Bending Time and Meeting the Beloved
As the light returns to us, this is the story of the miracles that shattered my reality and taught me how to live.
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Dear friends
This past autumn, I began to tell you my story of how I’d come to meet God. I told you:
“This is the story of my spiritual journey, of how it turned on its head my most fundamental beliefs. About God. About what Jesus came to teach us. And about the very nature of our existence, here on earth.”
I shared that at its heart, this was a love story. Not in the everyday sense of boy meets girl — or girl meets girl, boy meets boy. But in the sense of the lover finding the ineffable Beloved, and experiencing an ever-present, all-encompassing depth of love and care in return beside which our ordinary mortal love is little in comparison.
I also said up front that some parts of what happened are so improbable they may be hard to accept. If you find yourself sceptical, please know that I understand. I might be too, if someone else had written it.
My first post, Into The Mystic, was the prologue: why I’m finally sharing this, plus the backstory of my early faith, disillusionment, severe illness, and several personal crises.
My second post, The Year The Lights Went Out, told the story of how I arrived in Zimbabwe with nothing and no job waiting, rebuilt fast, then was crushed in my personal life while the country itself began to collapse.
I ended that post on the promise that God shows up next. I was due to publish the third and most significant instalment, but life took a sideways turn. My father-in-law succumbed to his injuries after a freak accident, a loss that set our whole community reeling. I needed space to be with the shock and grief, and to shift my focus and energy to the care of the people around me.
At the same time, although I didn’t mention it, I’d just begun UVB treatment and had an unusual, unpleasant reaction. I developed an ongoing allergic response to UVB light. It’s taken a further toll on a body already living with chronic inflammation, post-exertional malaise, and allergic reactions to multiple triggers. I still shake my head as I write that sentence. It has meant even tighter day-to-day management, which is exhausting in itself, before I even get to the added burden of writing.
But today is the Winter Solstice: the exact turning point in the year when the Sun reaches its lowest noon height in the sky for the Northern Hemisphere, giving us the shortest day and the longest night.
Spiritually, the return of the light matters because it is hope with receipts.
The winter solstice is a physical, measurable turning point. Even if we can’t see it yet, the relationship between the earth and the sun has shifted. The long slide into deeper darkness has reached its limit, and the movement reverses. Nothing looks different in the evening sky — it can feel just as heavy, just as early — but the direction has changed. The turning is real even when the evidence is subtle.
Many traditions treat this as a pattern for inner life: when we hit our lowest point, we are often standing right on the hinge where renewal can start. The hinge is small, quiet, and easy to overlook, but it’s the point on which the whole door swings.
As I’ve moved through the different chapters of my life, I’ve noticed that my lowest points often contain a hidden hinge-moment: not a grand breakthrough, but a shift in orientation. I stopped pretending. I stopped bargaining. I stopped trying to muscle my way through. And I became willing to be carried, taught, remade. That doesn’t feel like victory. It often feels like surrender, or even defeat. Yet it’s the moment the story can change direction.
This is the kind of hinge-moment I mean. It’s the moment my story changed direction.
I should probably make it clear that I hadn’t gone looking for God again. I was living it up, doing all the worldly things that teens and twenty-somethings do. With some conflict, I might add, because even though they were just the things other people my age were doing, they were also the very things my deep-seated Christian belief system had taught me I shouldn’t be doing. But I hadn’t “repented of my ways” — nor did I plan to — and I sure as heck didn’t ever intend to turn towards a life of piety.
Yet, that’s exactly when God showed up.
That’s the only way I can think to describe it. There was nothing for me to see — not at first, anyway — but there was this profound Presence, arriving with a sense of immediate recognition and an all-encompassing feeling of, “How I’ve missed you, my friend.” This was the One I’d been seeking all my life. It felt like coming home, like my soul had reconnected with my Beloved after a painfully long parting.
And that is how it was: the profound joy of reconnection. The delight of getting to know each other again, of catching up on all I’d missed. I say I’d missed, because of course God hadn’t missed a thing.
But three things surprised me.
The first was that God met me where I was. They didn’t expect me to be perfect, let alone pious. (I use “They/Them/Themself” because that’s how God revealed Themself to me — singular and gender-neutral.) They saw me, and They loved me — not in spite of my flaws, imperfections, and mistakes, but simply as I was.
