About Brad

Spiritual Journey

I should be dead. When I was 24, I was riding a motorcycle when a car pulled out right in front of me. I braked, but there wasn’t space enough to stop or room enough to swerve. Suddenly, just before impact, the bike turned sharply and took me—within inches of the car—up the side street the car had emerged from. I didn’t turn that bike. I couldn’t have. Something invisible took control and saved my life.

Twenty years later Ramoth told me something that would change every moment day of the rest of my days. “Now, why do you think you’ve been given this information?” he asked. I said the only words I could think of: “For a great spiritual purpose.” “Yes,” said Ramoth.

That spiritual purpose is why I wasn’t allowed to die at 24. The time has come to put that purpose into action.

Early Life…

I was born in Roanoke, Virginia, at 9:14 p.m. on Feb. 11, 1953. (Astrologers, what do you think?) My full name is John Bradley Burkholder. (Numerologists, have a go at it.) As a little boy, I had a brief conversation with a ghost. As a teenager, I considered becoming a preacher. In college, I became a poet. After college and graduate school, I worked, mostly teaching college English and creative writing. But I wasn’t happy. I had big questions, yet I couldn’t find satisfactory answers.

If you could say one sentence to the universe, it would be a question, wouldn’t it?

Poetry

Without having any particular reason to do it—except that I felt I had to—I became a poet. You’ve probably never seen a poem I wrote. I never cared about publishing. For most of my life, I’ve said that I write for God first, the dead poets second, and everyone else third. It’s funny, though—my spiritual life opened up precisely because I’m a poet. I have worked hard to perfect my craft, though, and I’ve even invented a type of poetry all my own. I’m not into forcing poetry on people, but in my blogs I’ll tell how being a poet ties in with everything I’ve learned since 1997.