This article is going to blow your mind and hopefully give you some faith…or at the very least, perhaps it will make you think and wonder if there’s not something more out there than what we currently understand through our current level of science.

Part I: The Prince of Peace

Akiane’s painting of Jesus painted when she was only 8 years old.

Have you ever heard the story of Akiane’s Jesus?  Here’s a synopsis of the story:

“Akiane (is the name of a little girl whose) name måeans ocean in Lithuanian.  She and her siblings were homeschooled for the most part and they had no television and few books, so when she began telling her family about seeing visions at age four, they were fairly certain what she was experiencing was not a result of outside influences.

Akiane began to sketch and write poetry at age four, advanced to painting at six and writing poetry at seven. Her first completed self-portrait sold for $10,000. A large portion of the money generated from art sales is donated by Kramarik to charities. According to Akiane, her art is inspired by her visions of heaven and her personal connection with God. “I am a self-taught painter,” she told Children’s Digest. “God is my teacher.”

Akiane explained to her family that God gave her the visions and abilities to create her artwork and poetry, which must have come as quite a shock since both her parents were atheists at the time Akiane’s painting of Jesus painted when she was only 8 years old.. They later converted to Christianity on account of Kramarik’s paintings and visions. More than art was happening in their home. “Simultaneous with art was a spiritual awakening,” Akiane’s mother, Forelli Kramarik, told Christianity Today. “It all began to happen when she started to share her dreams and visions.”

You can read the entire incredible story here.

Part II:  Heaven is for Real

There was this little boy from Nebraska who had a near death experience and his dad wrote a book called: “Heaven is for real.”  This what happened.  When that little boy had his near death experience his parents started to notice that he’d talk about things that they knew he had never been taught or been exposed to……he was only 3 years, 10 months old.  Little by little his parents realized that he had some kind of heavenly visitation or experience and had seen Jesus.  So every time the little boy’s parents would see a painting of Jesus they’d ask him  “is this what Jesus looked like?”.  Over and over and over again he would say no, no, no….a hundred times he said NO that’s not what Jesus looked like.  Then they showed him the picture of “Akiane’s Jesus” and didn’t tell him where it came from and he said YES, that’s what Jesus looked like.  (By the way, this book has been made into a movie that was released in 2014).

Part III: Can Science Prove Christianity?

The History Channel did a piece last year about the Shroud of Turin….The History Channel and a group of scientists that specialized in developing software that was developed to create

This is the digitally created image that resulted from the analysis of the Shroud.

3D images out of 2D surfaces (such as photos taken of planetary bodies) studied the Shroud of Turin.  They used a photograph of the Shroud of Turn and ran it through this highly specialized software developed by the Air Force and Nasa.  They discovered that the photo of the Shroud of Turin was completely unique and different than any other photo they had ever examined.  They said that the photo looks the way it does because it’s not a 2d picture….but rather it’s the data needed to create a 3d image and so they used the 3d data from the image and created a 3d computer generated image of the man who was covered by the shroud.  (incidentally they said they discovered that the image on the shroud was NOT created with a liquid or paint because of the way that the image sits on top of the threads and they believed that the image was made from some kind of light).  They took every aspect of the event and shroud into consideration and even analyzed how the cloth would have laid on the face of “the crucified person”, etc.   This is the 3D image that they came up with:

OK now look at them next to each other:

The image on the left is is the digitally created image that resulted from the analysis of the Shroud; the image on the right is Akain’s painting of Jesus.

The only difference I see is the color of the eyes and the History Channel scientists were just guessing at the eye color, since that info wasn’t extractable from the Shroud.

Why is it so hard for people to accept the possibility that there’s something more “out there” than what we can prove with Newtonian Physics?  Whoever you are….you don’t have to believe 100%….just try to open the doors to your heart and let in a little bit of “possibility” in from the other side.

Please follow me and if you want to talk to me post a note…..I would be more than happy to discuss this issue with you.  Thank you and God bless you,  Emily

I could talk all day on the subject of pain and fear – because unfortunately I’ve become intimately aware of the former and often found myself fighting against the latter.  Fear and Hate and Anger and the resulting pain is very pervasive in the world we live in.  If you turn on the TV, you are inundated by negative stories that could put even Gandhi in a bad mood.  Despite all that negativity, I DO see beauty wherever I look.  Even when a terrible thing happens, I still see love in it’s wake. I thank GOD for that perspective.  After the Boston Marathon Bomb – passers by were the first to help & comfort the hurt and dying.   EMT’s rushed in to stabilize victims and hospital personnel practically killed themselves working non-stop shifts just to save people’s lives.  Often when something bad happens, people come together to help one another displaying incredible selflessness. And even in humanity’s darkest moments….there is still GOOD in the world.

