(September 18, 2023 at 12:12 pm)FrustratedFool Wrote:
Sure. There are lots of smaller ones, there are a few big ones, here's a few:
1. On a Sunday, while deployed, after a particularly evening full of booze and porn, I woke up to the usual hangover and depression. I walked to the Commissary (base grocery store) with a hangover. After getting my booze and food, I walked back stopping at the bowling alley with a headache. Sat there trying to clear my head looking around at the situation I was in and the environment, I heard someone calling "you don't need that" as they approached. My particularly irreligious friend swears he didn't say that, as we sit and chat about nothing in particular. He asked if I wanted to go to chapel and check it out with him. I obliged, left my bags there, my head cleared and that was part of my call back to God, from walking away as a teen. I haven't got drunk or needed to look at porn since. Soon as I got back to the states, we started going to church.
2. I was feeling unhealthy and needed a chiropractic adjustment. Went to a new doc, he took xrays and said I needed to go to the ER for a pulmonary embolism he noticed on the Xray. He showed me, I still didn't believe, he reimaged and it was still there. Went to the ER they looked at the xrays and ran some tests and verified I should keep a close watch and verified I new the signs of a stroke and heart attack, they released me for a follow up. Go to my PCM next day (who is also a church member), he ordered xrays and said we should wait to hear back, but he prayed with me. I sent to go get the Xrays and it was gone. Went back to the chiropractor to the very same Xray machine it had shown up on twice and it was gone.
3. I got pretty frustrated with God at one point and didn't understand why I had to go through pain. Made a list of eevery single horrible thing I did, and was done to me, and everything I deemed bad in no particular order, just as I remembered them. I threatened God to prove this was His will and why. Over the next 3 weeks, every single one of the things I wrote down were used as a testimony, or conversation starter, or affected someone else close to me in the written order. When my list was crossed off, I never doubt His will in my life circumstances after that, good or bad.
4. Many times when teaching or speaking, I lose conscious control of what I'm saying. Kind of like you stop listening in a conversation and drift off into inattention. It apparently comes out coherently and passionately. Every time I've had someone come up after and say this and this was exactly what they were praying on needing an answer for.
5. Money just getting sent to us where the amount matches an unexpected bill no one outside of my wife and I knew about. Sometimes gifts from friends, sometimes ird tax refunds or refunds from overpaying medical bills or something.
there's a lot, but it's a start.
"There ought to be a term that would designate those who actually follow the teachings of Jesus, since the word 'Christian' has been largely divorced from those teachings, and so polluted by fundamentalists that it has come to connote their polar opposite: intolerance, vindictive hatred, and bigotry." -- Philip Stater, Huffington Post
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
always working on cleaning my windows- me regarding Johari
