Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 11, 2020 • 30 Comments
Human Nature, Jesus, The Source, Understanding Reality
But on the first day of the week, at early dawn,
they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared.
And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb,
but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus…
Behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing;
and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground,
the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead?”
– Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:1-5)
To be a human being is to live in fear. Like fish adapted to polluted water, for all of human history we have accepted the howling horror of knowing that each of us will soon cease to be. On top of that fear, we enter these lives with a powerful drive toward spiritual growth, and with an innate curiosity even despite our need to distract ourselves from our own mortality. Humankind’s spiritual restlessness has for all of our history demanded that we find ways to confront and address the terror of our imminent demise.
So, hundreds of thousands of years ago we began to try to bargain with death. And to do that we needed imaginary ways to personify the unknown. Modern humans came into being about two hundred thousand years ago, but evidence suggests that the idea of having gods is older by another hundred thousand years. It was then that hominins like Homo neanderthalensis began to formally bury their dead, often with jewelry and household goods or weapons, and with offerings of food and flowers.
Our relationship with the gods we had created was contentious. We envisioned powerful gods who were able to protect and provide for us, and it took us awhile to begin to trust them. Once we had developed the notion of bargaining with invisible entities, we would have experimented, giving them offerings as we prayed for 
good mammoth-hunting or a good run of fish. As nomadic groups shared their experiences, the gods that had seemed to be most successful would gain followers, while those that hadn’t performed well would fade. The only evidence we have now of prehistoric gods is respectful treatment of the dead, but those burials tell us so much! Valuable grave goods buried with the dead give us evidence of a developing belief that invisibly life goes on; and offerings of food and flowers show that human-made gods must have had a meaningful role in the imagined post-death process.
It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture about twenty-two thousand years ago that people settled in long-term communities with their powerful and whimsical gods. By then, most human leaders had learned to use stoking fear of the gods’ disfavor as an essential base for their own power. And as the tensions in our lives increased, our gods were soon demanding more. One indication of our societal stress as we became more civilized is the fact that the practice of human sacrifice soon was adopted worldwide. The earliest solid evidence yet found of an organized religion is Gobekli Tepe, a stone temple that dates to twelve thousand years ago. It was buried after a couple of thousand years in what may have been a dispute with its gods, so it has been well preserved.
Polytheism was the norm worldwide until shortly before the birth of Jesus. We think of the ancient Jews as monotheists, but references in their scriptures and excavations in Israel suggest that the original Yahweh probably had a wife and companions. The devotion of the Jewish tribes to a single powerful deity seems not to have been fully formed until the Babylonian exile that ended in 538 B.C. It was then that the genuine God chose to be born to 
the Jewish people. Their imagined deity was still human-made and fear-based, but in learning to relate to a single god the Jews had proven to the Godhead that they were ready to leave their man-made religion and begin to know the Un-Caused Cause.
It was to help us discover and begin to relate to the genuine God that an aspect of the Godhead was born two thousand years ago in the Person of Jesus. We can see in His Gospel teachings what He meant to do; and now that we better understand His mission we can contemplate its staggering importance! Jesus’s mission was apparently five-fold:
genuine Godhead. He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24), that God never judges (JN 5:22), and that God’s only commandment is the Law of Love (MT 22:37). He also tried to get his listeners to drop all their human-made religious traditions (MK 7:8) and develop a personal relationship with God (MT 6:6). To this day, both Jews and Christians ignore all these revelations and continue to worship a modernized but nevertheless still fear-based deity of their own imaginings. But the tremendous effort that God made to reach out to us in the Person of Jesus still survives in the Gospels as a beautiful expression of the Godhead’s infinite love and amazing patience.Jesus was not the Godhead’s first emissary. The Old Testament indicates that God was reaching out to the Jews from at least the time of Moses, trying to better shape 
their human-made concept of God. There were many Old Testament prophets who carried out this task, including Micah of Moresheth, who delivered an early version of the Gospel message more than seven centuries before the birth of Jesus. He said, “With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8).
So now we understand why Jesus was born, and why He taught us as He did. But why did He choose to die in public and so horribly? And why did He re-animate His dead body?
