I met with a married couple. Their son had died five years earlier. They’d felt no closeness or closure since. Their still-unprocessed pain seemed unbearable.

An hour into our conversation, the man who’d been mostly quiet began to share. He spoke of a time when he and his wife had contemplated quietly in a sacred place and experienced something wonderful.

“It was like a dream,” he said, “but I was wide awake. My son came to me. We were in a beautiful train station. He took me over to the counter and bought a ticket. Then he looked at me and said, ‘Now I can go places I couldn’t go before.’”

This grieving father then changed the subject and started talking about something else entirely. I raised my hands like I was stopping traffic and said, “Wait a minute.” I asked him, “If a complete stranger shared that experience with you, what would you call it?”

He thought and waited, and with a tentative inflection that sounded more like a question than an answer, he said, “A vision.”

I picked up the metaphorical mirror and reflected his words back to him. “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Your son came to you in a vision and told you he was alright and now he could go places he couldn’t go before.”

Tears streamed down the father’s cheeks. For the first time, he realized it was real. His son had come to him and delivered the exact message he had searched for. In his sorrow, he’d convinced himself it was all imagined, but it wasn’t. It was real!

Your answers are closer than you think. Trust them. Honor them. They are real.