Fear & negativity don’t get you anywhere, by the way.  I admit that there are many negative things in life that can induce fear – the ideas of death, destitution, hunger,anger, rejection, unrequited love, failure, loss, separation, pain and illness are enough to turn anyone into a Scrooge.  Yes life can deliver some awful things – and most of those things are scary as hell.  For that reason I want to focus on the things that heal and mend and lift us up a little bit each day.

A few years ago I was working on the “V-Chip”project and was contacted by the office of the Vice President (which at the time was Al Gore).  They wanted me and my father (an incredible entrepreneur & inventor named Andrew Andros) to demonstrate a product we had been working on that would give parents the ability to control the amount of violent and perverse TV shows that their children had access to  (something we take for granted now, but there actually was a time when this wasn’t an option).  My father later testified about Violence in the Media before the Senate Commerce Committee.  At that time people were starting to wonder if children were being influenced by violent images in the media.  To bring our product to market (the “TV Guardian”) I did a great deal of research on the subject and found that the images we see DO influence our bodies in very much the same way as the food we ingest.  Think of it this way….if you wake in the morning and eat a bag of salty corn chips….and did the same for lunch and then for dinner…..How do you think you’d feel?  How healthy would you be?  The things we eat  influence how healthy we are.  BUT do the things we SEE influence how we feel and think?  Unless you’re a sociopath I’m sure the last scary movie you saw scared the hell out of you.  When the body senses fear a whole series of chemicals are released in the body to prepare us for fight or flight.  OF COURSE if you consistently ingest negative images (scenes of hurt and anger and fear and greed)you are going to influence your own body chemistry in the same way.  There’s a great deal of research out there that talks about how stress affects the human body.  There are also studies that support the idea that what we THINK influences what we are and how we feel.  If you don’t believe me, read my blog posting called “Messages from water & beyond“. With that in mind try to take some extra time each day to look for the beauty and joy in life…..heal your heart by stopping to smell a flower or snuggling with and loving your children or pets.  Think about the people out there that volunteer to help the homeless or people who sacrifice their lives caring for the sick and helpless.  Love and hope and joy ARE out there.  Surround yourself with beautiful art, music, laughter, joyous people and all the things in life that heal us.

I want to remind your heart….your inner child…about something.  I think we all had a sort of wisdom about truth when we were younger and as life goes on that truth gets fainter and fainter each day.  We forget where we came from and as the world loads us up with all the reasons to be afraid, we have to make a point to reach up….to look up and seek the hand of God and rediscover that we’re not alone.  We have to remember that the glue that holds the whole big universe together is love; and nothing is more important than love.

I don’t understand any more than anyone why bad things happen to good people, but I do believe with all my heart that there IS a creative designer and that He sent us here to live these human lives to learn something – to seek and rediscover love in all its different forms.  God does exist and there’s more to life than the years between our physical birth and death.  Jesus promised us this and science is discovering proof of this more and more each day.  Knowing that death is not the end helps us to trudge through the muck. Knowing that we will some day be reunited with those we’ve loved and lost and knowing that we’ll reunite with the one central love of GOD, puts all the pain in perspective.  Think about it – if you KNEW for sure that there was life after death and that “death” wasn’t really the end…..but rather some incredible, beautiful, enlightened and brilliant new beginning…a gateway into the divine…..then that would help us to put death into a different light.  It doesn’t do a whole lot for the suffering part, but the death part really becomes way more tolerable.  That’s why I thank God for the perspective He gave me…..it’s a great gift just to be able to see the beauty (but that doesn’t mean you can’t develop that skill, either).  I realize this is a stretch but it does remind me of all the highly over publicized court cases that are beaten to a pulp in the media.  People are frequently bitching because “so and so wasn’t convicted of that crime.” And then the media finally releases one last little tid bit of information that makes sense out of everything…..and we all collectively say “OH well why didn’t they just tell us that?”