Thomas has told me that the Lord’s original life-plan didn’t mention how He would die. Its focus was on His mission. But even though He was trying to wean His followers away from their religious traditions, He was well aware of the impact it made when He fulfilled prophesies. He was having trouble convincing His first-century followers that our lives are eternal, so Thomas has told me that shortly before Jesus died, He decided in concert with the Godhead to alter His life-plan. He would die
publicly so He could rise from the dead as a kind of “Ta-da! See? I didn’t die, and neither will you!”
(I offer this explanation with the caution that Thomas is only one reporter.)
Actually, there is some textual evidence that the Lord’s crucifixion decision may have been last-minute. Throughout the Gospels He is calm and confident as He repeatedly courts death by breaking religious laws; but on the night of His arrest “He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done” … And being in agony, He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground” (LK 22:41-44). Even on the cross, after nine hours He blurted, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (MT 27:46). So He seems to have been less confident through His crucifixion ordeal than He ever had been before in His lifetime as Jesus, which makes sense if He was winging a last-minute plan. But He carried out the plan so well that I imagine Him now smiling to recall it.
At Easter we celebrate the fact that two thousand years ago God came to earth in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and began a new stage of human development in which we can abandon all religious superstitions and live in the love of the genuine God. Humankind was growing up! We also celebrate the fact that by going through a public death and then re-animating His dead body, Jesus gave us indisputable proof that God is real and we are immortal. It matters little whether the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus. 
The Shroud bears on it signs that we could not have recognized for almost two thousand years, and that we still cannot reproduce. It is God’s message given two millennia ago and meant to open our hearts today. The Shroud of Turin is the greatest token of perfect love ever given!
This Easter each of us can celebrate our joyous newfound certainty that we are the Godhead’s best-beloved child and forever safe in Everlasting Arms.
“He has risen. Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee,
saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men,
and be crucified, and the third day rise again.”
And they remembered His words, and returned from the tomb
and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest…
Peter got up and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings;
and he went away to his home, marveling at what had happened.
– Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:6-12)
Robertа, Mikey Morgan on the issue of the body of Jesus has a different opinion. Here is his answer: Mikey tells me that Jesus did not return to his dead body and “reattach” with the Resurrection. He appearred and returned to this dimension in a vibrational state that was “solid” to us here. He looked the same just like we will look the same when we return Home if we choose. But he “resonated” in such a way to be in solid form when he reappeared in this dimension.
Dear Dmitriy, thank you for giving us the chance to talk about this! I would have dealt with it above had we gone beyond Easter morning, and others are likely to wonder about it too. I know Mikey’s position, and he is right! But, I think, so am I. Not that it matters!
We know (as was said in my recent post on NDEs) that once the silver cord breaks, we cannot “reattach” it. Mikey is right. But what Jesus did was to retard the body’s decay and then zap every cell of it with enough consciousness energy to reanimate it and allow Him to control and use it. He created the first zombie! Someone studying the scorch estimated that to produce it would have taken more energy than can yet be generated on earth. I think that’s an extreme estimate, but it was a lot.
The body that Jesus first appeared in to His disciples after His death was severely damaged, probably not washed and therefore dirty and covered in wounds. Putting aside the fact that they knew He was dead, they didn’t recognize Him at first, which is major! It was important to Him to demonstrate the re-animation of that body, so He worked out how to do that successfully, made a point of letting them touch and probe His wounds (no blood flowing, of course), and in general powerfully demonstrated what He had gone through His crucifixion to demonstrae: what had been seen to be dead was nevertheless alive. There really is no death!
But that body was unstable. It was beginning to decay, and without the normal silver cord and apparatus of etheric bodies to animate it He likely would have had to stay in it or at least be very tight with it in order to keep it functional. Since even when that body was alive, He had spent a lot of time out of it as you and I also spend a lot of time out of our bodies, this having to stick with it so tight to keep it going was no doubt a frustration! He had to ditch it pretty quickly, and the change in body is apparent in Scripture. I haven’t gone back and tried to pinpoint the moment, but it was likely within a day – just as soon as He had made His emphatic point about having risen from the dead.
