W: WORMHOLE

Wormholes are hypothetical shortcuts through time and space. Though they have never been actually observed, they are valid predictions, given the math of general relativity. At least in theory, one can move from one location to another without crossing the distance between them. And that theory is not just a concept: it is backed up by that gatekeeper of the sciences and best friend of quantum physics: mathematics! We cannot say that wormholes do not exist.

There are a few things in my life that I feel I have always known, even though that cannot be the case. I was captured as a spiritual thinker so early on that the thought of transcending spacetime limitations just didn’t seem that odd to me when I heard about it. I suppose I felt like I participated in a wormhole of sorts every day I communed with God. “Heaven” never seemed like a far away place to me, but rather a here and now reality, albeit another dimension. I understood the shortcut: how in a moment I could go from tired, human analog struggle to digital immediate power breakthrough, as if I just tunneled through to another realm! (I adopted the saying, “Nothing, nothing, nothing…POW!” for the way God seemed to burst in at times in my understanding.)

I thought of the famous Old Testament story of Jacob’s ladder: a portal that opened between heaven and earth, revealing to the wide-eyed Jacob the fact that he might not be the master of his own fate as exclusively as he had believed. Jacob would later say of the location of the incident, “Surely God is in the place and I knew it not.” Why? He hadn’t yet found the wormhole. Later Jesus would declare Himself to be the same kind of ladder between heaven an earth—the same portal for heavenly energies to be transferred, meaning the wormhole was now EVERYWHERE, not just at a place called Bethel!

By the time I heard of wormholes, I also had already come to understand that spacetime was no barrier to the healing of past personal hurts. I had experienced and talked to many others who had also experienced an encounter in which some incident was revisited, with a healing outcome replacing the injury. These were not just projections of the imagination, but real “events” of a different kind than we are accustomed to in the natural. It seemed so logical to me that a Savior would actually SAVE—from the real traumas life had inflicted on us—those misshaping forces that kept us limping through life long after time has distanced us from the offending cause. Heaven—the place where every tear is wiped away—can show itself NOW in the wells of deepest pain.

Once, as I was musing on a particular event in my own past that I suspected was still generating discomfort, I felt the thought rise up inside strongly: “There’s a portal in your pain!” Then, I immediately pictured myself “diving” into the event headlong, only to find another realm of complete freedom in the spacetime beyond it! I got it: The event need not limit me; instead, my very need could be my motivation to transcend the event and find a whole world of spiritual truth that replaces the natural dire predictions of dysfunction!

What looked like a black hole suddenly became a wormhole! One of the best preaching messages I ever delivered was called, “There’s a Portal in Your Pain.” This thought went public, but it came from a very personal place indeed. I finally dove (in a way I can’t explain) right into the middle of an abandonment, rather than avoiding it. At the other end of the tunnel, I tumbled out into a safe place of total Divine acceptance! It was like Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, only it was an encounter with a real and perfect Father, not a contrived image of my earthly one!

When I was studying for that particular message, I discovered an amazing piece of science that still wows me. It is the atmospheric equivalent of wormholes: portals that open up in the earth’s magnetic field on a regular basis! These little “Bethels” are unstable and unpredictable, forming and dissolving, allowing a brief “flux transfer event” between the earth and the sun! One scientist described them as “bursty”. Every eight minutes, one of these portals opens up allowing solar winds to blow particles into the earth’s magnetosphere. As few as fifteen years ago, no one believed these portals existed, but now the evidence is incontrovertible.

What if these bursty portals are just a faint picture of the dynamic and immediate availability of the real Light of heaven? What if all the time, the reality of the Spirit dimension is forming a portal to shoot particulate matter of the spirit kind—insight, wisdom, revelation, truth—right past our protective layers? What if there is heaven to earth contact swirling, forming and dissolving in tangible tubes where the Wind forcibly blows substance our way? One scientist simply said of the magnetic portals, “They’re real.” What if that same conclusion awaits all of our skepticism concerning spiritual things?

I was once criticized by an older minister for being “too resistant to the limitations of time and space,” and he actually added that this tendency was only going to make me more miserable as I grew in years! I suppose he was trying to lovingly dose me with reality as he saw it and generate some sense of practicality that he felt I was missing. His dire prognosis confused me, as it also did a younger man in the room, who later took me aside and said, “Isn’t that how we are supposed to be? Less and less hindered by the considerations of time and space and more and more filled with the possibilities afforded by spiritual living?”

I suppose you would expect such from the younger guy, who hadn’t yet encountered the bumps and bruises of what we all too frequently call “real life”. And yet, many, many years on, I wonder if these space-defying; time-bending PORTALS of heaven to earth contact are not responsible for actually keeping me young? I wonder if the jaded predictions of calcification into earthbound thinking may have been AVOIDED, not exacerbated, by my tendency to ride on the next available wormhole right out of the problem and into God’s world of Spirit-provision! It doesn’t even require a machine, like Jodie Foster’s—have OPEN HEART, will travel, in Spirit…

Yes, I’ll own that criticism. I am far too resistant to the limitations of time and space! Far too resistant to be contained by the simple causational definitions of identity afforded me by circumstance alone! There is a ladder/portal/wormhole to another realm of identity called the Kingdom of God. You don’t physically go there when you pray or worship—it opens up on you! Surely this is the fountain of youth, no matter what your age or stage.