From The Chief Editor's Desk...

A really strange thing happened the other evening.

My wife was saying goodnight to my son, and spent a few minutes snuggling with him in his bed. She told him, "You know, mommy and daddy waited a long time for you to get here. We love you so much! What took you so long?"

Without much hesitation, my son gave her an answer. "Well, I had to get old and die first. And then I was put in your tummy."

As if that wasn't chilling enough, he went on to describe how he was an old man who had made a lot of money, and who was a chicken farmer. Ryan currently shepherds over his small flock of 11 hens. It would certainly go a long way to explain his fascination with his chickens.

I still get chills just writing this all down.

I had no idea of how common this whole "past lives" thing is with children. There was this three year old little boy (YouTube video) who they think might be the reincarnation of Lou Gherig. At three years of age, he played baseball with the ability of an eight year old, despite his parents or other role models not having any real interest in baseball. He knew intimate details of Lou Gherig's life, including Gherig's dislike for Babe Ruth (and the reason why). Then there's the story (YouTube video) of another little boy who seemed to be recalling a previous life as a WWII fighter pilot. Night after night, he'd awaken from a nightmare, screaming "Plane. On fire. Little man can't get out."

Here's another YouTube video summarizing the stories of five children who recall past lives. We could do this all day long. It's not hard or uncommon to find these types of stories, once you start looking for them. Here's an article on the HealthyWay website. There are scientists and doctors who are now exploring not whether or not reincarnation is a reality, but how it might fit into our current understanding of life and death and being.

I'm not one who, for the most part, doesn't believe much of the stuff about reincarnation, ghosts, past lives, the occult, or any other such things I usually consider nonsensical. But, it's a little harder to dismiss when it involves your own child. His answers were rather "matter of fact" in their nature.

Most children who experience these "revelations" experience them between the ages of three and seven. But my son has dealt with some learning delays for all of his life. His speech and language deficits have made it, up until now, difficult to communicate effectively or easily. He's quite smart, and day after day, he amazes his mom and me with just how smart he really is. Math is his favorite subject, and he's good at it. And get him on a topic he really likes … like Transformers and Minecraft … and he can tell you everything you might ever want to know. So the fact that they are just coming to light with him at almost nine years of age makes sense.

For the record, I also think that us being the only intelligent life in the Universe is a statistical impossibility. I'm just more in the camp of the late, great physicist Stephen Hawking. He claims we have much to fear from "meeting" other intelligent beings from across the Universe, since they will obviously be far more technologically superior to us (after all, they had to figure out a way to traverse great distances very quickly to get to us), and thus hold us at a distinct disadvantage. From there, we could be extinguished or enslaved, and there'd be little we could do about it. Hawking saw other "intelligent beings" from across the cosmos coming here as a threat, more like an invasion. It's nice to hope for a more benevolent first meeting (I would even consider something like the alien in the original (and much superior) version of "The Day The Earth Stood Still" movie a benevolent first meeting), but we had better prepare for something more like the depiction of alien beings in Independence Day and the TV series "V", just in case.

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This month's cover was designed by Meemaw, and commemorates the annual Fourth of July Independence Day holiday in the U.S.

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Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity, prosperity … and continued good health!