The Spirit World Comes Through

Today the spirit world came through in a big way – for a new friend of mine named Lola. They came through during a reading with a medium who is one of the very best by far (in my humble opinion), and gave Lola the much needed evidence that her loved ones who recently passed over are still very much around.

If you want to know the truth, I think the spirit world set Lola and me up. There I was in Burke, VA, last month killing time before doing a radio show to promote my book, The Priest and the Medium. I was due to have an important interview in person the next day, so I figured I’d splurge and get my nails done. I was about to enter the nail salon when I heard a little voice in my head say, “Why don’t you go wander around Walmart?” My reaction was, “But I don’t need anything at Walmart!” The feeling was insistent, so darned if I didn’t go and wander aimlessly around Walmart. I emerged empty handed ten minutes later and went back to the nail salon. I ended up seated next to Lola, who I had never met. Something made me strike up a conversation with her, and we got to talking about my book and about mediumship. I’m actually a bit of an introvert. I don’t go around chatting up every person I meet, yet for some reason I felt compelled to speak with this friendly-looking woman. I even admitted to her that I was a “baby medium” – something I rarely tell people. Lola seemed interested in the subject, so I gave her my card and recommended that she read some of the essays on my website.

A few days later I received an email from Lola. It seems that our meeting and my website was exactly what she needed that day. It turns out that within the past 6 months she had lost her mother very unexpectedly as well as her son-in-law, who died within two months of being diagnosed with cancer. My goodness. I had no idea, yet something had drawn the two of us together. I realized then that if I hadn’t heeded the voice that told me to wander around Walmart, I wouldn’t have ended up next to Lola, for someone else had been in my seat. Lola told me that she had been fighting grief and depression for months due to the two back-to-back deaths of two people she loved very much. She had decided just that morning to take better care of herself …

I knew instantly that Lola was meant to connect with her mother and son-in-law and I knew just how to bring them together: with a reading with my friend, Janet Nohavec. If anyone was going to help Lola to know that her loved ones were still around, it was Janet. I recently finished writing Janet’s life story for her: Janet is a former Catholic nun, and is now the pastor of The Journey Within – a Spiritualist church in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey. Janet is trained in the British method, which focuses on evidential mediumship, meaning, she may not be able to PROVE the continuity of life, but she can give you an overwhelming body of evidence to leave no doubt in your mind that she was communicating with your loved ones on the other side.
Janet is so good that she has a waiting list of over a year. I’d never done this before, but I called her and asked her to squeeze a friend of mine in as soon as she could. I didn’t give her any details, other than to say it was a friend who had suffered some tragedy. Janet agreed, and THEN I went back to Lola and told her what I’d done. Happily for all involved, Lola was excited about the idea of a reading and agreed to set it up. I stepped back then and left the rest up to her. I didn’t want to know anything about her family members – their names, how they’d died … nothing! The evidence had to come from Janet.

Well, Lola had her reading with Janet this morning. It’s been on my calendar since Lola set it up with Janet’s assistant a month ago. Now, I have talked to Janet many times in the past month, but I never again mentioned Lola. This morning, however, it was all I could do not to call Janet and tell her to drink an extra cup of Starbucks so she’d be on top of her game, but I knew it wouldn’t be fair to put pressure on her. It didn’t help to get an email from Lola telling me that her entire family had been teasing her about resting her hopes on a medium. Her husband and son were sure she was going to be scammed. Her step-daughter was still grieving too much to pin her hopes on the outcome. So I was probably as nervous as Lola, but I forced myself to relax. After all, Janet is a pro, and this whole thing was out of our hands, anyway. I reminded myself that all I had to do was sit back and trust that the spirit world wouldn’t let us down.

And they sure didn’t.

Lola’s reading with Janet was by telephone. I knew that would make no difference for Janet as she tuned into the spirit world’s energy. I recommended that Lola find some way to record the conversation, and it’s a good thing she did. I’d learned from experience that Janet gives you the fire hose approach in her readings – flooding you with a deluge of details that leave your head spinning. There’s no way you can write down fast enough all the jaw-dropping facts that she has no way of knowing. You can google a person’s name all you want and never come up with the kind of personal evidence the spirit world gives to Janet.

Right away Janet brought through the very two people Lola wanted to hear from: her mother, who Janet claimed had died suddenly (she had) and a younger man who died from cancer (he did). Janet heard the name John, or Joseph. Lola’s son-in-law was, in fact, Jose. Janet saw boots and knew that indicated a military background. Jose had retired from 20 years in the Army. That’s all great, but it gets even better: Jose showed Janet a woman with dirty-blonde hair and called her by name. It was Lola’s step-daughter, and her name was not Jane, or Mary, believe me – it was an unusual name (I’m not mentioning it here for privacy’s sake), yet Janet got it spot-on. Why? Because Jose had a message for his grieving wife: “Tell her I miss her and I love her very much.”

Janet went on to flood Lola with a whole bunch of other great details such as the fact that Jose liked dancing and had given Lola a special flower when she was sad about his sickness (she planted that flower in the back yard). She talked about all the knick-knacks Lola’s mother had (the ones Lola had to dust all the time) and passed along her mother’s apology for being critical (she had been critical, but none of that matters anymore). Janet even brought through Lola’s dad who’d died when she was two years old. Janet didn’t know that, yet she passed along his apology for not being around as she was growing up. Was he a teacher? Janet asked. He sure was.

This is all great, but hang onto your socks, I saved the best for last: Janet asked Lola: Do you have a granddaughter? Yes, she does. Well, Jose wanted to thank her granddaughter for the poem she wrote and for the roses they all put at his grave. As it turns out, Lola and her family, including her granddaughter, went to Jose’s grave at Arlington Cemetery just this past Sunday, where they placed some roses, and yes, Lola’s granddaughter wrote a poem and placed it there as well.

This is what I love about the message of Spiritualism and mediumship: that our loved ones not only do not ever leave us, but they are right here with us still, watching us and reading our poems. They’re there with us as we grieve for them, wanting so much for us to know that they’re still around and love us just as much as they ever did.

The best part of a reading with Janet is that you know that she's not pulling random facts from the ether ... she's actually talking with these folks in spirit. If Lola had been in the room with Janet, she would have seen her tilt her head and ask her mother, father, and son-in-law to, "Give that to me again" if the message was just a little bit unclear.

I don’t know how Lola’s family will react when they hear the recording of her reading with Janet. There’s always a chance that they might hear those incredible details and still poke holes in them. We’re all at different steps along the path of our understanding of this life, and that’s okay. But hopefully Janet’s words and the messages she brought through today in such a beautiful, evidential way will allow their hearts and minds to open just enough to find the comfort that’s waiting on the other side for all of us. I know that today Lola found the comfort she was seeking, and I couldn’t be happier for her. Thank you Janet. Thank you Jose, and Lola’s mom and dad.

And thank you, Lola, for keeping the faith.