Yesterday family, friends, and I are sitting just inside the dry sand on the beach of Waimea Bay. Quicksilver camera crews are hooked up and ready to film. It’s 6:00 a.m., an hour before sunrise.
It’s the Eddie Big Wave Surfing Competition, and we feel the mist of the white froth kiss our cheeks, and as we talk, we begin to see the waves and their turbulence rushing towards us. The waves are pounding the beach not 50 feet in front of us.
My daughter Hannah and I are ironically, not speaking about water, ocean, waves, or anything remotely wet. Somehow we get off into dreams-about-flying–where you are in the air, moving about without benefit of a flying-machine.
“You’ve had that dream?” she asks.
“Yes, several times. I have a recurring one where I’m lifting off silently and I’m gliding easy-like over a college campus.”
“You, too, Dad? I’ve had a dream sort of like that several times, but I never talk about it. You know, people would think I’m a nut or something.”
“You would be surprised at all the people with similar dreams. I’ve talked to many people who have had a dream where they are lighter than air and fly around. It’s pretty common. What was your dream like?” She’s becoming animated and her smile outshines the breaking light that now kisses the tops of the waves.
“I don’t know exactly how to talk about it. In the dream I raise up and have the sensation of staying just above my regular body. It is an incredibly beautiful feeling–no worries, no cares. I guess you’d call it levitating.” She laughs a little girl joy-laugh, free for now to confide in me something very precious to her.
“You’re not a kook,” I tell her. And now I’m smiling with a transcendent child-grin, as having shared in a most delicious complicity. “Hey, I turn around mid-air just by waving my hands like flippers.”
She laughs. “What do you think it means?” she asks.
“I think that it’s a preview of what is to come. God created us so that we would have these dreams. They are not nightmares or evil, so they can’t be from the dark side. And so I believe that He arranges for us to catch a whiff of how it would be to be immortal. The apostle Paul wrote in I Corinthians 15 about how our earthly bodies will be changed to spiritual bodies that cannot die. It sounds wild, but it’s there in black and white. So I think that it is a preview of a coming attraction.”
“Well, I know that it is real and true.”
“I wrote a poem about it. A heavenly being, a heavenly messenger, an angel, if you will, is speaking to us mortals about these dreams. I used it as the Prologue to my first book. Check it out when you get home.”
Anyway, the conversation shifted to waves, or rather to the lack of proper big waves to hold the competition. And so we all drifted back to our cars and went to get some breakfast.
Hannah will have looked up the poem by now, but I’m going to include it for you below, so you can have a chance to read it. Pleasant dreams…
The Message
And the heavenly messenger said,
Oh, there are eternal things
that you have inklings about.
Little things that come in the night,
while your head is on your pillow,
while your eyes shimmer
and dreams fly through your eyes, and you soar,
and your spirit for a moment is freed
from the earthy chains of flesh.
And you glimpse how it could be,
that wonderful, immortal feeling of lightness,
being that celestial that you are called to be.
You feel it at times, in your dreams and daydreams
of how it would be to not be human,
to not be restrained to the earth,
to seep up as a warm vapor into the light air,
lifting off and wheeling this way and that,
and breathing a life that is the essence and fount of all life,
breathing into eternal lungs that which breeds immortal thought.
Oh, you have had glimpses.
You have heard whispers from those
who guard you in the night,
from those who breathe into your ear
the precious seeds of immortality.
But then you awake to the bands of a fleshly prison
and soon hunger for things to stuff your face
and things to place your instrument of
eternal seed-bearing into.
You awake from your fine dream that we’ve given you
and then return to grovel in the lie
that you are only animal. Kenneth Wayne Hancock
{You can read my two books at my website yahwehisthesavior.com or you can read about them at Amazon.com. Just type my full name in quotes}
Immortality Road 