From Whispers of God's Love: Touching the Lives of Loved Ones After Death, by Mitch Finley:
Frederick Buechner Receives a "Visit" From an Old Friend
Frederick Buechner, Presbyterian minister and bestselling author, reported his experience in a talk he gave in 1987, sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which appeared later in Spiritual Quests: The Art and Craft of Religious Writing, edited by William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1988). Buechner told his audience that a good friend had died one year ago, and a couple of months later he and his wife stayed overnight with the man's widow. That night, he dreamed that his friend stood there in the guest room "looking very much the way he always did in the navy blue jersey and white slacks that he often wore . . ."
Frederick Buechner told his friend how much they missed him and how happy he was to see him, and his friend acknowledged this. "Then I said, ‘Are you really there, Dudley?' I meant was he there in fact and truth, or was I merely dreaming that he was? His answer was that he was really there. And then I said, ‘Can you prove it?' ‘Of course,' he said. Then he plucked a strand of blue wool out of his jersey and tossed it to me, and I caught it between my index finger and my thumb, and the feel of it was so palpable and so real that it woke me up. That's all there was to the dream."
It seemed, Buechner said, as if his friend came to do what he did, and then he left. The next morning at breakfast, Buechner described his dream, and he had barely finished when his wife spoke. She declared that she had seen a strand of blue wool on the guest room carpet that morning as she was getting dressed, and "she was sure it hadn't been there the night before."
Buechner wondered if he was losing his mind. "I rushed upstairs to see," he told his audience, "and there it was--a little tangle of navy blue wool that I have in my wallet as I stand here today."
To learn more about this book or to purchase a copy click here: Whispers of God's Love
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