*WARNING: This contains material which may be triggering to some*
I want to share another random memory about visions.
My family on my Mom’s side is 90% Pentecostal/Apostolic. They are big believers in visions and prophetic dreams. I shared in an earlier post about my Mom and her best friend informing me of a vision that I was going to be raped as a consequence of my rebellion of wanting to wear pants. Another time when I was 17, my great-grandmother told me she’d had a vision about me.
She almost cried as she told me, she was so disturbed by the content of her vision. She said that she saw me at a river, and I got pushed underwater by a tall man with blond hair. I thought she was about to relate a vision about baptism, but I was wrong.
She said that he never let me back up, he held me under the water for a long time and eventually let go and walked away. She didn’t see me surface. She said that the scene then changed and she saw people that looked like police officers carrying a stretcher out into the water. They reached into the water and put something on the stretcher. When the carried the stretcher out of the water, she saw that it was me, dead, on the stretcher. She described in detail how my clothes and hair were covered with river mud, moss, and “seaweed” type plants. She said my skin looked greenish gray. The vision ended there.
There were several members of my family around and they were immediately distressed after she shared this and started praying for my safety. By this point in my life, I was 17 and had left home in order to leave the Pentecostal religion (my parents told me that as long as I was under their roof I would be Pentecostal) and I knew that the rest of my family was thinking that this was a warning from God that I was going to die if I didn’t come back to the “church”.
My Great-Grandmother was not like my Mom. She didn’t focus on demons and punishment, and she is not normally a ‘sensationalist’ Christian. This caused me to take her ‘vision’ a little more seriously than I now viewed my Mom’s claims of divine revelation. I didn’t agree with my family that it was a message from God that I needed to be Pentecostal again, but I didn’t have an explanation for it of my own either.
17 years later I still don’t really know what to make of this memory. I can’t write it off as easily as other claims of visions because of the deep respect I have for my Great-Grandma. So far though, I’m still alive.
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Wow. Through the filter of LOVE instead of the filter of “fear”, I see it totally differently. I see it as confirmation that indeed, you are IN Christ, for you were crucified with Him. It is now not you who live, but CHRIST Who lives in you! Declaring the TRUTH and sharing the love and light of Christ with the world. Thank you for sharing this; we were speaking last night at a prayer meeting about how looking at things through the proper “filter” changes everything!
Wow! I am so sorry to read this. I thought I was the only one to go through this.
I was still in my mother’s house whom forbid me to move out, even though I was over 21. I wanted to go away to grad school, and we kept arguing about it. Also, she started patrolling my every move (counting how many times I used the restroom, how many times I combed my hair, etc.)
I finally decided that I would not go away to school, but drive a few hours over twice a week for a special program. She became angry about this too. All of a sudden, one day, she said that she had somethings important to tell me. She then described a vision, while crying. She said that she saw my bedroom suddenly turn as a funeral home. She then tearfully begged me to stop trying to go to grad school, stop planning to attend the program, and said that she would provide everything for me if I just stayed with her and prayed night and day. She then proceeded to count the number of times that I prayed in an obsessive manner, which made the next few weeks difficult.
I’m not saying that the visions are not true (I pray that they are not), but I find it strange that these visions suddenly come up when we try to get some autonomy in life.