We are taught to be present in the moment in the culture of the modern day, but this wasn’t always the case. However, in some cases we may find ourselves present in a moment out of time.
Little Adam sat on the floor in the living room at his home and felt the green warm carpet with the Persian patterns keep him warm in the dark November evening. He sat alone playing with his bright blue car that his oldest brother can gifted him on his last birthday and didn´t have a care in the world. He could hear his siblings talking in the hallway and hear his mother making dinner, singing along with the radio.
As Adam played on the floor, he began looking out of the window. He saw what he always sees, a few houses across the road outside, some trees in the shade from the streetlights. He can also see the old gray church far away, that is lit up by some ground lights pointed at the church. Adam had been to the old church often with his parents at Christmas time, and he had also gone to Sunday school there with his siblings.
The kind old priest at the church has once given him a small book about Jesus, when Adam had asked him questions about God and Jesus after Sunday school.
He found himself staring out the window and he sensed that something was off. Things didn’t feel right. All of a sudden the living room seemed to disappear as well as the street view outside. It was daylight in the living room and the sun was shining brightly. Adam could feel the fresh warm air all around him.
Then he started paying attention to the view in front of him, which had changed from a room to an open field with tall green grass and pastures. There were no buildings or roads nearby anymore, but he did see the old church in the same place as before. This time however, the church didn’t look old at all, it rather looked kinda new. It was now painted in white with a red roof, instead of being gray with a brown roof.
At the church there was something going on and Adam many people were standing outside the church. Adam couldn’t hear any sound coming from them. They were wearing strange clothes and all of them had hats on. He could see a priest in a black cloak walking out of the church and following him were many men, holding on a big long box on their shoulders. Trailing after the men with the box was a woman in a long blue dress and wearing a big white hat on some kind. As Adam kept on watching this spectacle he could see the group heading to the right of the church, toward a garden with large stones on the ground. As they walked to the garden, all the other people at the church followed them silently.
All of the sudden Adam could feel the sunshine dimming and the next thing he knew, he was back in his house and sitting on the living room floor. His mother called out that dinner was ready and Adam shot up to run for the kitchen to eat his dinner. At dinner he told everyone what he had seen in the living room, about the sun, the church and the people. His parents and siblings smiled at Adam and told him that he had quite the imagination. His older sister teased Adam that he was crazy and said that Santa Claus wasn’t real either. Adam felt angry and tried to hit his sister. Adam didn’t bring the matter up again.
Then ten years later when Adam was in his teens visiting a museum, he saw a painting of people from the 1600s. There he recognized the clothing of the people he had seen as a child, while sitting in the sunshine in his living room. He even saw some of the large hats that the people had worn that day.
Later that day Adam went to the old church and walked around outside, remembering what he had seen as a boy. He must have seen a funeral of sorts from the 1600s. He figured that the men had been carrying a coffin to the old graveyard and that the woman following must have been the widow of the dead person, or maybe the mother.
This event sparked Adam’s interest into the supernatural. But this was not the last strange thing to happen to Adam.
A.G. Munson
