As a child, my father would make an effort from time to time (usually on Sundays) to pull out his well-used King James Bible and read a little Scripture. As a man of science, he was very interested in and intrigued by the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, two very dynamic, epic, and often considered impossible-to-understand books of the Old and New Testaments. His interest in these prophetic books and in extremely terrifying places was undoubtedly influenced by the things he had seen in his life: the nuclear bombings of Japan, the Chinese communist revolution in which a good friend of his from Manchuria disappeared and was never heard from again. of the. , Koren’s War in which he fought and saw the full scale of human horror, and then the true beginnings of our technological revolution where the famous passage from Revelation claims that without the number or mark of the beast or the devil, no one can buy or sell anything – social security numbers, credit card numbers, credit scores, anyone?

In this background and context that my father provided, I also found myself very interested in all the prophecies and writings of the Bible about the end time and tried to understand them or at least be familiar with them. But, and let’s be honest, making direct links between any prophetic work of any religion and establishing it directly in modern day-to-day life is, at best, an almost hopelessly complicated exercise that really only serves to make one completely abandon oneself. of society and go live in a compound somewhere, or just as badly, raise your hands and dismiss all the prophetic books as meaningless from a scientifically illiterate age irrelevant to this day. What I have discovered is that the real power of the prophetic books of the Bible is to inspire the mind, spirit, and soul to turn away from the daily grind, so to speak, and try to get a big-picture view, the big picture. . in fact, God’s plan for the world and how he does it.

The reason I say this is simply because starting around the age of 12, I began to have a very vivid, full-color, immersive dream of a vortex of energy and light at the end of which was this presence that was both almighty. and yet. all kindness, and the accompanying feeling of being uplifted and also feeling completely at home in this presence. This was the kind of dream that when you wake up you totally remember everything about it as if it really happened, as real as that car accident you almost had or the ladder you almost fell from.

Along with these occasional dreams, I carried on with the rest of my life: going to school, attending Sunday school, where I was one of the few “weirdos” who regularly attended classes, and eventually becoming a confirmed Catholic and an altar boy. that helped. with Sunday Mass and was considering Divinity study. But then came my first encounters with the Bahá’í Faith around the age of 18 and the funny thing is that I would try to convert and save everyone I knew who were Bahá’ís into Catholics because it seemed so sad to me how nice a group of people how these Bahá’ís would condemn themselves to eternal hell for not following the Mother Church of the West.

This one-man miniature Inquisition went on for about a year during which time I was very impressed that none of the Baha’is responded with anything like my predictions that they were all doomed. And certainly a heresy, I began to read some of the writings of the Bahá’í Faith and found in them a very warm glowing presence, like the feeling of the Bible, only much more alive. Now, being a rather scientific minded guy, I couldn’t allow that to just make decisions regarding the theological situation of these people who still thought they were stuck in a dead end situation since, at least as far as I could understand, they were not strictly Christian.

Finally, when I was 19, I went on a trip to Chicago to basically eat some pizza, see the Sears Tower, and just have a vacation and during this trip, I was proposed a visit to the Temple of Willmette which I was told for sure. I have been to Rome and seen Saint Peter and the Vatican and Notre Dame in Paris so the epic religious architecture was something I felt I could more than handle and as the size progresses the Bahá’í temple in Chicago isn’t the same size (but sure, it wasn’t built on the backs of peasants or on the near bankruptcy of a nation either) so I didn’t think I’d see anything I couldn’t handle. Arriving at this temple, I was pleasantly surprised at first as it is a very pretty structure located along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and was obviously built with a lot of love and devotion and it is certainly a place enough big. But then I walked into the visitor center at the temple and was immediately struck by the same sense of calling and yet being completely at home. And suddenly it made sense that the slightly colder or lower, but still wonderful feeling of spirit that I had always felt from the Bible and from the readings and discussions with my father and from Sunday school, was the same as that of the Bible. feeling of spirit that I was getting from the Baha’i Writings and now, in this temple in Chicago, I was feeling that again, but I had never felt this kind of spirit in St Peters or Notre Dame, instead of marveling at the external Greatness From epic religious architecture, this presence, this completely immersive energy at home, came to me from a building.

That was it, I decided that I had to learn much, much more about the Bahá’í Faith because nothing that caused such a deep feeling could be wrong, I was as certain of this feeling as you can get from any test in science or observation of the nature. Call it an act of faith. And now I am in a beautiful place: I can recognize the majesty that Jesus Christ was and at the same time I have accepted His Return in the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh and His Religion. Who would say that “the end of the world” could be so enlightening and revolutionary? Now I think of Apocalypse not so much as a forecast of the rupture of a planet, but rather as the beginning of a wonderful new era in which humanity could finally feel the welcome, the amazing shock that touches your heart welcome, that God provides through His Covenant.