The Beyond is Part of the Here Now is a spiritual memoir of witness in which you recount a lifetime of visions, losses, rescues, and unexplained encounters to show how love binds the visible world to the unseen. When did you first realize these experiences belonged together rather than as separate events?

Around the age of 30, I realized I needed to someday put several experiences in writing. I thought up until then my empathic encounters were happening to everyone but started to see they were not typical. I had to work full-time as most do, and so had to wait until retirement to write what I had been wanting to say for a while.

How did you decide what to present plainly as testimony and what to reflect on more deeply for the reader?​

The experiences that registered very deeply were when friends, family, and even pets who passed away showed up to give me a message. They came to say goodbye, and often looked younger or repaired from the debilitated state they were in when alive. I thought this–God’s mercy was something humankind should know about. However, I do not think this is automatic, as sadly, I have seen some end up in darkness as well. The encounters with God were by far the best experiences.

The memoir moves easily between ordinary life and extraordinary encounters. Was that tonal balance natural to your memory, or something you shaped carefully while writing?​

I saw one of the goals of my life was to learn how to use a sword, so I trained and eventually won several tournaments. There is good and evil, and I want to be able to literally stand against the evil. Sounds corny, but that’s how the spiritual world is set up. The Bible tells us to wear a helmet of salvation and to carry the sword of the Spirit. I’m trying to help people defeat fear, but at the same time convert fear of the Lord to loyalty to Him. My memory wasn’t shaped, but my life was.

What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing the book?

I hope people understand that heaven is not automatic, and it takes something on our part to get there. It helps when you show love to the innocent, help what is right, and try to understand God while you can, because life is short and the window of opportunity is always closing.

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