For some reason GOD has veiled our minds and hearts from the truth about death.  Yes, He’s thrown us a bone here and there, but He’s essentially mandated that we live our lives in a sort of amnesia.  He’s set things up so that we live our lives blinded from the truth for the most part, in a sort of “life long test” to see if “unaided” we can find love & truth.  I still believe (with all my heart) that someday the veil will be lifted and we’ll all collectively say “OH, well why didn’t You just tell us that?” (but by then we’ll be so thrilled that we’re enveloped in the love of God that we’ll most likely be speechless and in awe of God and completely unable and unwilling to bitch about anything at all).

Meanwhile…..we live and laugh and cry….and we seek and love and listen and we do what we can to uncover the truth from the heap of “life” that truth is hidden under.  I hope that just thinking about….and knowing that the good is out there helps you to find it in your own life.   I may not know you but I know you’re out there…..and I’m sending love your way.

If you find anything of interest here, won’t you please feel free to talk to me about it?  I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than talk to YOU about what you think.

Have you ever woken up after a long period of time only to realize that you’ve been in a rut?  You’re in a  hideous feedback loop of doing the same thing over and over and over again?  If you haven’t….you might want to reexamine your self and your life, because this is something that most of us do.  As most of my intellectual readers know…..Einstein said that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  If you say to yourself, “every time I ask the kids to do the chores they don’t do them” or “Every time I say something my wife (or husband) she/he gets mad at me”  or “Every time I order at a restaurant they get the order wrong.”  For now I am not going to talk about the REASONS these things keep happening in your life as much as I am going to talk about the fact that they do happen.

My current favorite author (Martha Beck) says that sometimes in order to change we have to go through “The ring of fire”.  The ring of fire is any trial or tribulation that we’d rather live without…..but sometimes (or most of the time) when we experience something dramatic we come out on the other side of the trauma (or the other side of the “new experience”) with a new perspective or a new plan for our life.  If you find yourself stuck in a feedback loop in life, try doing something totally different…something you’ve never done before or haven’t done for a very long time.  If you are a mild-mannered house wife, take a trip by yourself to Paris.  If you’re a scientist or doctor….learn to paint.  If you’re a “dare-devil”, learn to meditate.  If you’re a graphic designer, read a book about quantum physics (I’d highly recommend “The Dancing Wu Li Masters” by Gary Zukav).

It doesn’t matter WHAT you do, but just DO SOMETHING that’s the opposite of what you normally do….something that’s not necessarily comfortable for you to do.  Do something to break yourself out of your shell of security and procrastination.  By the way….I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out, I’m just telling you about things that I’ve discovered along the way that I think have value to us as human beings.  You CAN change your life.  You CAN fulfill your dreams; and by the way, to do that you have to HAVE some dreams to begin with….if you’ve tossed your long forgotten dreams off to the side of an old dirt road, pull the car over and make up some new ones.  Start by thinking back on the things that fascinated you most when you were little.  Did you spend long hours outside staring at leaves & trees?  Did you get excited just thinking about your next tennis lesson?  Did you suck at all your classes EXCEPT creative writing?  Each of us has something (at least one thing but maybe more) that we’re good at…and those things are your first clue to the question “what SHOULD I be doing?”  If you’re stuck in a rut the likeliness is it’s not a rut where you’re doing the thing you love most in the world….rather it’s a rut made up of life’s responsibilities and other pressures that you have had to do at the expense of the things you were BORN to do.  To get out of the rut….dream up some new dreams, make sure they’re in line with what you love most (aka your “Gifts” or your “Destiny) and then start doing that thing….even if you can only do that thing one time a month.  Break out of the life you’re currently stuck in by taking just one little step in the direction of your destiny (aka God’s plan for you) and don’t get overwhelmed by the fact that 99.9% of the people, that you know and love think you’re crazy for even THINKING of doing those things.  That doesn’t matter (as long as you’re not hurting other people by seeking your destiny).  Just do SOMETHING….anything that helps you to break out of the rut you’re in and changes abruptly (and sometimes painfully) the direction you’re going.  You’ll come out of that depression you’re in or shake off that gloomy feeling you’ve been living with too long and at the same time all those chronic diseases that you’ve got that your doctors can’t even properly diagnose will start to disappear one by one.  Living your life free of the shackles of being in a rut and moving in the direction that jives with your destiny is the best way to start on the path to happiness.