I Forgot the Vision God Gave Me at 13... Until Now

There are moments in life that arrive with unusual weight. You don’t always know what to do with them. Sometimes you file them away. Sometimes you dismiss them entirely. And sometimes, without even realizing it, you forget them — until something pulls them back to the surface decades later and you find yourself standing in the middle of a moment you were shown a long time ago.

That’s the story I want to tell here.

The Vision I Didn’t Know What to Do With

I was twelve or thirteen years old, sitting in a charismatic church service that was meeting at the Jacksonville Conference Center (NC) because the congregation didn’t have its own building yet. It was a revival atmosphere. Speaking in tongues, laying on of hands, prophecy… all of it was normalized in that environment. I grew up in it. I understood it as just how church worked.

During one of those services, I had a vision. I saw myself healing people. People in wheelchairs rising up. The kind of image you’d associate with a Benny Hinn crusade or late-night TBN programming. And here’s the honest part: I didn’t know what to do with it, so I dismissed it. I was a kid with a vivid imagination in a highly charged emotional environment. I told myself that’s probably all it was.

So I moved on. Thought about school, sports, girls, college — the things a teenager actually thinks about. The vision faded into the background. Life continued.

The Long Road Between Then and Now

What followed that vision was decades of genuine spiritual seeking, and also genuine spiritual unraveling… sometimes simultaneously.

I stayed connected to faith. I felt drawn to teaching, to God’s word, to helping people understand something real about who God is. I ran online ministries. I wrote Christian books. I preached in churches. But somewhere along the way, my theology shifted significantly. I moved away from my charismatic roots toward a more Reformed framework — one that was skeptical of the charismatic gifts, including healing. That theological shift quietly closed the door on the vision. Not dramatically, not with a decision. Just gradually, the way things fade when you stop believing they’re possible.

Then came deconstruction. Over the course of last year, I walked away from Christianity in its institutional form. Not from God — I want to be clear about that. My love for God, my pursuit of truth, my desire to help people connect with something real and alive — none of that left. But the doctrinal containers I’d been operating inside of did. And with them went most of the framework that had shaped how I understood spiritual experience for most of my adult life.

By this point, the vision from that revival service in Jacksonville was not something I thought about. It hadn’t crossed my mind in years, maybe decades. I was focused on what was in front of me: who I was now, what I actually believed, and what it meant to continue doing The Work I felt called to without the structures I’d relied on.

What Brought It Back

A few things converged in a short window of time, and I don’t think it was coincidence.

The first was a spiritual retreat I attended in Tulum, Mexico. One of the people I met there was a Reiki practitioner. I spent time getting to know her and learning more about what she was doing with this healing modality. Her openness was disarming — she said simply that anyone could learn this, that it wasn’t reserved for a special few. I found myself genuinely curious, but I didn’t immediately act on it. I sat with it.

Around the same time, I was listening to season two of the Telepathy Tapes podcast, which explored healing modalities including Qigong and Reiki… and specifically looked at documented evidence of these practices affecting physical conditions, including cancer cells and bone repair. That grabbed my attention differently than I expected. This wasn’t someone’s spiritual testimony. This was documented, measurable, repeatable. I found myself thinking: this is real, and it’s available to anyone who learns it.

Those two things together — the conversation in Tulum and what I was learning about the science behind energy healing — created something I hadn’t felt about healing in a long time: genuine interest. And somewhere in the middle of that interest, the vision from when I was thirteen came back to me.

Not slowly. More like something that had been waiting in the background stepped forward.

I signed up for a Reiki certification course. I completed it two weekends before writing this. And when it was over, something settled into place in a way that I’m still processing — the sense that this is what that vision was pointing to all along. Not the theatrical version I imagined as a kid, but the real thing.

What Reiki Actually Is

I want to be careful here not to turn this into a Reiki explainer, because that’s not the point of this piece. But some context matters.

Reiki, at its core, is the practice of directing life-force energy — what the Japanese call ki, what Chinese tradition calls chi, what the Bible might simply call the Spirit — through focused intention toward another person. It is not about the practitioner generating something from themselves. It is about becoming a conduit. Allowing energy that is already present, already real, already flowing through all of creation, to move through you toward someone who needs it.

The healing that results isn’t always physical. Often it’s emotional. Sometimes it’s spiritual. The modality doesn’t determine what form the healing takes — it simply creates the conditions for healing to happen, and then gets out of the way.

When I understood it that way, the connection to what I’d believed about God my entire life became undeniable. The energy being transmitted is love. That’s not a metaphor — it’s the actual mechanism. And if God is love, as the text says, then this is simply learning to cooperate with what’s already true about the nature of reality.

The Pattern the Bible Has Been Showing Us All Along

I keep returning to two figures from the biblical narrative when I think about this: Abraham and Joseph.

Abraham received a promise from God that he would father a nation. He was already old when the promise arrived. And then he waited. He waited so long that his wife Sarah eventually offered her handmaiden Hagar as an alternative path to the promised son. The waiting stretched so far beyond what seemed reasonable that human beings started improvising around it. And still, Isaac wasn’t born until Abraham was one hundred years old.

Joseph’s story is even more visceral. He was seventeen when he had the dreams — the sun, the moon, and eleven stars bowing down to him. He told his family, and it made things worse. His brothers threw him into a pit. Sold him into slavery. He served faithfully in Potiphar’s house and was falsely accused and thrown into prison. He sat in that prison, probably wondering what the dreams had ever meant, probably having stopped thinking about them the same way I’d stopped thinking about my vision. And then, in what the text describes almost as an abrupt pivot, everything aligned. He was brought before Pharaoh, interpreted a dream that no one else could, and was appointed second in command over all of Egypt. The thing he’d seen at seventeen didn’t materialize until he was approximately thirty — and only after years of suffering he never asked for.

What I notice in both stories is this: the vision came before the person was formed enough to carry it. The waiting wasn’t punishment. It wasn’t abandonment. It was preparation. The path between the vision and its fulfillment was doing something to the person that couldn’t be shortcut.

I think about my own long middle — the theology shifts, the deconstruction, the retreat in Mexico, the podcast that caught my attention at just the right moment — and I can see the preparation in it now. I couldn’t have received Reiki at twenty-five or thirty-five the way I received it at forty-four. I wouldn’t have had the framework, the spiritual maturity, or the willingness to hold something outside the categories I’d been given. The road had to be that long because I had to become who I needed to be to actually do the thing.

The Vision Didn’t Die. It Waited.

Here’s what I want to leave you with.

If you had something happen — a calling, a dream, a knowing, a moment in a church or a forest or a kitchen at 2am — something that felt real and then got buried under years of life and change and loss of framework… it did not die.

Visions don’t die. They wait.

They wait for the person to catch up. They wait for the container to arrive. They wait for the moment when you’ve been formed enough to carry what was shown to you before you were ready.

The version I saw at thirteen was filtered through the only lens I had at thirteen — big meetings, dramatic moments, the charismatic imagery I’d grown up with. That was the packaging my thirteen-year-old brain put on something that was actually much quieter, much more intimate, and much more sustainable. I’m not healing people from a stage. I’m healing people one at a time, through presence, through energy, through love. The vision was right. The packaging was just mine.

You may be in the middle of your long road right now. You may have forgotten the vision entirely. You may be in the pit, or in the prison, or simply in the years of ordinary life that come between the dream and its fulfillment.

Keep going. The vision is still there. It knows exactly where it’s going.

If you’re navigating your own spiritual deconstruction or trying to make sense of a calling that doesn’t fit the containers you were given, I’d be glad to talk. That’s part of what I do through The Work. You can find out more about it here.