The second was that They didn’t ask me to change. I didn’t need to grovel, or believe anything in particular. I didn’t need to follow a religious system — or even hold any religious beliefs at all. I didn’t need to jump through spiritual hoops. I am as I am, and I am loved.
And the depth of that love is limitless. It is as vast as the universe, widening moment by moment. Because that love is the fabric of the universe. It’s woven in and through every part of existence. We trip over it every day; we don’t find it because we don’t look.
For two years, I experienced that immeasurable love pouring out upon the earth and all her inhabitants — not as something separate from me, but as something I was part of. I became a deep well of joy: a warm, steady gladness bubbling up through ordinary experience. I felt the joy of storm clouds gathering, the joy of rain falling, the joy of parched earth drinking it in, the joy of plants growing, the joy of animals grazing, the joy of water vapour rising into the air.
My third surprise was just how eager God was to reveal Themself to me. Because while God hadn’t missed anything about me, I sure had missed a lot of things about Them.
Much of that came from the things I had been taught to believe. Things like God being a “he”. Things I’d been taught were the one — and only — true path to God. But there is no one true path. And more than that, the God that we have been told of is a pale reflection of Their true nature.
God conversed with me — a steady stream of chatter that often made me laugh. I remember thinking how odd it was that books get written about one person’s conversations with God, when this kind of closeness is available to all of us.
They revealed Themself through the oneness of all creation, showing me that the natural world is not a thing apart from God, but a part of God. That we cannot profess to love God and be at odds with the natural world. That those who do are showing contempt for God, and all that is sacred.
That we show our care through being stewards of the earth — the world’s caretakers, if you will. That we are not apart from God, other than through our own decisions, and each one of us, too, is a part of God. That when we are at-one with God, They work through us, and through what we think of as the natural world, to restore love and healing. That this is the purpose of our time on earth.
Even now — some thirty years later — my heart lifts when I connect with the natural world, where joy and love are innate, unspoiled by man and our drivers. Today, nature is my church, the place I go to connect with God. Even through the window of my office, where I can see the songbirds in my shrubbery, I am in holy communion.
I learned that God also showed up as a still, small guiding voice — what many people call intuition, and what Christians call the Holy Spirit. At first, it spoke to me through conscience. But as I learned to listen to my conscience and treat it as a moral compass, my intuition grew stronger and clearer. I also learned how to still the louder voices of fear, reason, and ego that would argue with it and override it. That guiding voice carried such insight and wisdom that I knew I never wanted to be without it.
Finally, I met the Master Jesus.
First, he appeared in my dreams. Later — and only once — he appeared in person. I can only describe it like that scene in the original Star Wars when Princess Leia appears as a hologram: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi — you’re my only hope!” Except Jesus was life-sized, and he was sitting in my guest room.
“They’ve missed the point,” he wept, in great distress.
Without hesitation, I responded: “Teach me.”
And he did. I became his disciple, following my teacher and his path. Over the course of more than two decades, he showed me how his teachings had been misinterpreted through the millennia — whether innocently or deliberately, I don’t have the authority to speculate. He showed me that the kingdom of heaven refers to the here and now. That we can access it in this lifetime, through principles hidden in his teaching. That the promise of “abundant life” — which, in practice, looks like our needs being met as they arise — is faithful. And that when we live by these principles, we become co-creators with the Divine, and can expect miracles.
I have now lived by these principles for almost thirty years, and they have never once failed me.
And it makes me wonder: what if these teachings are meant to meet us in the dark. What if they are one way the light returns, quietly and concretely, in the very places we feel least resourced?
Because my experience didn’t stop at navigating life’s day-to-day. Within a short time of God showing up, I began to experience events that fall outwith the laws of the world in which we live. We call accounts with no possible explanation “miracles”, and I experienced many.
My first was to do with time.
The simple relationship we all rely on when it comes to speed, distance, and time is that time equals distance divided by speed. In ordinary life, if I drive at a certain speed, I can only arrive at my destination so fast. And yet I began to cover distances in a time that simply wasn’t possible at the speed I was travelling. It wasn’t a one-off. It happened often enough that I stopped thinking of time as a fixed constant, and started to understand it as something that can be stretched.
Another experience seemed to bend gravity.
