Interview with the Osbornes, Part IV, Gold Dust and Angel Feathers

In the first three parts of the Osborne story, we learned about Myra’s two life-changing visions of Jesus Christ, her sensitivity to ethereal realms, Charles’s Baptism of the Holy Spirit, and his experience with deliverance ministry. In this last section, Charles discusses gold dust, angels feathers, Marian apparitions, aliens, and his brother’s NDE.

Gold dust

Our discussion of gold dust began when I mentioned the fact that in Medjugorje, pilgrims would often discover that the silver-colored chains on their rosaries had turned to gold. There is also a DVD movie called “Finger of God,” by Darren Wilson, that documents testimony of gold fillings appearing in teeth during a worship service. Wilson has also filmed Christian speakers who manifest gold dust all over themselves as they preach. At that point, Charles had his own gold dust story to share, since the phenomenon sometimes occurs in his church. I asked if he had ever gotten it on film.

"No, because that’s never been our focus. Sometimes it lasts, sometimes it fades. There was a time when I was very negative about those things, because I’d heard accounts of it being faked, and I thought it was all nuts and was just gimmicks. Then we had Kathy Walters come. She gets gold dust all over her. She gets covered. I had the minister watch her, knowing that she gets these kinds of manifestations, or is reported to, and these little pinpoints of light began to form on her face as she talked about Jesus and the grace of God. They grew until it became gold colored flecks that were all over her face.

 

"I had breakfast with her at IHOP, and as we were sitting there, this wave of perfume began to fall down over us to where you couldn’t smell the ham and eggs or the maple syrup. And she began to talk about the grace of God, and said the gold, the manifestation of glory only happens in a climate of grace where people are free in the Lord and you’re not walking in legalism, but you’re walking in the grace of God, and as she talked like that, these tiny little points of light began to form on her face again, and before long she was covered over with this gold dust. And uh, it was just the most interesting thing to watch it, sitting over a table in a booth. I’ve been with her many times, and gold dust would just shoot across her arms.

"Hers kind of hangs around. You can wipe it off and take it home with you. Our praise team, when they worship on Tuesday night, sometimes the silver dust falls on them, and it tends to fade away afterwards. So sometimes those manifestations seem to fall out of the sky so to speak, and other times they seem to exude from inside the body, like it came from within somehow, and then seems to go back where it came from. I don’t understand it, but I have certainly witnessed it enough, and I’m satisfied it’s not faked."

Angel feathers

"Well, sometimes a feather will fall, and … it sounds crazy to even talk about it, but I had totally discounted this kind of thing. When someone would show me a feather that had fallen during the service, I politely looked at it, and didn’t want to discourage them, but I really thought they were nuts. So one Sunday, I was ministering in a prayer line, and I was ministering prophetically, and I turned to the right to collect my thoughts. As I turned, no higher than my waist, a fluffy white feather was floating in the air. It was about the size of my thumbnail. I was so shocked (chuckle)… I thought, what’s that? And as I looked at it, it wafted as on a breeze, and then it just blinked out of existence. I saw it as clearly as I saw my own hand.

"The next week, we had a visiting prophet who was going to minster, so we pushed back the altar. It’s just a portable table, and had a floor length skirt, and we pushed it back. That feather that I had seen the week before was lying at the foot of the altar. I didn’t say anything because it was so nuts. The next day I picked up the mail, and a friend who has the gift of prophecy had sent me a letter, written the previous Wednesday, and detailed the exact prophecy the lady had given there in church. The Lord would open the heavens, and glory would be poured out, and sometimes feathers would fall in the church, and when it did, it would be a reminder of the open heaven and the ministry of angels on our behalf. Every now and then feathers will fall down. And when anyone gets one, they feel it’s a little love token from Jesus and a reminder that we’re being watched over.

Marian apparitions

My readers know from my four-part blog post that I am very skeptical about Marian apparitions. However, when I asked Charles what he thought about them, I determined to listen with an open mind.

"Well, you know Anglicans are very diverse. So there are high church Anglicans who practice devotion to the Virgin Mary. In Wisconsin, I was rector of a church that was the home of the American Proto-Shrine of the Lady of Walsingham. The Lady of Walsingham is an English shrine. In 1061 when Edward the Confessor was King of England, a Saxon noblewoman had a vision of the Virgin Mary. Three times she was taken up in the Spirit and saw the Virgin Mary and the Virgin Mary took her to Nazareth and showed her the holy house where she had lived, and the childhood home of Jesus, and told her to build a replica. So she had a wooden replica made to those specs. And in digging around and building it, they dug up a spring, and the spring kind of became like the Lourdes of the day. And in the height of the Middle Ages, until the shrine of the Lady of Loretta was established in Italy, which claimed to be the actual holy house itself, Walsingham was one of the great shrines of Europe, and people made pilgrimage there from everywhere.

