Everyday Supernaturalনমুনা

Hearing the Ordinary

After some time, I began to notice God was speaking to me through books. Again it’s normal, ordinary and unspectacular, but it was his voice nonetheless. I’ve always enjoyed reading but I began to find that I’d pick a book off a shelf, seemingly at random, and it would end up speaking profoundly into what was going on in my life at that time. This didn’t happen all the time, and as you read this it may seem like mere coincidence, but it’s happened so frequently that it’s now something I expect. I see God’s hand behind it.

I remember praying one week about what to speak on at church and the thought came into my head that I should speak on death. I’d never given a talk on death in my life and I was pretty reluctant to start then! The very next thing that happened was I noticed a book on my shelf. It had been there for years; I’d never opened it and can’t remember how I even got it. I suddenly had a sense I needed to read it. I said aloud, “If that book is on death, then that’s what I’ll speak on.” To my amazement the whole book was a meditation on death and dying.

When I look back I wonder if God began to help me join the dots with scriptures and books to encourage me that I wasn’t totally deaf to his voice.

As I began to grow in confidence that God was speaking to me, I started to practice prophecy a little more. When I look back, one of the things that surprises me is how unspiritual it felt. I had always assumed, when I’d heard other people’s stories, that something akin to electricity had raced through their body and they had announced a message that had just been burned into their souls.

When I started to practice, it didn’t work like that. I went through a season of trying to have a prophecy a day for somebody. I’d sit in my room at university and ask God to give me a word for someone. Usually, after a while, someone would come to mind and I’d get a Bible verse, a picture or something else. I still wasn’t feeling confident, so I decided to text people the prophecies—it saved me the embarrassment of getting them wrong face to face! I did this for two or three weeks, and I’m pretty certain that I sent out a lot of “blessed thoughts” rather than prophecies. Most of my texts went something like, “I see a waterfall and God says he loves you…”

Then one day God brought to mind a friend who I hadn’t been in touch with for months. In my mind I saw a picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it. I texted her the picture and a message that I thought went with it, “You’ve only taken one bite out of your life, and the Lord wants you to know that there is so much more to enjoy.” It felt pretty simple, but she texted right back, “That’s amazing, thank you so much.” She explained she had been due to get married but about nine months before had broken off the engagement. I didn’t realize it, but that was the very morning she would have been walking down the aisle.