I have told this story here a couple of times.

I was raised a Christian. My folks were not that religious, but they felt we boys needed some church. We didn’t go every Sunday. Usually just a few times a year.

I have held a love for science since I was a kid. In college I had pretty much abandoned God for science. I felt that there could be a creator of the universe, but I saw no evidence. And as far as life-after-death, I didn’t see how it was possible.

And so I stayed like this until Christmas of 2000. On that day, my grandmother died at 79 of a heart attack. I was very close to her. She was a strong Christian, who had gotten to see the Holy Lands and even taught Sunday School in the Holy Lands. She even gave me a Bible she got in Jerusalem, with an olive wood cover.

We got back from the hospital, tired and emotionally drained. I was getting ready for bed when I heard my wife scream. I ran into the den to find her pointing at a toy car my 2-year-old son had gotten for a present that morning. She was telling me it moved on its own when she tried to pick it up.

One thing you must know about my wife and her family is the weird supernatural stories they have to tell. They have a group family picture with her grandmother in it, except her grandmother had been dead for a couple of years, when the picture was taken. She has a cousin who committed suicide at 18 (Over a girl) and they can’t keep the house rented because he chases them out. Just last year, her brother saw a ghost in an old Galveston hotel. Stuff like that.

My wife seems to have a strong connection with the spiritual world. She has a hard time going into cemeteries for spirits seem to seek her out. It is very weird.

Now I didn’t believe any of this stuff until that Christmas night of 2000. I had never had any supernatural experiences. I thought people who believed that stuff were crazy, and I had given my wife a lot of grief over her families stories.

Anyway, she went to pick up the car again and it shot across the floor before she could touch it. I didn’t believe what I just saw. She tried again and the same thing. My scientific mind tried to come up with a logical explanation, but I couldn’t. My scientific mind was getting stretched in a way it hadn’t before.

After that, as my wife walked through the house, the lights around her would dim. The air around her was cold. It was eerie.

My grandmother was going to be buried in Texarkana, but there was an ice storm going on at the time, so we had to wait for 2 weeks. During those two weeks all kinds of weird stuff was going on. Things moving, stuff like that.

My grandmother had been close to my son. He had this little wind up lamb that played Jesus Loves me.

My wife and I were in bed when we heard the little lamb being wound up (crank, crank, crank…) We looked at each other and jumped out of bed. The lamb was sitting on my son’s dresser playing Jesus Loves Me. My son was across the room fast asleep in his crib.

Once we had the funeral, all the weird stuff stopped, until a year later.

My son had just turned three. I was walking past his room one night to go to bed, when I saw him sitting up in his bed and talking to someone in the corner. I stepped into the room and looked around. I asked him who he was talking to and he said his grandmother. The hair stood on the back of my neck as I got a picture of my mom and grandmother. I pointed to my mom in the picture and asked, “This grandmother.” He said no, and pointed at my grandmother.

For several nights he talked to her.

My scientific mind struggled with all of this. Then I realized my science is for dealing with this physical universe and the laws that govern it. Things beyond are outside of my science’s reach. So God and the after-life can exist and not violate my science, for they exist outside of my science’s realm and do not necessarily follow its physical laws.

I realized that there was more to us than our physical existence. And there is something outside our universe. My mind had taken a great step. It wasn’t any easy step, but it opened my eyes.

There is a line in a song by the group Rush I really like;
“We sometimes catch a window. A glimpse of what's beyond”

I got that glimpse once.