A BOOMING good Morning To 'Ya!

BOOMING is right...as in THUNDER BOOMING. I have always loved thunderstorms....not sure why but I really like them. I remember as a little boy, sleeping in what we called the "bunk room" of the old cottage here on Coldwater Lake when big thunderstorms moved through. The whole place shook. I pretended it was artillery fire and I was in a trench on the Western Front during the Great War.

I never really thought much about it until later in life when I was seeing a therapist in the late 1980's and had started talking about being sexually assaulted. She started asking about why a 4 and 5 year old boy was dreaming about being shelled on a WWI battlefield. Nobody in my immediate family had fought in the Great War except my Mum's Father (Maternal Grandfather) who died 10 years before I was born and adopted. No one really ever talked about him either so I didn't even know that about him until I was an adult.

This is where the notion that I had perhaps lived before (been reincarnated) really started to make sense to me because there were a LOT of un-explainable COINCIDENCES like this in my life. Later  when I had the opportunity to visit some of those Great War Battlefields, The Somme, Arras and Ypres in particular...I was already hauntingly familiar with the area, the terrain and even the tunnels at Arras. I felt really strange the entire time I was there, I knew where the trenches and outposts had been...both times I visited. The second time we visited we also went to the French Battlefield of Verdun...I did not feel the same way there. But wherever British or Common Wealth Troops (Canadian, Australia/New Zealand, South African, Newfoundland, etc) I felt it. A strange coincidence sure...but I have been fascinated with the British involvement in the Great War since I was a boy...not American involvement but British.

I used to dream all the time about being buried alive, a very common circumstance in that Trench/Dug-out and Artillery dominated War. I dreamed about rats and have a terrible phobia about them..rats lived by the millions on the Western front feeding on the tens of thousands of un-buried corpses. I dreamed about violence and combat so much as a boy that my parents had a sleep study done over night. Those who know me have always known about my interest in history and particularly military history.  What very few people have ever known about me was I naturally knew detailed infantry tactics but not those of modern day warfare. No they were the tactics and small unit movements (squad, platoon, Company) of trench/stationary warfare.

Where did all that come from? I don't know. What does it mean? To this day I do not know. I know that those beliefs about living before most certainly do not fit into a traditional Christian set of beliefs. This I do know. The cool thing about that though is this. When I became a Christian...I had a very concerned discussion with my friend (and Pastor) Shayne Looper of Lockwood Community Church and when I laid all my concerns/questions about this in front of him what he said really surprised me. He said not to worry about it now..let time help sort some of this out.

And that really made a difference for me because I thought I was going to get criticized by the church or made fun of. Basically his thinking is that we don't know all the secrets of GOD...who knows what this whole lifelong experience of mine really means but just because we don't understand it or have a quick/easy Biblical explanation for it doesn't mean it didn't happen or doesn't matter. It does...

This went a long way in making me feel accepted when I truly expected to feel like an outcast. That is pretty much the same position I have on the subject today and I feel OK about that. I stay open minded and yes I still have the dreams...just like I always have so we will have to just wait and see how this all turns out.

(Trench Remnants Newfoundland Park, The SOMME...France)