Comforting Reassurance

Today I got one of those comforting reassurances from God that He is walking with me. Not because I am any more special that anyone else, but because He has a special word for all of us.

I attended an earlier Sunday church service this morning because a friend had asked for the elders in that service to pray for me. I was accompanied by my eldest son and my sister who is visiting me from Hong Kong. The rest of my family was at home as my daughter was down with a bug she caught from her first week back at kindie. 

In the Methodist church liturgy, we start off the service with a Call to Worship, which is a responsive reading based on a Bible passage. This morning's passage was from the book of Psalms. I read responsively but had not taken notice of where specifically the verses were from until we got towards the end of the reading:  

How sweet are your words to my taste, 

sweeter than honey to my mouth! ~Psalm 119:103

This is the same verse I ended my last blogpost with. I googled. And there are 31,173 verses in the Bible. Still it could all just be a pure coincidence right? 

I choose not to believe that it is a mere coincidence because I have had similar experiences in the past. It's happened once in a dream, another time when I was in a small town in Tasmania. Recently, prior to being diagnosed with lymphoma, I uttered words of reassurance whilst doing a morning run which is most out of character for me - I am usually completely out of breath and concentration when I run, and would not outwardly verbalise my thoughts, definitely not 3 times. The reassurance that God loves me to prepare me for the impending journey. Enough of such experiences to know that it is not my imagination.  And there are many friends who share similar experiences in their walk with God, especially when they've been through a difficult path.

Special reminders to encourage me along the journey from the One who molded me. Yet they are not too different from my reminders to my kids that I love them and that they are special to me. What's else should we expect from a living and loving God?

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, 

neither angels nor demons,

neither the present nor the future,

nor any powers, 

neither height nor depth, 

nor anything else in all creation, 

will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

~ Romans 8:38-39