As Mikey points out, the body Jesus used for the next forty days was of the matter that exists in the astral, of which our afterlife is a part. Think of colorful pure alabaster. Beautiful.
I should add that the two beings in glowing robes who appeared to the Marys when they went to anoint the body were sixth-level beings. Classical description! My mother had one appear to her without having ever heard of such a thing: when I asked her how she knew she was going to live awhile longer, she said, “The tall glowing man told me.” One of the wonderful things about the Gospels is that the reverence of the Lord’s followers was such that they lovingly passed down even little details like this!
Merry Easter, everyone. The crucifixion and resurrection of God on earth is His beautiful gift to each of us!
Why is it so difficult for anyone to accept that Jesus could and did imbue His body with life after death? He is, after all, God! So it all makes sense. He is the second person of the Trinity! Thus HE can do/create anything. What’s so difficult to accept here people?
Dear Vesna, I gather that you didn’t even read the post on which you are commenting, which is of course your right. But why then even comment? We are saying here that the evidence tells us that Jesus in fact actually did reanimate His dead body, and throughout this website we talk about the fact that Jesus is in fact much more than any Christian denomination has ever said that He is. But if you prefer to simply accept whatever your religion tells you, never caring about “seeking” and “finding” as Jesus urges us all to do, then I think that everyone here wishes you joy in doing whatever makes you happy!
Happy Easter, Roberta and everybody!
Jesus’ disciples would have recognized the rising of his physical body, as the liturgy for the Jewish New year, Rosh Hashanah, mentions the reviving of the Dead, the reanimation of the Dead, the quickening of the Dead, no less than half a dozen times.
Dear Sha’alah, how interesting it is to hear that Jewish liturgy talks about raising the dead. It is not, of course, possible to raise the dead in fact, but this set of beliefs may trace back to ancient Jewish afterlife beliefs. It is clear that developing some view of life beyond death – and an associated process – was one of the earliest ways in which prehistoric peoples related to their gods. Fascinating!
Roberta
I just discovered you while channel surfing. I am sure it was not a coincidence. Everything you say fits with my experience. I am 81. A lot of the Bible never made sense to me until now. Thank you.
Dear Rosemary, I am delighted to help you in whatever way I can! If you have questions, please simply send them to me through the green contact block on this website. I think you will come to see that a great many people share your view of the Bible!
Thanks Roberta,
I often thought Jesus coming was particularly directed at the Jewish community, because of their monotheistic and structured beliefs and because they were noteworthy in the old testament. However, the history goes back much further.
But now I can see, that while Jesus was born Jewish, it was a choice for the time and that the misconceptions of God and eternity were something that truly needed to be addressed.
Modern Christianity, at the very least, has embraced eternal lives and still values the teachings of Jesus, even though they often misinterpret or misconstrue the true meaning of Jesus life to fit into their particular religion. Blessed Easter to you!
A blessed Easter to you as well, dear Timothy! Oh, I wish you were right when you say that modern Christianity values the teachings of Jesus. I cannot see that they even try to be aware of what Jesus actually taught! Instead, the 40,000-odd versions of Christianity that now exist seem to be primarily based in the Old Testament and in the teachings of Paul. Whatever they take from the Gospels, they then modify with ideas from those other parts of the Bible. It’s pretty horrifying!
dear roberta and team i have read alot of booke on the afterlife that jesus is there at the trasition of many how is this possible when there is thousands dying at the same time? terry
Dear Terence, spirit guides will often impersonate religious figures; and of these, the most common one personified is Jesus. I gather from how common this is that the Godhead blesses the practice! There even seem to be versions of Jesus commonly adopted, for example there is a blond version of Jesus who is always smiling and laughing and very often appears to children and sub-adults. They will do whatever works to comfort us and to ease our transition!
I sincerely believe that this is true. There are accounts of guides coming through to say that they impersonated religious figures to make people comfortable during their transition. They have even mentioned personifying Mohammed and holy men from other different religions, depending on the beliefs of the person. As far as raising the dead, I don’t think that a person who is actually dead can be brought back to life, so what about Lazarus? Do you think that was just a story, or maybe Lazarus was in some type of coma and he just appeared to be dead? There wouldn’t be any way they could tell for sure back then. It’s hard enough sometimes to tell nowadays sometimes, let alone centuries ago.
