I was six years old when I was sitting in a rocking chair in my parent’s parsonage.  The National Geographic in which I was engrossed featured gorgeous pictures of Yellowstone National Park. I saw the majestic wooden beams of Yellowstone’s main lodge and dining room.  “One day,” I said, “I’m going to go there and eat in that dining room.”  Many years later, with two children in tow, Lois and I approached the counter of Yellowstone’s Lodge and said, “We would like a table for four please.”  The woman said, “Honey, for you to eat in this dining room, you would have had to make a reservation six months ago.”  Then, I heard the voice of another woman behind the counter, “He is in luck.  We have just had a cancellation on a table for four scheduled for this time.”  We were seated.  While I was eating a meal of Cutthroat Trout, we looked through the opened side door at one end of the Lodge and watched Old Faithful erupt right on schedule.  That precise scene was one I had seen as a six year old.

     There are countless times when the impossible is achieved at the moment we need to have it happen.  We are reminded of what Moses and the Israelites experienced when they were trapped between the Red Sea in front of them and an Egyptian army of charioteers bearing down on them on the other end.  They were caught at Pi Hahiroth.  Moses held out his staff and a strong east wind blew all night.  Not only did it drive the water apart but the land became dry so that the Israelites could cross safely. (Exodus 14:21)

     All around us is a silent and almost unrecognizable support system that knows more about what we need and desire than what we know ourselves.  When we look back over our lives, we may be able to pinpoint the small, almost undetectable movements that caused us to choose a particular summer job, attend a church, meet a pivotal person, choose a particular professor, or accept an invitation to a seminar that changed the way we perceive our experiences.

     When I was appointed to come to St. Matthew’s, realtor Thelma Harvey, carved out an enormous part of her schedule to show us countless houses in Bowie when we learned that we had to purchase our first home. We saw countless houses, none that we really liked.  We chose a dwelling on Angel Place and I later returned to Weichert realtors to sign the papers.  We both knew that house was not what we wanted but we had nearly exhausted Thelma with our indecision.

     As I was signing papers, Thelma’s phone rang.  When she hung up, I asked her if the caller wanted to sell his home.  She indicated that he did. I said, “Call him back and see if he is interested in my looking at the house.”  She did and he said, “Come over.”  The house was perfect, a lovely rancher on a cul-de-sac just a mile and a half from the church.  When I returned to Thelma’s office, the phone rang again.  It was that seller.  He said, “My wife and I have just talked.  While we had planned to sell our home six months from now, we want to sell it to the Stetlers.”

     We had not prayed nor had we asked the universe for any special favors.  We did not know what we were looking for.  We carried ourselves with an open spirit to whatever comes and our spirit guides were busy working out the details.

     Of course there will be countless nay-sawyers who cannot imagine anyone believing in such a fantasy.  What is unique about spiritual guidance, even when guidance comes when we are not requesting it, is that it does not matters what other people think about it.  Their orientation to life may be different and only they can make sense of how they arrived at where they are in life.  The more we trust the pipeline to supply us with what we need, the more responsive our guides become.

     There are a number of reasons for this.  One is the quality of the relationship we have established with our spirit guides.  Another is that there is a support system in place that provides guidance to help us achieve the purpose for our being born.  When we are awake and alert spiritually, we detect that there are forces at work that allow us to meet certain people, to be at specific places at precisely the right time, to connect with abrasive people who help us perfect our skills of spirit, to read a book that changes our perspectives, to be confronted with a mirror that points to the pigmy self within us and to be propelled into taking a detour we would never have chosen.  We may have heard the saying, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.”

     A central theme that can evoke our thinking is that the quality of our experience during any moment will depend on the level of our relationship with our guides.  All of us resonate with the spiritual dimension from a different frequency.  Jesus could commune with two apparitions on a mountain top, for example, while his disciples became so frightened they threw themselves to the ground in terror. People, whose belief systems cannot be open to what seems impossible, will never experience anything other than what their understanding can accept.  They are held captive by their inability to peer into the unknown and accept the energy pattern that they find.

     The task of our guides is not to lend us their expertise, but to enable us to develop our own.  They are there to support our creativity, to enable us to follow what Joseph Campbell called, our bliss.  We can feel we are self-sufficient and what we receive is our inheritance.  We can live a collaborative life with guides and soar to levels our self-sufficiency would never have allowed us to reach.  The only proof that this is true is the confirmation that comes from our experience.  What is vital and true for us may sound like insanity to those uninitiated.

     Do not be surprised if others do not subscribe to the mythologies that drive our choices, patterns that have molded our character and have allowed us to take gigantic risks prompted by our intuition.  We are not here to please others.  The tools that develop from guidance from an invisible world will be ours alone to use.  No one can take away our experiences.