Inspired song writing

94020 The White Man doesn't generally refer to angels in his writing. Being a scientist, he likes things to follow the various laws that have been discovered to rule unchallenged in the material sphere. But he also recognizes another sphere, the immaterial. Angels are those beings that cross the boundary between those two spheres and interact on a material level with our own reality. Thus it is impossible to fully study them from a scientific perspective.

From the perspective of history, however, angels can be studied. History dutifully records WHAT happens, without having to go into the HOW. And history is replete with angelic visitations. In fact, history seems to turn on events of global significance that involved the trans-dimensional missions of angels: Creation; The Fall; The Incarnation; The Birth; The Cross; The Tomb. In a back-handed way, this was the basic premise behind the script of Ghostbusters.

Now that I think of it, I'm sure that it was angels who conveyed the blueprints of the Ark to Noah. It is totally fitting with God's character to have used his own intermediaries to communicate across the boundary between the temporal and the eternal. In fact, when he communicated directly with Moses, it was noted as being out of the ordinary for him to do so.

For over a decade now I've been studying the appearance of angels at one particular pivotal event in history: The Operation Auca Massacre. Details have continued to trickle out since Walter Liefeld took his wife, the former Olive Fleming, back to visit the scene of her first husband's martyrdom. At that point Dawa, their guide and a remote eyewitness to the massacre, mentioned that "chanting foreigners in robes" had appeared above the trees at the time the five missionaries were being killed.

This is where my spine starts to tingle. When Steve Saint returned to live among the people who killed his father, he picked up more information about this angelic visitation. The killers, being farther away than Dawa, only saw illuminations in the sky. But like Dawa, they heard the singing. And even more incredibly, Kimo, one of the killers, was able to identify the very song they heard when Steve brought a film crew down to document God's work among the Aucas since the Massacre. It was titled "Beyond the Gates of Splendor."

The song Kimo recognized was from the sound track of "Beyond the Gates of Splendor," specifically a song composed for the documentary, called "To Every Tribe and Nation."

A song composed in the 21st century, but sung by a choir of angels almost 50 years earlier. A song written under inspiration, and we almost never knew it. A Heavenly Song to welcome five faithful witnesses Home.

You know, I kind of suspect that this wasn't the first time it had been sung.

I'd like to sing it myself someday. I have a feeling that I will.