Dear Lola, precisely right! We are so clueless about what is going on at the moment when our silver cord breaks that our guides will do whatever is necessary to keep our attention and get us to trust and follow our deathbed visitors. Dr. William Barrett tells in his century-old book about an old hermit who wouldn’t follow anyone until an old gray carthorse in spirit walked into the room, and the man was overjoyed, he hugged the horse, and they both disappeared as the man fell back dead on his pillow. Might that have been the actual dead horse, or his spirit guide in a horse suit? Who knows?
I think clearly that Lazarus was in a coma, and not actually dead. If we learn anything from analysis of the Shroud of Turin, it’s that re-animating a dead body requires an extraordinary amount of energy and the body itself won’t survive for long.
I agree about Lazarus, but as far as the old carthorse is concerned, it could have been real, as Leslie Flint, the famous British medium, “talked” to a man who used to be a peddler back in the day. He had been dead for a number of years, but his horse (Jennie) had helped him carry goods around in his lifetime, and when she got old and died, he was devastated. However, she was the first (and I think only) one to greet him, according to the peddler, and he was delighted. He said she appeared in a field full of grass and trees.
Dear Roberta
What a wonderful history lesson, I learned so much from reading that, so thank you for taking the time to write it all and share it with us.
“At Easter we celebrate the fact that two thousand years ago God came to earth in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and began a new stage of human development in which we can abandon all religious superstitions and live in the love of the genuine God”
This explanation is absolutely critical for humanity to understand, and it would appear to be with the utmost perverse irony that most of the world either turns to “Religion” for salvation, or away from the known corruptions of organised religion, and hence from all Spiritual beliefs, notions of afterlife and the true teachings of Jesus.
It feels like it is a bit of a mess down here, hahahahaha, I guess we just have to keep the faith, forgive all that we can and hold on to Love and the real teachings of Jesus and the many others that speak the truth and let our Light shine forth as much as we can.
Stay safe everyone
Dear Kenneth, thank you – so beautifully said! The fact that all human cultures carry such an intense and longstanding association between God and religions is frustrating and mystifying, as you say! After all, every religion-based god is human-made and therefore not even real; but in dropping all of that, few people consider the possibility that there might nevertheless be a genuine Un-caused Cause.
It feels like a bit of a mess, indeed! As you say, religions are becoming a turnoff to more and more people as humankind becomes ever more sophisticated, and in the process people are turning away from God, from Jesus, even from the afterlife truths. That is our task now: to give people who are fed up with religions an entirely religion-free way to come to understand and relate to what is true!!
I totally agree, Roberta. The minute someone starts to talk about the afterlife, the subject of religion comes up and people start talking about the afterlife as though religious ideas and the afterlife are somehow deeply intertwined. This is what has led to the religious dogma that we have experienced for so many years. The goal seems to be how to appease this religion based God so that our afterlife will be comfortable and without scary penalties for what is perceived as “sin.”.
Dear Lola, so since we very well understand it, and we know that associating the genuine Godhead and the Lord Jesus Christ with any religion whatsoever is bogus… what then do you propose that we do about it?
It’s hard to say, as people get so caught up in belief systems that they actually tell you that you are in peril and will likely wind up in hell if you try to explain that Jesus is all forgiving and doesn’t demand any specific religious beliefs. That happened to me just the other day when I e-mailed a pastor from some Protestant church who insisted that people wind up in hell when they deviate from these teachings. I tried to tell him that Jesus taught forgiveness and love, and that hell, therefore, was not in resonance with his teachings. He wound up sending me by e-mail all the scary reasons why I should change my mind “while there is still time” so clearly, he didn’t “get” what I was trying to say. I asked him where he got his information about Jesus advocating a fiery hell, and he said it was from the bible, but he didn’t give me a page number to look it up. I suppose it’s none of my business what he preaches but he is scaring a bunch of people, which was evidenced in the Comment section.
