I hope my first seven letters, along with the accompanying sections “Chad Bookshelf” and “Chad’s Musical Notes” have helped you better understand my personality, interests, family dynamics, and spiritual experiences. Now with this letter, I will shift my focus to the series of chronological events that are crucial in explaining what later transpired in my life,
I am discontinuing the Bookshelf and Musical Notes sections from this point forward. Those sections served the purpose of showing the various literary and musical influences in my life, as well as allowing me to share a few additional stories that related to each letter’s main topic. I will still occasionally mention other influential books, songs, and movies that emphasize important concepts, but they will be included in the main letter.
Let’s begin in the summer of 2017, when my autobiography titled “Living on the Edge of Heaven” was published. The book’s title refers to the spiritual experiences I have described in the previous letters, including my two near death experiences I’d had up to that point. I had shared portions of my life story many times over the years through church talks, newspaper interviews, interviews, podcasts, and in a weekly online column I wrote. But I felt that the audience was only getting a small part of the story. So I assembled all of these anecdotes from my life into one volume.
This book was well-received, and I was invited to participate in several speaking events, where I would give a humorous talk with an accompanying slideshow. After my talk I would go to a table and sell my books to interested attendees. It gave me an opportunity to meet a wide variety of people from all over the United States.
One of these events was a conference held in the mountains of Central Utah. It was a beautiful outdoor setting in a meadow surrounded by trees. I spoke to a couple hundred people sitting in lawn chairs and relaxing on blankets. Despite the setting sun, my slideshow is still visible, and I was pleased with the audience’s response to my talk.
Afterward, I spent several minutes talking to people and selling my books. As the crowd began to disperse, a bubbly, blonde woman and two of her friends approached me. The woman introduced herself as Melanie Gibb, and that she was from Mesa, Arizona. I told her I had given a presentation at a writer’s conference in Phoenix in 2005, but I had never been back. Melanie responded by saying she had a lot of friends in Arizona who were reading my books and who would love to hear me speak. She said she was very good at organizing events, and she would be happy to arrange it.
I appreciated her enthusiasm, and I thanked her for the offer to help me out. I explained I had just started working on the final volume of my latest fiction series, and once it was published in 2018, I would contact her. We exchanged phone numbers and then went our separate ways.
Around this time, excitement was reaching a fever pitch in eastern Idaho for the Great Eclipse that would cross the United States in August 2017. The anticipation was magnified in the Rexburg area, which would be directly in the eclipse’s path of totality where the sun would be completely blocked by the moon. Our home was projected to be within the moon’s shadow, and on the day of the big event, we had a large crowd of friends and relatives come to our property, including several people who had traveled from Utah. The eclipse would begin in the late morning, and the day was essentially considered a holiday in Eastern Idaho.
As the moon began to pass between the Earth and the sun, we all put on our special protective sunglasses. The actual eclipse took longer than we expected, but the sunlight slowly dimmed, and eventually only a small sliver of the sun remained visible. I glanced to the west and saw an enormous shadow approaching across the landscape and suddenly the sun was completely blocked by the moon. We could see the amazing ring of fire that a total eclipse produces. The air temperature noticeably dropped, and people‘s voices even sounded distorted as we excitedly talked with each other. Everyone was marveling at how strange the world felt.
Meanwhile, I had to suddenly focus on keeping my spirit in my body. It felt like my spirit was being pulled by a giant magnet toward that ring of fire in the sky. I felt dizzy and close to losing consciousness, but I just clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. This seemed to actually hold my spirit in place. After about two minutes of totality, a burst of sunlight emerged, and the magnetic pull I felt ebbed away. I had stayed in my body, but I felt completely exhausted.
In earlier letters, I discussed my first two year death experiences, which happened in 1985 in 1993. It had now been 24 years since the second one, but I had always felt vulnerable to having another one, as if I could pop out of my body at any time. For that reason, I’d become much more cautious about any recreational activities involving water after my Flaming Gorge and La Jolla Cove incidents, even jumping off the low dive at a swimming pool felt risky!
I think my spirit must have been somewhat dislodged by the eclipse, despite my best efforts. I now felt disjointed with some alarming side effects. The most dangerous one was that a few times a day, everything around me seemed to stop in place.
This new problem was most concerning when it would occur while I was driving. It had happened twice while I was traveling along Highway 20 between Rexburg and Idaho Falls. Each time, the world around me froze up and didn’t start moving again until I was 200 yards down the road. These incidents were happening often enough that I modified my daily routine so I didn’t have to leave the house unless necessary.
The best description is that I was “buffering”, similar to when you’re watching a video and it freezes for a few seconds before catching up to where it was supposed to be. I was somehow missing out on those few seconds with no knowledge of what happened during that time.
About a month after the Great Eclipse, our family was watching a DVD of the movie “Wreck-It Ralph”. When it came to the scene where the cute little girl Vanellope starts suffering glitches, I realized I was suffering from a similar malady. I sensed I needed a reboot, much like Vanellope in the movie.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait too long. My glitches went away after my third near-death experience, which happened in early November 2017, less than three months after the Great Eclipse. That incident will be the topic of my next letter.