Visions?

I am not a visionary person by nature (however someone wants to explain that term), but I have had a handful of experiences in my life that defy logical explanation.

I wish I had more personal insight into them, but I don’t. All I can say is that I do believe there is something outside us and our understanding – that there is a reality behind some of these things that we just don’t understand and which I can’t dismiss as just psychosomatic.

Hey Brian,

I have had spiritual experiences but not ones that are unexplainable. I believe that some people in our church have attempted to quantify the spirit. This is so difficult because people inside and outside of our church experience the spirit at different times and ways that don’t really make much sense to our specific and ordered worldview.

One of the best things about this kind of experience is that it is an indicator that God is aware of you (if that’s how you choose to interpret it). The idea that this last vision just happened last week can be very affirming because it can serve to dispell that these visions/inspirations only happen when one is “worthy” or that “faith before the miracle.” If I understand you correctly, you have been grappling with doubt. That doesn’t appear to have changed God’s relationship with you. :thumbup:

Yes, Sam. And yet that makes it no less special and meanIngful to Brian to have such experiences, or as Roy points out, others have their own. It’s cool to see how God works with all His children…puzzling perhaps, but cool.

Thank you all for your responses.

But, from hearing what you are talking about, the struggle I see you needing to wrestle with is around certainty. You want the church to be all true or you don’t know what to believe.

Then, I realized, I could look at the other parts of the things I do still believe. I still believe there is a God. I believe teachings about love and service are helpful.

Yes. I think I am a product of my black and white upbringing. I have lost my all true world and it can be hard in a world of grey especially when my wife insists that it is black and white.

I think the church does good things and teaches good things as well. It is just hard to leave the other stuff when it’s forces on you. For example I don’t want to sing praise to the man, I have a hard time hearing what I think are preposterous things taught in church like the garden of Eden is in Missouri or that American Indians are descendants of Jews. So I don’t know the right way for me to be cafeteria with these things. Do I get up and leave? ( I so that when its really bad) Do I try to correct people? (only sinners don’t think the garden of Eden is in Missouri).

I have done quite well setting up boundaries between me and the church with regards to my time and what I will do, but I just feel way too unauthentic when I’m at church.

It might help your wife hear something you believe in.

Yes. She needs this. The problem is I don’t know what I believe. I don’t have a premade canned set of beliefs that I can give her that has an answer to everything. I usually just say I don’t know. This is hard for her because she does not have the stability she needs. It’s been a rough 2 years…

One of the best things about this kind of experience is that it is an indicator that God is aware of you (if that’s how you choose to interpret it). The idea that this last vision just happened last week can be very affirming because it can serve to dispell that these visions/inspirations only happen when one is “worthy” or that “faith before the miracle.” If I understand you correctly, you have been grappling with doubt. That doesn’t appear to have changed God’s relationship with you.

Yes I do hope it is God being aware of me, I just have this feeling in the back of my head that I don’t want to get fooled again… I am having a hard time believing in things again. I really hope there is a God. It is painful to think that there is not one. I think this experience has given me insight into why we have religion and why we believe in God (we being people as a whole). I think it’s a great defense against the unknown cetainty of death.

They happened while I was sleeping and when I awoke I followed the dream and everything was exactly as I saw.

Believe it or not, these happen to most people, although they prefer not to talk about it. They’re really quite common. But they happen as much outside Mormonism as in it.

Yes. I think they have to do with being human and not with being Mormon. Also I don’t think they have anything to do with “worthiness” (my opinion only).

I have had some very vivid dreams about my faith crisis lately and they haven’t been very pleasent. It really sucks to wake up one day and have to admit to yourself that maybe none of it is true, especially when you never really doubted before. It really turns your world upside down. I understand how most of us have had these feelings or impressions and at the time they seem so real and powerful but life happens and now we aren’t sure of hardly anything. I hate it and I struggle with it almost every day. It’s hard when your wife or husband or kids are looking to you for leadership when you are not sure what the hell to think. Some days I feel good about the cafeteria Mormon concept but other days I feel so lost and like I’m starting the whole faith crisis from the beginning. Is this fairly common of others that post here?

I have experienced those types of events: visions (while awake! not sleeping), dreams, promptings, dramatic answers to prayers, etc. I would consider myself fairly agnostic now.

I even had one of those really hard to explain “lost car keys” events a couple years ago at scout camp while fully doubting (and rolling my eyes while they were saying the prayer). I can not explain how the lost keys to a truck appeared dangling from the door immediately after the prayer. I was the last person there searching. I had checked many times around the truck. I had full view of the truck during the prayer and nobody was around it. I was the first person back over there, and was the one who found the keys mysteriously dangling from the passenger side door. It was bizarre and I can not explain it. It was extra funny because I had just been making fun of those types of prayers the week before volunteering to go to scout camp — why does God find lost keys for Mormons and not save starving children, etc.

I guess I am trying to balance these supernatural experiences with my logical engineer mind. Does anyone have any insight? Have any of you had experiences that seem unexplainable?

Here’s how I do it: These things happen. I have experienced them first hand. To me, it’s intellectually dishonest to pretend they don’t (this is just my opinion). But … I don’t know what they are or what they mean. That’s the essence of being agnostic (or a skeptic) — suspending judgment. I think human beings have strange experiences. They seem to be uncommon, but not impossibly rare. So to me, it’s more meaningful to accept that they happen and wonder about them, than to poo-poo them and dismiss them as inconvenient brain electrical malfunctions. I instead accept what seems to me like a fascinating and very interesting aspect of humanity. It just is what it is. We are very creative and complex beings. I also don’t accept that we know so much about the universe and reality as to have all the answers wrapped up in a nice neat box with a bow.

I don’t take the same meaning from them anymore though. I see them as interesting, mostly. I don’t see them as being attached to any particular set of dogmas or faith traditions. They aren’t necessarily, to me, an indication of “truth.” Everyone seems to have them. I feel they are a part of our vast and complex mind, much of which is outside our conscious focus and perhaps even outside the meat of our brain, and also perhaps acts as a gateway to perception and thoughts that stretch our limits (in a good and creative way).

Fwiw, brian, the LDS Church right now is the only true church for me – if I define “true” as in “true north” and “pointing in the right direction”. There is no other church I have found that actively points me toward the “destination” (“state of being”, in my own words) I want as my destination, no matter the messiness of the details caused by it being run by infallible, flawed mortals.