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Linda Decloedt Linda DeCloedt is a resident of the Pacific Northwest, a widow, and a grandmother of twin 8-year-old girls. She is a college dropout, an avid environmentalist and gardner, and has a lifelong interest in metaphysics, self-transformation, and the arcane. For relaxation she works with pottery and glass-fusing. She shares her home in St. Helens, Oregon, with her aging mother, a Chihuahua named Petey, a cat named Baby (but more often called Her Majesty), and a fish called Wanda.
"When I Was 15" When I was 15 years old, I had an experience that stayed with me for the rest of my life. I was with a group of 20 girls, and we had backpacked into the Three Sisters Wilderness Area in Central Oregon. We were staying there for ten days. This was a club, and several of us were "pledging"; our initiation was to be on the 5th night. Well, I was miserable (mainly because I was a spoiled brat and wasn't used to being treated like a second class citizen). I was lying in the sun one day and had practically worked myself into a lather, telling myself what a bunch of jerks they all were and how I should just pack up all my stuff, tell them to shove it, and stomp the eight miles out by myself (of course, the trailhead was about 20 miles away from the nearest civilization, but I wasn't really thinking coherently). In the midst of all this adolescent angst, a presence came to me. It's very difficult to describe. It's as though I could see him, but couldn't really see him. I could hear him talking to me, but there were no words. But the feeling! There was an absolutely overwhelming feeling of totally non-judgemental love, mixed in with a considerable feeling of humor. It was an emotional warmth beyond anything I could ever imagine. The message I was given was that it wasn't good for me to get so wrapped up in these bouts of anger and resentment, that this experience was transitory and would soon be over. Nothing particularly awe-inspiring about the message, but it wasn't the message that affected me so much as the presence. In less than five minutes it completely transformed me. I knew that it was Jesus. And that's interesting, because at the time I didn't believe in Jesus. I had had no religion in my upbringing and had, in fact, been given the message by my parents that those who believed in religion -- and most especially Jesus -- were weak-minded. Yet I knew this was Jesus. I still didn't believe in churches (and I still don't), but it certainly changed my mind about Jesus. I couldn't understand why he would come to a snotty little 15-year-old who really wasn't going through much of an ordeal at all, even though she thought she was (at that point I was embarrassed that I had made such a big deal of it -- it was embarrassing that I was so emotionally out of control that Jesus had to actually come and shake me out of it), but I've come to believe that that wasn't the point. The point was that it was the catalyst for a life-long search for truth, for the real Jesus and the real message, and for the reality that hides behind everyday life.
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