Good Morning Beautiful People…A Date and Time I Will Never Forget…
A few days ago on Good Morning Beautiful People, Christmas Miracles From The Scanlin House, I shared about the miracle stories around the table at this Christmas Outreach. I really wanted you to hear about the tree that was in her dad’s yard one night. Was it there the next morning? Well here is the story as written by Author Joan Scanlin of Easton, Maine. (Shared with permission).
June 5, 1999, started out a normal day. My husband and I went to St. Agatha to see about some landscaping we wanted done. We went to a restaurant for supper, and just as I was leaving the car the Lord spoke to me and said, “You are never going to forget this day or this time.” I looked at my watch and it was 5:30.
At 12:30 that night my brother Ivan called me and said my brother Dean was missing. I said, “What do you mean, missing?” All he said was, “Prepare yourself,” and he hung up. Remember, he woke me up out of a deep sleep. I was still holding the phone in my hand. “What did he say?” I got up and showered, got dressed and layed down on the couch with the phone in my hand. At 2:30 AM Ivan called me back and said, “We found his truck and his body.”
We met at a designated place and from there we all went to tell our parents. We traveled about eighty-five miles. We traveled Route 1, the same road we had traveled hundreds of times. But grief had altered my thinking that beautiful Sabbath morning. I would look at different houses and think, “I wonder what grief they might have had in their lifetime.”
As we were driving in our parent’s driveway I was thinking, “We are going in there to tell them something and their lives will never be the same.” The light was on in the bathroom. I was afraid that someone had already told them. My brother said, “No one has told them.” It was 4:30 and they were already up. Dad unlocked the door and said, “Why are you all here?” Mom came out of the bedroom with red face and swollen eyes. She knew something was wrong and she had cried for two days. She said, “It’s Dean isn’t it?” We had to tell her, “Yes.” We were all in shock for a few days.
When Dean was only three, closer to four, he had a vision. Dean had never been to Sunday School. Our parents were not Christians at the time! Mom wanted this read at his funeral. She asked dad to write it, but he said he didn’t remember it all. I said, “I’ll write it; I remember it.” The afternoon of his visiting hours I sat in the back of the church and wrote it on a piece of paper–much too small, but I made it do. Here is what I wrote:
“I Went to God’s House Last Night”
When Dean was only three years old he got up one morning, and as he and Alan (who was only two) were playing on the floor Dean said, “I went up to God’s House last night.” Alan asked him, “How did you get there?” Dean replied, “I don’t know, but you should have been there. The grass was so green and thick. Not like we have here. It was so soft, and the flowers were so pretty. And I walked on streets of gold.”
At this point he had mom and daddy listening real good. Daddy began to question him, “Dean, did you see God?” Dean answered, “Yes, I did.”
Daddy asked him, “Did He have short hair like me?” “No, He had long hair like mommy.” “Did he wear a shirt and pants like me?” “No, He had a long white thing something like mommy wears to bed.”
Dean continued to tell his experience. He said, “There was a little boy there and he looked just like me.” He said, “There were a lot of sheep, and there was just one black sheep.” He said, “There was a little black boy. We had so much fun playing! I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to come back, but God told me I had to come back–my family needed me. God told me, ‘I promise the next time you come, you can stay!’
Alan asked, “How did you get back?” Dean said, “A big bird brought me back.” (I believe this was an angel, but in his little three-year-old mind he may have compared the wings to a bird.)
God gave us Dean for fifty more years to love and enjoy. Today, Dean is walking on those streets of gold, and I know he is singing in that beautiful voice God gave him! I just bet he is singing “How Great Thou Art” or maybe as he holds his head high and I can almost hear him singing “Amazing Grace.” “When we’ve been there then thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun.”
I was five years old at the time of his vision, and I remember it like yesterday. Thank You, God, for my brother, Dean!
We made it through the funeral; the presence of the Lord was so strong. At the cemetery when we were leaving I kept saying his name and that, “I can’t leave him here.” As we were leaving through the iron gates I was crying so hard I thought I couldn’t breathe. The Lord spoke to me and said, “I was preparing you for this fifty years ago.” I said, “Fifty years ago.” Which was right. Dean was three when he had the vision and he was fifty-three when he died. I hung on this!
Dean died on Saturday and was buried on Wednesday. That following Friday we went down to see my parents–they needed us!
The day we had traveled to Danforth to tell our parents about Dean my heart was crushed. All the way down I kept saying to myself, “I am not having our Christmas open house anymore. I am not decorating nothing!” I never told my husband, Winston.
At 11:30 I had just gotten mom settled down for the night, dad had long since gone to bed. It was a beautiful, moon-lit night. Winston came and got me and said, “Come, I want to show you something.” He took me into the kitchen and said, “Look.” I looked straight out the window and didn’t see anything different. Then I looked to my left. There was a huge Christmas tree with a huge star on the top moving up and down ever so gently. (To attract our attention, I believe.) The full moon was behind the tree, and we could see those huge branches. This tree was probably fifty feet tall.
He said, “Looks like you will continue.” And I said, “Yes.” I told Winston God did this just for me. Then I told him what I had been saying, “No more open house, no more telling the message of salvation though our outside decorating.” (We have a sixteen-foot cross on the end of the house with a nativity scene at the bottom, and a tomb with angels–the whole message of salvation without saying a word.) We stood there and talked about what we were seeing. Then we went to bed.
The next morning I walked by that window to start breakfast. I looked out the window. You will never guess what I saw. This time I went and got Winston. I said, “Look out the window. Where is that tree we saw last night?” There was no tree.
While we were looking at the tree the night before I could see all of those huge branches with the full moon behind it. I never once thought about playing on that back lawn without a tree there–there never was one. I didn’t think of that because it was right in front of me–huge, about fifty feet tall with that big, beautiful star which was moving ever so slightly.
Dad came into the kitchen and said, “What are you talking about?” I told him all about our experience the night before. “Oh, Daddy, I wish you could have seen it.” He sat in the rocker by the window, and he was real quiet for a while. He said, “In fifty or more years living here I have cut a lot of trees–because of storms or they were just in the way. But there was never a Christmas tree at the corner of the barn, never!” And it always made me sad every time he had to cut one. I love trees.
One night, I went to bed and I was thinking about that tree, because you can’t see something like that amazing thing and just forget it. It made me so humble that God did that just for me. And that He wanted me to continue our Christmas open house to tell the message of salvation through our decorating. The Lord woke me up and said, “You continue to tell My message of salvation and I will heal your broken heart.”
Christmas came and we did our thing like always. Ten months from the time Dean died, my mother died. I had no grief for her and I couldn’t figure it out. I asked my dad, “What is wrong with me?” He said, “Your mother lived a long life and she didn’t want to live. After Dean died she wanted to be with him.” I said, “No, there’s more to it than that! I just can’t figure it out.”
When we drove from the cemetery when mom died, when our car pulled onto the road the grief left me for Dean. It was like twenty pounds left my shoulders.
One night God woke me in the night at 2AM. He addressed me like this, “My daughter, I told you if you continued to tell my message of salvation I would heal your broken heart! You did, and I have.” Praise God. He is so faithful.
Remember, we were getting out of the car and God spoke to me and said, “You will never forget this day or this time.” On Dean’s death certificate it said: Date of Death June 5, 1999. Time of Death 5:30 PM.
Matthew 5:4
Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0UIhU6vy_o&w=560&h=315]
