Knowing the Unknowable

Every year I declare that I’m not going to watch the new season of MTV’s The Real World. Every year I fail…except for the Las Vegas seasons. Now, why the Las Vegas seasons? I have no idea. I loved Vegas when I went there, so that baffles me. Anyway, the latest season is in Sydney, Australia. I think the following is true: they allowed America to vote for who would make up the cast. Funny thing, America didn’t vote in any gay or bi people. MTV must have been shocked that the majority of Americans don’t think 1 out of 7 is a representative percentage. Good lord I’m talented at not getting to the point.

Okay, there is a man named Isaac on the show. He used to do acid when he was a teenager. He is off it now, but he has side effects that have stayed with him. I didn’t even know this about him until this last episode. Well something happened that got me thinking. He woke up one morning and said he saw a black bird. By “saw” he meant HE saw it and no one else could see it. He has visions occasionally which he attributes to having been on acid. He didn’t have the visions before he got into drugs. Anyway, he doesn’t talk about it because it obviously makes him look crazy. Well seeing the black bird wasn’t just a reminder of his past. He had seen a black bird before. Four times to be exact. Each time he saw the bird it was a sign that someone he knew died. So, to see the bird freaked him out. He called home and had someone call around for him. His mood changed dramatically. I don’t know if it was that day or the next, but someone from home called him and told him that his Grandpa had just died.

Now here is my question: how would an atheist explain that? The little I know about atheism teaches that there is no such thing as the spiritual world. Would it have to be chalked up as a 6th sense? Maybe that would avoid the spiritual route, but it seems that a 6th sense of knowledge would be mental. What I mean is that you would just know it. It wouldn’t require a bird flying in your mind. It wouldn’t need to communicate through signs. My way of viewing what happened to him is that the acid altered his brain in such a way that he can sometimes view parts of the spiritual world. I get that what I just wrote is pretty mystical and primitive, but there is something more to our world than just the physical. That is the part that the atheist would have a problem with.

Have you ever known something before it happened? I have, and the occasions range from the funny to weird to downright impossible. I don’t know what to think of this, but I have a funny example. Before I write it, I should preface it with this: I think this was probably just a weird coincidence.

When I was about 10 years old, I lived in Branford, Florida. After church one night, we had some people over. My mom was talking to one of the church members when she said something that I couldn’t understand. She said it in a weird way, so of course, I made fun of it by saying what I thought she said. So, I said, “Fred, the chickens are coming.” I didn’t just say it. I added an accent, and I kept repeating it over and over. Less than one week later we came home to find like 5 or 6 chickens in our yard. They hung around our yard for about a week. Never before and never since have I lived anywhere where a chicken came onto my property. I don’t know what to make of that. Like I said, it was probably just random coincidence.

For summer, I always came home from college. I tried to work every year. One year I came home and didn’t know where I wanted to work. I can’t remember which year this was. Anyway, I felt like I was being a bum by not working, so I decided I would go back to work at Southern Dunes. For whatever reason before I ever even went up there, I felt like I shouldn’t go. For some reason I felt a pull that that was not the place I should be at. I thought that that feeling didn’t make any sense, and I was just being lazy. One day I just forced myself into going up there to talk to my old bosses to see if I could work for just a couple months. It seemed like it would work out, but I needed to talk to a specific person who wasn’t there at that time. Later that night we had church. When I walked into the foyer of the church, a person standing in the foyer looked at me and said, “You shouldn’t have gone there.” I don’t remember what my response was, but I knew exactly what he/she was talking about. Now how did I know? Even more so, how did he/she know? Discernment is real. This person wasn’t psychic and neither am I. God tells us things sometimes that we could never know on our own. I think about that sometimes and wonder what the big deal was. Why was working at Southern Dunes, that summer, not a good idea? The only thing I can think of is that maybe I would have gotten into an accident. But you know, when you go down that road, you could just as easily say God could prevent the accident. I don’t know what that deal was about.

This past Sunday, my dad announced service for that night. By the end of the morning service, he said that he didn’t know why, but he felt like he shouldn’t have church that night. He doesn’t just call off church especially for no reason. The reason was “no reason” only in the sense that he didn’t understand it. The one telling him did.

I had another incident in my life where I knew something that was impossible to know. I’ve never told anyone, and I’m not about to here.

There is a spiritual world. There are things that are impossible to be known, by normal means, but can be known by the spiritual.