A friend of mine, Meera, and I had started pooling resources to get by. She was a teacher on a very low income, which she supplemented with massage and reiki. I, meanwhile, had begun to “come into” money as I needed it, and when it happened I shared it with her. She repaid me whatever way she could: small jars of homemade ginger and garlic — the kind that warms you from the inside — and treatments that brought me real relief.
We started with massage, to ease some of the physical tension I lived with. But when I tried reiki, I found that when Meera and I were both in a meditative state, we fell into a shared attunement that deepened my connection with the Divine.
During one treatment I went so deeply into communion with God — held in a peace so complete it felt tangible — that everything else fell away. At some point I noticed my hands lifting. Slowly, steadily, they floated up from my sides towards the ceiling. I wasn’t trying to move them. There was no effort in my arms, no strain in my shoulders; they rose until my arms were fully extended and then they stopped, as if my arms were “strings” tethering them in place.
I remember calmly thinking: this is a bit strange.
And they just stayed there. For about ten minutes, my hands remained suspended, like helium-filled balloons, until Meera asked me to turn over, and I was able to bring them down.
As I rolled onto my front, a practical thought flickered through my mind: surely this can’t happen again? After all, the human body has limitations — the spine doesn’t bend that way.
I assumed whatever had happened would be over. How little I knew.
I lay on my front with my hands near my head, and it began again. My arms lifted from the bed. Then my head and chest began to rise too. I was dimly aware that my legs were lifting as well, but only dimly, because my attention was elsewhere. Inside, I was in profound peace. In my mind’s eye I felt myself being drawn upward towards a brilliant, bright light.
At the same time, I could feel Meera doing something unusual. She was repeatedly moving her hands along my spine, from the crown of my head down to the base, again and again, as if she was trying to keep something flowing and settled.
Later, she told me she’d been scared. She knew how deeply I loved the Divine, and she feared I was going to leave my body. She said she’d been moving energy along my spine to keep my soul grounded to my body.
When she told me, I felt only disappointment. I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if she hadn’t. I still wonder.
Then I had an experience that unsettled my understanding of what I’d been taught to believe about reality: about space, time, and what is and isn’t possible.
I had scheduled an afternoon of back-to-back appointments in Mutare, about 260km from Harare, where I lived and ran my office. It’s roughly a four-hour drive. In typical fashion back then, my morning was bedlam and I left far too late. If memory serves, I had perhaps two and a half hours for a journey that should have taken four. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling ahead, I panicked. My fight-or-flight system took over, and I drove like my life depended on it.
I was doing over 100mph when I came up fast behind a car pootling along at about 40. The road ahead looked clear. I pulled out to overtake. As I drew level, a third car pulled out of a side road just ahead, straight into my path.
When I say into my path, I mean it was there, perhaps a couple of seconds in front of me. There was no time for evasive manoeuvres, and even if there had been, the road at that point sat on a raised bank with nowhere to go. In a split second I knew, with absolute certainty, that a crash was inevitable — and at that speed, that we would all be killed.
And then, the next thing I knew, I was sitting in my car in a lay-by a hundred yards down the road.
I was unscathed. The road was empty. There was no sign of the other cars.
To this day, I do not know what happened.
I’m aware of the ordinary explanations we can reach for. Under extreme stress, memory can fragment. Perception of time can distort. Maybe I lost a sliver of awareness and “came to” after some rapid series of events my brain didn’t properly encode.
I can accept those possibilities, because they are real and human. But they don’t quite satisfy the experience as I lived it: the felt certainty of impact, followed by an abrupt, inexplicable discontinuity. It felt as though a segment of time had been removed, and my story had resumed in a new place.
Whether it was an anomaly of perception, a gap in memory, or something I don’t have language for, it left me with this: my confidence in simple, linear cause and effect was altered. I began to suspect that under certain conditions — conditions I do not claim to understand, let alone reproduce — the way reality behaves may be less straightforward than everyday life suggests.
I can’t explain it. I can only bear witness.
The final miracle I want to share with you is, for me, the most profound.
If you haven’t read my previous two posts, here’s the bare context. At twenty-four I was diagnosed with stage four endometriosis. By my late twenties, I’d been told again and again that I was infertile, with test after test — and a diagnosis of premature menopause — to back it up.
And then there’s the personal context. My marriage was marked by violence and infidelity, and when I sought help from my church I was met only with pressure to stay. Told that I had made my bed so I must lie in it, I stayed.