I read somewhere that Jesus was able to convert his physical body back into the energy it was made of, i.e., making it disappear, like “melting” a snowman. This left a miraculously formed imprint on the shroud of Turin.
Other speculate that his secret disciple, Joseph of Arimathea buried him elsewhere.
His spiritual being appeared as if solid to his disciples. Not his physical body.
The problem with the revelations received from different spiritual sources is that they are not in congruence about Jesus. Some sources say he was conceived indeed immaculately from a real virgin, and then Mary herself from the spiritual world supposedly said that she got pregnant the normal physical way with Joseph as the father. Some Korean religious leaders believe that Zechariah was the father.
Some sources say Jesus was married, some say he never really died, and lived on with Mary Magdelene in France and had kids.
All I only believe is that he is a Christ level spirit, very high, extremely loving, extremely helpful, compassionate and that his level of heaven is available to all of us and is actually our birthright.
And that reaching this level is up to us. Attainable on the basis of our service to others. Not up to him. He is a wayshower, not a magician. he will help, point the way, inspire, teach, show, but never interfere with human free will.
Am I wrong?
Dear Adri, thank you for all these thoughts! I hear from people all the time who send me ideas about Jesus being married, having children, going to India after His Resurrection, or moving to the south of France with his His family, and other speculations. Maybe He was actually an alien??
Here is what I think, after having given this matter considerable thought, study, and consultations with Thomas (who often won’t tell me what he thinks):
* Jesus was conceived the usual way, and His biological father was Joseph. If Mary said this from where she is now, that makes my conviction stronger!
*Jesus never went to India, either before or after His death. He never went to France, either.
* I have long thought that Jesus must have married in His teens as a good Jewish boy of His era, perhaps to Mary Magdalene, and had children. There is a theory that His wife and children were spirited away when He was arrested to keep them safe, and probably taken out of the country. Perhaps to France? Who knows? But (a) the Magdalene seems to have stuck around and visited His tomb; (b) I have seen good arguments made that He never married, and there seems to be no real Gospel evidence that He did; and (c) there is some evidence buried in the Gospels that He may have been homosexual and John was “the disciple Jesus loved.” I find delicious the prospect of judgmental Christians being made to accept that possibility in a more enlightened day, when they are actually reading the Gospels!
* I think the evidence suggests that He actually did re-animate His damaged body, but it was unstable and He couldn’t leave it because it had no silver cord so after He had shown it to His disciples (and let Thomas put his hand in the now-dry spear-wound in His side), He ditched it and used an etheric body, which would have been solid, for the forty days that He remained on earth.
No way to be sure about any of this! But this is what I have come to think that the evidence most likely shows.
The reasons given why God came to earth as a human all seem valid but from my perspective offer little explanation for his violent death. He could have accomplished all of these objectives even by dying naturally. Like all spirits taking on a human body I believe Jesus had a specific life plan. It seems he was not only aware of his plan but strictly followed it to avoid going off course. I think that many humans pass on once their objectives have been achieved or in some cases take an early exit if the going gets too rough. The order of our universe and the extraordinary event of God taking on a human nature does not seem consistent with a flexible conclusion concerning the death of Jesus.
This certainly seems to be the case, Tom since Jesus certainly was aware that he would “upset the apple cart” when he made that big scene with the money changers etc. How could he not know that it wouldn’t be forgotten about and brushed aside? As far as his crucifixion is concerned, that was done quite frequently. If they just wanted Jesus dead, there were much quicker ways to kill him, but they were cruelly sadistic, and killing him in this manner actually gave them pleasure, just as it did when they threw Christians to hungry lions. They always had a large audience as if they were watching a harmless football game..
Dear Tom, you are right that the Lord’s dying on the cross as a criminal doesn’t seem to fit His life-plan as it clearly was laid out. As is true of most of us, He planned His lifetime as Jesus with all the precision and care of an astronaut planning a trip to the moon! And I agree that He clearly was aware of Who He was and what the plan was throughout His life. It was all so carefully done that the plan is clear to anyone who carefully reads the Gospels.