"Henry VIII endowed the shrine, and prayed for a child, and it was one of the great shrines that he destroyed [1538] when he annexed the great monastic houses and their wealth, and burned their great statues in the street. And so the shrine collapsed at the Reformation. So in the Anglican-Catholic revival…there was a revival of Catholic practice in the Anglican Church in the 1800’s… and in the 1920’s [1922], the parish priest in Walsingham had a new statue made, and it became a place of pilgrimage. And our church in Wisconsin, we had water from the holy well. People would come each year and would pray for healing and would be sprinkled with water from the holy well in England. It would be like water from Lourdes.

"So one night in the shrine, we were having a prayer service, and I anointed a lady with the water, and she fell under the power, and the power of God was electrifying. And as she lay on the tiles of the shrine, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary with light emanating out from her, and that increased her love for Jesus rather than her adoration of Mary, so I think that’s kind of a positive experience. So I think some apparitions of Mary are real and some aren’t."

OK, how about Fatima where the child was told to have Russian dedicated to her Immaculate Heart, which means her pure, sinless conception?

"Well, I’m always dubious about things like that, but I’ll say that I took a Baptist friend to the shrine of the Lady of Fatima near Niagra Falls, and we got some holy water out of the shrine. This Spirit-filled Baptist lady had a benign, scaly skin growth that was on her back, just right up at the bra line, so her bra rubbed it raw all the time, so it was a constant irritation. So she took some of that water, and she went to bed and she could just barely reach it. A drop of that water fell on that growth. And that night it fell off in the bed, and she was completely healed. So I don’t know if that was the blessing of the water or what. Uh, I think that some Marian devotion crosses the line in my mind and elevates the Virgin Mary too high. But at the same time, I believe in the communion of saints and that there is an ongoing relationship between the living and the dead. And so the idea of people in heaven praying for us does not seem like a strange concept. So I don’t like the exaggerated side of Mary. So for instance, I think that Mexican Catholicism is a cult of the Virgin Mary, but I think that there’s a more balanced way of thinking about it."

Rick Osborne’s near death experience

"He met the Lord around that time, but he didn’t follow through. And then, several years ago, he was severely injured on the job and lost a foot in the injury. In the course of the many surgeries he had to have, he really thought he was going to die. One day he was in and out of consciousness, and he had an experience in which he was out of his body. He was floating over an area that had rolling green hills. Behind the hills, he saw this great light shining. There were streams of people floating towards this light, and he thought, “Finally, this is it. I get out of this body.” He felt this radiance of the love of God wash over him, and all the pain was gone.

"Then he heard a voice calling his name, and he looked down, and there stood our father’s mother and her mother, both in their twenties, like we had seen a very young photograph of them rather than in advanced years like we knew them. And our grandmother said, 'Stop, Rick, you can’t go now. You’ve got to go back. But everything’s going to be alright.' And so suddenly he was back in his body wracked with pain. And that experience has kept him. He went through a horrible divorce and other trials, but he has this deep assurance that a plan is unfolding in his life."

I expressed surprise that it was Rick rather than Charles that had the spooky experiences, since it was Charles that initiated the séance. Surely the experience terrified him.

"It did scare him, and afterward he had some very frightening experiences. Like one night, we were sharing a room, and he had heard steps coming down the steps, and he assumed it was one of the pet dogs, and he walked over to the door, and there was a scratching at the door, and then he heard a harsh voice call him by name. It said, 'Rick, come out here.' And it just terrified him. He just waited to make sure nothing broke in. He was so terrified he woke me up. And then another time, he lifted up off the bed in the air, you know, and when he was released and crashed back on the bed, he woke me up. He had some terrifying experiences like that, but he never actively practiced anything occult."

Aliens

In our discussion of aliens, not surprisingly Charles thought that there must be something demonic about them. He discussed as best he could the essence of another dimension, which he calls the second heaven where demons and angels are active, where our physics fades out and another emerges. He surmises that demons manifest as aliens in order to pull us over into that dimension. UFOs can be just as real as gold dust and gold fillings and can dematerialize the same way. I have to admit that both of us are/were still groping for an understanding of that phenomenon and for the language to express it, but he did have an interesting surprise for me.

"I have a friend in Memphis, she is in her 80’s, and her husband was at Roswell, and he was later in the Korean War and was captured and was considered MIA to the present day. But he told her that he was actually there at the crash site when they initially investigated it, and he swore by the story that there were alien bodies and actually a spacecraft as opposed to the balloon story that was disseminated later on. And he wouldn’t give more details, but he had always held that something really unusual had happened there and that it had been misreported. And he never talked about it because he was kind of afraid to.

Thus ended the most remarkable conversation I've ever had.