Verses that touched me this morning

Pharoah's daughter went down to the river to bathe -- Exodus 2:5
Wow!!! Think of that. A small little decision like that is direction and guidance from God....PLUS God's timing. And deliverance is made for God's people. If she had bathed elsewhere or earlier or later.... what would have happened to Moses?

The chastisement of our peace was upon him. -- Isaiah 53
Mental healing is in the redemption. So many illnesses come from not being peaceful. There are so many emotional wounds in the world. We often think of Jesus as the great physician of our bodies but he was despised and rejected of men so that our spirits can be healed.

Whatever things are lovely, true, joyous, of good report. -- Phillipians
Here I was praying to God for manifestation of my healing... but in my mind I imagine, "well, will I be able to go on an airplane? No, I imagine myself getting very tired for the entire trip." My imagination needs to be restored and trained to see good things.

And last but not least a God wink.

Backstory: when my son was just a year old I was sitting on the bed when I heard quite loudly the holy spirit say "Rest." I wasn't resting. I got up and went to the other side of my bedroom to pick up my son. He had taken four letter cubes from the pile of alphabet blocks and had spelled out in perfect order R E S T.
I was amazed...and yet... I didn't really take the advice. I should have. Maybe learning to rest back then would have spared me this fibromyalgia.

This morning I was lying in bed and the same son -- now 21-- sat beside me. I kept telling myself to rest and to stay in bed until 9:30 or 10:30 just to recoup from another night of sleeplessness. I told myself to do that every morning. But theer I was...about to get up when older son decides to come and lie down beside me on the bed. I was reading a devotional so I said to him, "Pick any number from 1 to 472." He said, 372. I turned to the page and this was the verse it was talking about: "God blessed the sabbath day because he rested." Then the devotional went on to talk about the value of resting.

This kinda stuff happens to Christians all the time. So what does one say when atheists who have never experienced these kind of things tell us that God doesn't exist?

Praise God for guidance

God guides us sometimes by speaking to our spirits. The rational mind often doesn't accept it but after a while we use our faith and trust that God's people DO hear His voice. The Bible says, "God's sheep hear his voice." Some of us don't like being called sheep, but I don't mind. It reminds me that I have a great shepherd who looks after me.

I've done many a thing that seems irrational and yet I knew that it was God guiding me.

Three examples:

I once went into a GNC at the mall. A man walked past me. I heard "in my spirit" a voice that said: "This is so-and-so. He's the general manager of such-and-such a radio station." The name of the person and his title and his workplace. I walked over to the man and quite irrationally said, "Hi, are you so and so?" He said, "I am." I did not behave irrationally, mind you. I didn't go over and tell him that the holy spirit had told me who he was. So I had some sense. But still, it is kind of irrational to believe some weird bit of information one hears in one's spirit.

Another time, I was working on my novel Wind Follower. I decided on a whim to make the main character an epileptic and needed a name to call the illness. I decided on "the falling sickness." Wrote a scene. Got up from my computer. On a lark I turned on the TV and flipped through the channel. I saw some guys in togas. Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. As I listened I heard one character say, "well you know Ceasar has the falling sickness."

Another time, I finished writing a scene where a character tells another character he should change his name from Stevie to Steve because Stevie sounds so childish. I went upstairs and although I NEVER turn the radio on at night, turned it on for some strange reasons. A guy was calling in to the DJ. He said, "My girlfriend thinks I should quit calling myself Stevie because it's too childish." Kid you not.

I remember once I got some money and I was wondering who to give my tithe to. I said a prayer, "Lord, who should I give this tithe to?"

Immediately the name of a friend across the country was impressed upon me. It was so strange to hear that name in my heart that I suddenly stood still. I thought, "that was weird!" Generally, guidance didn't come so quickly and the name had come so suddenly and so clearly after the prayer...I found myself thinking that the idea had come from my own mind. And yet, it was so weird to suddenly get this girl's name in my head. I decided to tithe the money to her.

Then, I said...I could send her a check...but I had bounced checks recently and I was bounce-wary. All I needed was to pay $50 to my bank for bouncing a check written as a gift to a friend, and then my friend's bank would also charge her for the bounce. So a gift check for $50 would cost $150 by the time everything was said and done. (Okay, I get nervous and like I said I was very nervous about bouncing a check.)

Then I thought I would send the money as cash. But then I got nervous about that. Cash might get lost in the mail. Then I thought about a money order. But I didn't want to go to the bank or the post office to write a money order. Hey, it's cold in winter in NY and I didn't want to deal with it.

I decided on pay-pal. But I had to wait until the check I had received cleared and went into my paypal account.

Anyway, one night about four days after this quandary and decision, I went online to check if my money was in paypal. It wasn't. Later that night, instead of going to bed, I went downstairs again and for some weird reason (thank you, God) turned on the computer and went online to paypal. The money was there!

I transferred the money from my paypal account to my friend's paypal account.

The next morning my friend emailed me. It seems that the night before -- the night i felt the need to as transfer the money to my friend's account -- my friend was driving home from the hospital with her sick husband. She was miles away from home. Maybe 40 miles. And had run out of gas. She had no money left in her checking account and on a whim (thank you, God) decided to check her paypal account. Voila, the money I had sent her was in it. She hadn't even expected it. But that money got her gas and got her home from the hospital.

I love when God does stuff like that. It makes me feel that yes I do hear from God. It makes my friend know that God is aware of her. It makes us both know that God is aware of the future and provides for the future in the present. Isn't our God good? IT just makes me so happy when stuff like this happens. And they happen all the time. Doesn't it just make you roll your eyes when some atheist says that only idiots think that God exists? Hey, if this kind of lovely stuff is what happens to idiots, may I be an idiot forever!

Thank you Jesus.

I cannot tell you the amount of times my life and my family's life have been saved or my children's life by trusting the irrational.

We Christians call that kind of thing "God winks." It the situation is death-defying, we call them "testimonies of God's protection." These events are odd and a Christian's trust in them is utterly irrational. But it gives us a feeling of being loved. And while everyone has some odd thing happen to them once in a while, these things tend to happen incredibly frequently to Bible-believers. Praise ye the Lord.