It was in the midst of those years that I had a vision. I saw myself on a beach in the UK, with a cliff at my back and a young boy beside me. To the side of us stood a man I knew through work — not my husband. I understood it to mean three things. That despite everything I’d been told about my body, I would have a son; that my son and I would move to the UK; and that the biological father would not be involved in bringing him up.
But I was married, and I believed vows made before God were unbreakable. Whatever the vision seemed to be saying, I would not act on it. The man had shown an interest in me and I made it clear I wasn’t available. In time, his interest faded, and we became friends.
Not long after, I intuited my husband was having another affair. Instead of confronting him, I told him he could do as he wished, that I would stay as his wife — but in name only. He lost his temper, tossed a table, and left. He had abandoned the marriage, and in the terms I’d been held to for years, those were the only “grounds” on which I could divorce him without defying God. My marriage was finally over.
I’d been single for around six months. My body’s story, on paper, was not a fertile one, but during that time, I felt something in me bloom. Not in my head — in my body. A quiet shift, like a thaw, as if something that had been shut down for years was softening, loosening, becoming available again. There was a ripeness. A readiness. Not frantic, not desperate, not something I could force. Just a sense that my body was turning towards life rather than away from it — as if a door had opened and I could feel the air change.
And then, on Good Friday, 2005, God spoke to me: “The universe is in perfect alignment for you to fall pregnant tonight.”
But I had no partner. So I reached out to my friend, the man from the vision, and asked if he would be willing to try with me to conceive. We both understood I might only get this one chance. Our son was conceived in sacred space, under the full African moon. His name — given to him when I learned I was six weeks pregnant — means “a fragrance pleasing to God”.
It was only when I returned to the UK on the advice of my health practitioner that I realised his due date was the Winter Solstice. My son was to be born on the day the light returned to us.
Hope with receipts.
Why I’m sharing this now
Before I left Zimbabwe, I had one final vision — a clear sense of a time ahead when humanity would need a message of hope. More than that, a time when many would want to know how to take hold of that hope and use it to change our trajectory for the good of humanity.
I knew that when the time came, I would recognise it by the feeling the vision placed in me. That time is now.
The writers of the Greek New Testament use more than one word for “time”. Chronos means measured time. It is linear time, the kind we count. It ticks forward — we can quantify it.
Kairos means the appointed time. It is the opportune moment. It carries purpose. It is not about quantity, but about significance.
Most of us are living under Chronos right now. We feel the clock bearing down, as though we are running out. We feel time slipping away faster than we can respond.
But I write here to offer you Kairos.
Kairos is the moment when the future does not merely arrive, but opens. It is the moment when the fixed begins to move. It is the moment in which miracles still happen. As grace. As a real change in what is possible.
That is why I named this publication Your Time Starts Now.
I am not offering a mood; I am offering a moment that asks something of us.
We cannot pretend the world feels bright. We are moving through a period of deep darkness in modern history. We should name it as darkness because clear sight matters.
Yet darkness has meanings beyond those which instil fear. Darkness can be a place where something real is forming, out of sight. Seeds do not open in bright sunlight —they split open underground.
The solstice gives this a sacred frame: darkness is not random, and it is not endless. It has rhythm. It has a boundary.
Darkness reaches its limit.
That word “limit” matters because it places a line under despair. It says the dark does not get to expand forever. It says something holds.
That is the logic of the solstice as lived experience. Darkness reaches its limit, and then it begins to release.
So I am speaking to the part of you that still knows this — even if you feel tired, even if you feel stretched thin, even if you have forgotten. Your time is not only what you have left on the clock. Your time is the moment in front of you that still carries purpose. Your time is the opening in which the good can be chosen, and the impossible can become possible. Your time starts now.
May this Winter Solstice meet you gently.
May the long nights give you rest, not despair. May it loosen what has tightened in you, and return you to what is steady and true. If you are carrying fear, may you feel your feet on the ground again. If you are carrying grief, may you be held. If you are carrying anger, may it be turned into courage.
And even if nothing looks different yet, may you trust the turning. May the light return to you in ways you can actually live on — one honest breath, one kind choice, one clear next step at a time.
In solidarity, as ever
— Lori
© Lori Corbet Mann, 2025
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Such an amazing piece