Fire Wind by Guy S. Stanton III

with?”
    The Pastor nodded in understanding and I went
on, “I keep getting visited by the personage of an old indian,
which I think…… I know, is an angel. I don’t know why all this is
happening or how I got dragged into it, but I am!”
    The Pastor looked from his folded hands to me
and asked softly, “Do you regret being involved by God in this
war?”
    What kind of a question was that?
    The more I thought about it though the less I
could come up to argue against my new spiritual awakening. Finally
I just shook my head no and went back to staring at the floor.
    “Let’s pray Taran.”
    “You still haven’t answered my
questions.”
    Sighing he said, “I know as much as you do,
which is next to nothing in terms of these white hairs, but in
prayer perhaps God will reveal more to us. They are evil that much
I know. I also know that our best hope for victory lies in our
faith. Pray Taran.”
    “I’m not much good at this praying
stuff.”
    “That’s fine. The Lord loves a humble
attitude.”
    The Pastor seemed to close off from me then
and I was left alone on the bench for the most part. I stared at my
hands as the whispered prayers of those gathered in the room helped
create a complex atmosphere of mood that was hard to explain.
    I began going over in my mind everything that
had happened of late, only I made note to thank God for my
deliverances, my second chance, and the courage to take it. I
started to find myself praying for almost everything, even things
unconnected with the situation at hand.
    I began to feel sleepy, but then it all
evened out somehow. I wasn’t in the church anymore, but yet somehow
I was. It didn’t make any sense as nothing of the church was around
me and yet I knew what I knew.
    I walked forward into what I knew had to be a
dream of some kind. Whether past, present, or future I did not
know. “What’s going on God?” I inquired.
    “ Look and see.”
    I looked again and there was nothing.
Literally nothing!
    The land before me, the Earth, literally
everything was gone.
    “God?” I quivered out in great fear.
    “ Watch what I did with nothing.”
    I saw it all transpire as a fast-moving blur
of realization after realization. The heavens and earth were made
and sights strange to me and yet similar in some ways passed by
with blinding speed. It was as if I was a spectator over countless
eons of time and change that had transpired upon the planet that
had been created from nothing.
    Then the pictures that I was looking at
became marred by war, death, and violence beyond any comparison I
could offer. I shivered within the framework of my mind at the
terribleness of the once glorious creation now being destroyed
before me.
    “I can’t bear to see any more!”
    “ Watch!”
    I did and I watched the world as it had once
been destroyed beyond seemingly any repair. My view shifted until I
stood as if in the air above the planet from a great distance
away.
    Earth, if that was what it was and yet I knew
it to be, was before me. The planet was cold and lifeless. All the
light was gone from it and the surface was barren ice for as far as
could be seen. It was a forbidding landscape of hopelessness.
    I looked and looked but could not place what
I saw within the framework of what I knew of Biblical history. A
warm wave coursed by me and pierced through the darkness
surrounding the planet and seemed to hover over the surface of the
ice.
    Ice began to crack up and where extreme cold
had been before warmth began to rise as steam that seemed to wipe
away the ash of the world’s former destruction. I then watched six
literal days of creation play out before me and then as if in a
blink of time I saw the passage of several thousand years pass by
as if but a few seconds had gone by.
    In the brief time after the planet’s rebirth
I saw the same elements that had destroyed it over eons of time
still present within the new creation as if hovering on the edges
of a herd of bison waiting for the