[Some time after his near-death experience, Ned visited the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.  While standing in front of a friend's name on the wall, Ned had a trememdous experience.  The following is the message that resulted from that experience.]

I stood again in front of the slab of granite bearing my friend's name.  I thought back to the night of July 2, when I left my body in the ambulance and floated free to be greeted by Dan.  That evening had been the start of a long and difficult path of spiritual discovery that was still only just beginning.  It was no coincidence that I had been drawn back to this wall on this particular night.  As I reached out to touch my friend's name on the wall, a shock of energy wnet through my body.  I felt my body falling to the ground.  I was now free of that body and floating above it.

I was enveloped in an intense light.  I was in the presence of a great spiritual being.  A booming voice filled the air; it was the most powerful voice I had ever heard.  It was the voice of the Archangel Michael.  I recognized that he was conveying a message of importance:

"Your forefathers created one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all.  These were men of high ideals, spiritually guided and inspired to create a nation and a civilization to be admired and respected, to set an example for the rest of the world.  In exercising their free will under God's guidance and direction, they created a Consitituion and a Bill of Rights for every man, woman, and child to live in freedom in the pursuit of happiness.  Yet these high-minded and spiritual men were soon replaced by others who, in the exercise of their free will, chose to put their egos before God and to joust with God's plan.

"You became a nation of spoilers, man against man, brother against brother, government against citizens, and the chosen nation became a warrior with and against other nations.  You have become a nation of criminals and murderers.  You murder in wars.  You murder the innocent.  You murder your children.  Your leaders create laws to justify the murders, to attempt to make wrongs right, to rewrite morals and ethics to support your own earthbound greeds and desires.

"You have become a nation further and further from the spirit and the influence of God.  You hav created sciences and philosophies to support activities that only recognize earthbound realities, that not only refuse to recognize the spiritual nature of man himself, but refuse to recognize even the existence of God.

"You have taken God and His works of prayer and meditation out of your government, out of your institutions, out of your schools.  You have done everything you can to deny His existence, and you find yourselves in a world filled with wars, hatred, starvation, and death, and you do not understand why the rest of the world does not follow your shining example.

"You are a nation at war with itself, filled with hatred, prejudice, crime, drugs, and murder.  Yet when t he few of you who do look to God ask Him why all these things are allowed to happen, you do not hear His answer.

"You are members of the human race, universally created by God and given free will individually be divine right, and you would not wish to have it any other way.  Yet every little act of free will that man has exercised from the beginning of time, that was not in accordance with God's plan, multiplied in its impact and its negativity on the future of man.  Every simple act of aggression multiplied into acts of world war.  Every simple act of greed multiplied into worldwide human suffering and starvation.  Every acto of destruction of God's environment on Earth multiplied into destructive forces of nature - earthquakes, floods, pestilence, nuclear destruction and nuclear waste.  Every act of violence escalated into acts of murder and the extermination of ethnic people for their appearance or beliefs.

"Yet, God created a nation of high ideals for you to survive other empires and civilizations that crumbled into oblivion, for their leaders placed themselves as men above God, and now those empires and civilizations are but piles of dust or buried under the waters.  You sit on the edge of the new millennium, poised for the future of mankind, and you are headed, like all great civilizations of the past, to be reduced to piles of dust, to be covered over by the waters.

"Yet, God comes to you again, to appeal to you as a people, to appeal to you as a nation, to appeal to your leaders.  His army of angels is visiting upon you with a life force of energy, a spiritual energy radiated by the Creator to all mankind.  Many of you feel the vibrancy of His energy and His divine presence.  He is communicating with you spiritually, telling you to raise yourselves to the level of spiritual transformation that is necessary for those of you who hear Him to spread His message and His energy, to recognize that He is coming.

"Guided by prayer and meditation, all men, women, and children may answer His call, but it must be soon.  Time is running out!  The angels are coming!  Do you hear them?  Are you listening?

"Are you listening?"

As the Archangel Michael's message ended in a haunting echo, I began to float gently back down into my body.  Several people were standing over it as it lay sprawled on the sidewalk at the base of the wall.  Further away, I could see a team of EMTs with a gurney rushing toward my body.

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