Photograph from Heaven

On October 25, the night before my oldest son, Riley's, 4th birthday I sat there thinking.  This was the first birthday we would be celebrating since Justin passed away.  It got me thinking about Justin's birthday, how his first birthday would have been, what we would have done for it, who all would join in the celebration, and what he would look like.  I have a frame on my wall that has a picture of Riley eating birthday cake on his first birthday and underneath that is a picture of Jacob eating at his first birthday eating his cake.  There is one more slot that is filled with our very first "family" picture.  I look at it often, I'm not sure why, but I remember thinking that we would put Justin's first birthday picture there, especially since our first family picture only includes one of our children, (I have recently decided to just put a picture of all three boys in there).  But I thought how cute it would be to have a picture of each child eating their first birthday cake, all in the same frame.  Now we would not get the chance to have that picture of Justin.  A thought then crossed my mind. I wish God would send photographs from Heaven, just like we send pictures to family that lives far away, I wish we could receive them from Heaven.  I think that would be "fair". I wondered what Justin looked like now at 5 1/2 months, what he would look like on his first birthday, 5th birthday, middle school, high school... I really wasn't upset about it, I was just wondering and thinking how I thought photographs from Heaven would be an awesome thing!
We found this great idea on Pinterest, where you fill up a bunch of helium balloons and on the morning of your child's birthday you put them in his room while he is still sleeping so that he wakes up to a room full of balloons. So the morning of Riley's birthday a took about 30 filled balloons up to his room while it was still pretty dark out and took some pictures of the room before the boys woke up and then took some more after. I got a new camera and it is a little advanced for me right now, but I took about 50 pictures.

I sat at the computer later to try to go through the pictures because a lot of them were the same.  Out of all the pictures there was just one that stood out quite a bit.  It had a huge "glare" in the middle of it and it looked like his room was filled with fog or smokey stuff.  I clicked on the thumbnail of the picture to make it bigger and at first it looked like Jacob was standing by the bed, once I realized it though, I remembered that there was no way he could have been it was one of the pictures that I took while it was still dark and both boys were sleeping in Riley's bed.  It looked like a little boy sitting in the toy box, when I showed my friend she said, "mary, don't freak out....but it kinda looks like Justin, he just wanted to celebrate Riley's birthday with him!"

  There are a lot of crazy things about that picture, and I do believe there is something special about it.  I don't believe in "ghosts" or "haunted" houses, I do believe in angels and demons, it talks about them in the bible, and with all that went on shortly before and after Justin's passing I have no doubts about that, but whether or not it was the camera freaking out or something else, I will always cherish it as my photograph from Heaven.

To see the actual photo (large) and variations of it (with the brightness removed) and a photo of what the room actually looked like, Go to www.justinsjesus.com and click the tab Photo From Heaven. :)