Jim

On the road from Te Anau to Wanaka, I stopped in a tiny village to see the atelier of a local potter, a lovely old man named Jim. The shed that housed the workspace looked innocuous enough, but once we got chatting, a world of new information opened up for me. We started innocently, talking about pottery, but once we had established I was not American or anything else equally terrible (his words and views, not mine!), we got deeper into Jim’s world and life.

Jim cannot read or write well, but he has recently gotten into finding out more and more about “the Lord Jesus” and what happened back then. I think it is Jesus that tells him directly, but he was not 100% succinct in his explanations, so I can’t be sure. Jim has started painting the stories from the bible as he now knows they have happened. He says it is amazing how for so long you are left in the dark with all these people telling you what supposedly was going on back then, until you get to know the truth and it is all clear. It was Mary Magdalene who wrote it all, just in case you wondered. The female perspective is unfortunately a bit frayed by the fact that men have taken the writings and transformed them into what you know as the Holy Bible. I liked how in Jim’s version of the events, the women were the clever ones, constantly outsmarting the men who wanted fame and power and whatnot.

In any case, we soon moved on to more astonishing events (at least for me), namely the fact that Jim often sees the sprits of deceased people walk by, with a face if he had known them, without a face if they were strangers. I am always fascinated by tales like this and by the people who tell them. It is so easy to dismiss this as crazy talk and to make fun of them, but in the end, I actually have no way to disprove anything, and I am not even sure I would want to. My approach to life is to keep an open mind, and I have met many amazing people who have a worldview that couldn’t be more different to mine. I often find these conversations very enlightening, sometimes mind blowing.

But wait, Jim had one more amazing yarn that was the climax to our conversation.

When he was a kid, Jim saw THE SPACESHIP OF GOD. Yes. And the way he brought this up, totally off-handedly, was just so wonderful. I can’t quote him verbatim, but he said something like “Well, and then there was this thing in the sky. Not one of the normal UFOs, that you see, like the small round ones or the large ones, that are 1000km in diameter, but totally different”. For Jim, seeing UFOs was like seeing dogs play in the park. I started wondering what I would do if I ever saw a UFO – would I tell people as openly as Jim, taking the Mulder approach, let’s say, or would I try to forget the event so I can go back to being what is considered a “normal person”? Anyways, should you be interested, God’s own spaceship is about the size of a containership, and it is all motor. This massive motor can generate a strong electromagnetic field of sorts, which was the reason for all the strange events you find back in the bible, think seven years droughts and flooding the planet. Every time mankind needed a reminder of God’s existence, he showed up in his large spaceship, doing something pretty impressive like parting an ocean, and people became believers again.

With the world behaving the way it does at the moment, I a actually sort of expect him to rock up any day now…