke up in the middle of the night and God spoke a very strange statement about Mt. Sinai.  I didn't understand so I said "What?"  He repeated Himself verbatim with no further explanation.  I heard but I didn't understand.  I wrote it down and went back to sleep.  Dropped it off at Mom's on the way to work, she didn't get it either.  She passed it to a friend who prayed and worked on it a couple hours.  He got a well-timed phone call from a guy he met at Bethel who said he had Googled Kooskia and that we have our own Mt Sinai.  "Ohhhhhhh!"

We had a meeting and decided maybe we oughta get up there and see what happens.  Three of us decide we're going up and we coordinated a time.  The day came and my friend had driven in from a town a few hours away to do the trek, and on her way in to town she noticed the sign "Welcome to Kooskia, Gateway to the Wilderness."  That didn't go over well with us as we did not want to get down from Mt Sinai and then go wander in the wilderness.  We got some bad advice as to how to best get up there, but we made it and we sat down on our trash bags in the wet grass and ate our lunch.

We had decided beforehand that we were going to pray over the town up there.  (We hadn't learned to just sit and wait, we had to be doing stuff.)  So we were praying for about an hour in tag team fashion when my friend hears that we're supposed to shut up and just receive.  Now I was having a tough time tuning in with other people around even more than I do now, so I was doing my best to block everything out, which for some reason entailed me having my hands over my eyes.  So I'm sitting on the ground and trying to hear, but instead I saw. 

I saw a form come around from behind us, (still have my hands over my eyes) and He stopped in front of me.  I knew exactly who it was and I didn't move a muscle.  I didn't want to screw anything up.  He crouched down in front of me, pryed my fingers away from my face and peered in at me.  Then I saw clearly.  All rational thinking ceased, I rocked forward and hugged Him.  Then I pulled back and just looked at Him some more.  It was Spirit to spirit communication, not even putting thoughts into words, just flowing understanding.  As long as I looked in His eyes, understanding could pass easily into me.  His eyes are not what you would think. They're amazing.  I'm not going to say too much because I want you to see for yourself and not think that I put something in your head.  I'll just say that He doesn't look like the pictures.  That was the day I fell totally totally in love with Him.  Not love in theory, or love out of obligation or love because of what I believe he did.  Love at first sight.

I noticed that in this setting He was very thin and looking a bit unkempt.  I had the impression that He had been up there fasting and interceding.  He was very happy we had came and it was like a burden had been lifted from Him.

I think everybody has their ideas about what they want to say to Jesus in a face to face, well don't bother because all that goes out the window in the moment.  I started communicating with words again because that's more familiar to me, not out loud, but forming words in my mind, like how you pray silently by "thinking at God."  I said "You look like a wild man."  He threw His head back and laughed "I am a wild man!  Wasn't that a wild party we had last night?"  He was referring to a particularly memorable meeting at Mom's the night before.

Afterwards I was kinda crying and my fellow hikers were looking at me and I knew if I kept it up I was going to have to explain.  Even though I was with safe people, I didn't tell anybody for awhile because I wanted to square away what just happened in my own mind before other people's opinions started complicating things.

Once I opened up to a couple people, they made me tell everybody.  It was brutal.  It seemed sort of heretical even, to see Jesus in that way.   Once I was prodded into telling a man that I had literally just shaken hands with twenty seconds before and didn't know at all, other than I had heard a lot about him and knew He was a prophet which made me all the more uncomfortable.  I really did not want to be put on the spot like that, I had come to hear him talk, not the other way around. But I sucked it up and got lost in the memory again.  He smiled at me with the second kindest eyes I have ever seen and said "You know that's scriptural right?  After Jesus' resurrection He appeared differently to several people."  Oh yeah!  So his reassurance really allowed me to own this vision and feel confident, and for weeks afterward all I could do is walk around thinking about how much He loves me and how much I love Him.  And now I can talk about it.  I'm not worried about what people think.  Most of them think it's really cool.  Some say I'm really blessed to have an experience like that.  I say it's for everybody.  The bible says if you seek Him with all your heart you will find Him, and the last couple years I've been finding out just how literally I can take the bible.