Are U Crazy?

Have you ever seen or heard something that you could not quite explain and that when you tried to explain what just happened your friends look at you thinking man this guy must be out of his mind.  Something like this has actually happened to me before.  One night back when I was in high school a friend of mine and I both saw something that we still can not explain even to this day.  It was around two o’clock at night while we were relaxing out on the porch when something suddenly appeared out of the sky.  A bright bluish-green object the size of a hockey puck was just sitting there hovering in the sky.  Suddenly this object dropped about three feet in the sky in the matter of seconds and then stopped again.  After about twenty seconds of hovering in its new location, the unidentified object blazed of into the sky and disappeared into thin air.  With a look of shock on both of our faces we ran inside to tell everyone what we had just seen.  Of course the reaction that we got from everyone we told the story to was not quite the reaction that we were hoping to receive.   We were laughed at, called drunk idiots and were even thought to be out of our minds by many of the people that our story was shared to.  Even through all of the ridicule and name calling, we still know what we saw was real and we still have no explanation for what it could have been.  Since that night we decided amongst ourselves that we would stop telling people the story of what we saw in order to keep people from thinking that we were just a couple of nut balls who needed to be locked up in a mental institution.   

In most religions that I know of a prophet is thought as being a messenger of god.  Someone who has heard or has had visions from an unknown source and is spreading the message of that unknown source.  Though at the time that they are spreading this message, they are often looked at like they are crazy and are labeled as outcasts of society.  It is only years later that these messages are understood and the messengers are given back the dignity that is rightfully deserved.  In the novel, A Question of Power by Bessie Head, the main character Elizabeth is living a life full of different visions that have her being judged as a crazy person and incapable of being able to take care of herself.  While Elizabeth is experiencing these different mental breakdowns, she also is experiencing visions of events or “prophecies” of apparent future actions and events.  Some of Elizabeth’s visions come to her by Sello who is considered to be a god like figure but is also somewhat evil as well.  Other visions come from Medusa who shows her the real side of Africa and helps Elizabeth through her times of trouble.  Were these visions of god acting through the different characters or were these just another way of Elizabeth’s mind trying to find a way to recover from her temporary insanity?   

Personally I feel that Elizabeth’s visions are not actual prophecies from god but rather a figment of her imagination and a way of her mind figuring out how to cure itself.  Prophecies usually have a purpose or direction that they send the person to fulfill in order for the betterment of society.  They are messengers of god spreading his own words.  Elizabeth never was considered to be a messenger.  These visions that she was having were for her own recovery and not for the benefit of her own society.  She was never a leader but rather a person who was sent to a hospital for having a breakdown in order to help her recover.  Yes through all of the suffering that Elizabeth endured these visions did help her grow but that is just about the only person that it did help.

Sometimes some things that happen out there in the world can just not be explained.  Is Nostradamus considered to be a prophet because he predicted a couple of events in the future or do we help out his cause by finding different ways to link these predictions to events that would have happened no matter what he said?  Did a god like figure of Jesus really come down from the heavens or was it just an amazing man whose story got blown out of proportion?  Does David Blaine contain some magical powers not known to man or is he simply just an incredible magician?  These men could all be considered prophets of their time.  Does Elizabeth fit into this category?  I am one that believes the visions were not prophecies but rather mind trying to recover.