Will You Draw Back The Curtain, Lord, And Show Us What Is Really Happening?

By E. H. McClary (Bubba)

In ancient Greek theater, the sound effects, music and singing, lights, shadows and the narration, or the “Voice of God” often came from behind the curtain at the back of the stage.  At the end of the play, “The Apocalypse”, the curtain was drawn back, to reveal what is really going on. This is where we get our word in the English:  Revelation.

I asked my friend, Ed King, one of the early warriors in the Jackson, Mississippi movement for civil rights, if he would let me convert one of his overhead presentations to a PowerPoint presentation for him so that he could concentrate more on the presentation and less on changing the overheads.  He sent a large folder of them and I began to scan them.

The very first slide was a photo taken from a textbook, shot of the Vietnam memorial in DC.  Ed was there, staying with his brother in Virginia for a while and he wanted – needed to see the memorial because the artist, Maya Ying Lin who created this memorial also created the design for the memorial fountain in Montgomery, Alabama, which lists names and death dates of those who died in the struggle for civil rights, just as the memorial in DC lists the names of those who died in the struggle to try to save the people of South Vietnam from communist domination.

The second slide was of the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery Alabama, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, also by Maya Ying Lin; same stone, same type face.

This Juxtaposition is striking for a number of reason and on many levels. The people of South Vietnam could have saved themselves from the communists of North Vietnam but they could never save themselves from the combined forces of the communists of the USSR and the PRC.

The people of Mississippi, Alabama, the rest of the south, could have ended the domination of Jim Crow, however they could never end the domination of Jim Crow powered by the hate of the KKK and all the other bigots in America, combined with the silent acquiesce of the rest of the American public.

Ed had also promised an old friend that while he was at the memorial he would make a charcoal impression of the name and death date of her son, a U.S. Marine who was killed in 1968, in an ambush near the border with North Vietnam. 

Ed was out one day and felt an intuition that he should go to the memorial and make the charcoal impression.

In the textbook photo there is a lady standing looking at the names as the photographer shot the picture and you can see her shadow as the afternoon sun shines on the memorial.  The Photographer is somewhere looking through the view finder of the camera, far enough away that he and the camera are not reflected in the glass-like surface of the memorial. Yet there appears to be another image in the surface of the memorial. The image is much too large to be the reflection of the small lady or even of the Photographer. The person who shot the picture would be looking down into the viewfinder of a 50 mm camera, or it could be the photographer if the image had a camera up to its face, which it does not.

This photo was not taken the day Ed was there, I only mention the presence of the extra image because I’ve been told by others they have seen similar phenomena and I don’t believe in coincidences.

After getting the impression Ed went home and that evening he called his old friend back home in Jackson to tell her he’d fulfilled the promise he’d made and had the charcoal impression he’d said he would make. She immediately began to cry and asked why he’d gone to take the impression today.  Ed said he was near there and had a sudden intuition he should do it lest he forget and come home without it, no particular reason other than that sudden feeling that he should and asked why are you crying and why do you ask?   “Today is, would have been my son’s fortieth birthday”

The Sun is 93 million miles away. Its light travels to us at 186 thousand miles per second and takes about eight minutes to get here. The gravity of the earth exerts the same force on every piece of matter that happens to fall into its gravity well causing everything to fall at exactly the same rate, 33 feet per second squared.  14 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was in just one place.  God exhaled and in the exhalation said there would be light.  The only reason any of this is important is that God has provided everything in this entire universe He created, everything we need for life, for love and happiness. God wants us to love and nurture each other and be happy. Every once in a great while he allows a few of us to see through the floor of heaven beyond the real and the hard facts that define reality as we know it, to the great truths of life as we should understand it, so we will remember that all we really see is “Through a glass, darkly”.