Thomas tells me that the Lord’s whole focus was on getting these truths fully conveyed, and at that He was amazingly successful when you consider the fact that when He was alive, for Him to have plainly taught just about any of what He had come to teach would have meant a death sentence! So it is pretty believable that His dying and then rising from the dead to help His listeners better grasp the fact that our lives are eternal was added at almost the last minute. All of us work on our life-plans, too, throughout our lives! And as you point out, this twist was so inconsistent with His message of love and God’s mercy that He might well have anguished over it on the night of His arrest, not in distress about the pain to come but rather worried about whether what He was about to do might damage the value of the rest of His life’s work. Good points!
I became a follower of Jesus, in the late 80’s and I really looked forward to living a Christian life, but as time past I could see that most if not all of the people that I shared a pew with were talking the talk, but not walking the walk. The newness of life just wasn’t there, it felt like a great big lie to me.
So, I jumped into the Bible and studied hard only to find out that when the going get tough most quickly fall away. I can now see clearly why, reading about the fear based teaching that has been going on for years, and this is not Jesus at all. I have been so brain washed by this teaching, that I find it hard to grasp, because most everything I thought I knew is just wrong.
Thanks, Roberta for your Blogs, they have helped me see the light of the truth about our good Lord Jesus. He truly loves us unconditionally.
Oh dear Rockey, you can have no idea of how many people now feel as you feel! It’s as if all our spirit guides are working together to wake us up and open our minds and hearts. It’s amazing. Where once my emails through this site were primarily questions about death, nowadays there are many more emails each day and most of them say some variant of this: I was always a Christian, but most Christians don’t follow Jesus, and now I am seeing that. What’s next?” Some of them are just at that excited but unsure stage, but some others have already done what you have done, and have begun to find peace in the Lord’s pure teachings. But it is amazing and so beautiful to me to see Him escaping at last from all the false Christian dogmas and finding so many people already so eager to embrace His truths!
Roberta,
I heard from someone that Jesus had planned to teach for 30 years or more, but the Crucifixion was more of a “plan B”. Have you ever heard anything like this?
Thank you!
Dear Eric, I had heard that as well, but I don’t think it’s possible to know for certain. It seems to be clear that He had planned a ministry with an indeterminate ending because His assumed task was so open-ended:
(a) He came as God on earth to study humankind, as a kind of fact-finding mission; then
(b) in concert with the Godhead, the second planned stage of His mission was to deliver a set of teachings meant to wean us away from human-made religions and teach us how to sufficiently transform the consciousness of all humanity that we could bring the kingdom of God on earth.
Would that set of twin tasks take three earth-years or thirty earth-years? In a place without time – which is where He and all the Godhead had spent what were likely earth-eons – who really knew?
I think the Lord’s fact-finding mission took Him thirty years. During what is thought of as His quiet period, He was living and working as a human being while He acted as God’s avatar on earth to very carefully study us. Then by the time His active ministry began, He had worked out with the Godhead what He should teach, and He got right to it!
And apparently everything that He taught was believed by people whose guides were helping them receive these great truths… except for one thing. People who knew that death is the end of life and our bodies then rot away had a lot of trouble envisioning eternal life. I think in fact that He said a lot more about eternity than what we have preserved in the Gospels, because it all was just so hard to believe! His teachings were passed down as an oral tradition for sixty years before they were written down, and we are told now by those that we used to think were dead that the preserved teachings of Jesus are amazingly accurate; but we also know that some things that He said were not preserved. And eternal life for dead people was so unbelievable that it was probably one of those things.
So it was that once He had imparted what He could get people to accept, apparently He decided that a demonstration was needed to prove that life really is eternal! So He decided to die publicly and then re-animate His dead body. Ta-DA! So His last crucial point was made, and He could then gladly go home.
When I was first given to understand all of this, I went through a period of outrage and disgust that Christianity had taken such an appalling, fear-based detour for two thousand years! But when I didn’t soon get past that, my dear Thomas took me to the woodshed and made it clear to me that I have no basis for imagining that ANYTHING was not planned and carried out by God, and my job is not to judge Christian history! My life’s work is just to help people who are eager for the Lord’s truths to find those truths. Period. I love Thomas, but he does not suffer fools, and not even when I am the one being foolish 😉