God Winks - Gifted

When I was 19 years for only 2 weeks I got married.  I won't even go into how long ago that was.  My husband was in college and pastoring 4 small churches.  We lived in Waterloo, Alabama which is the end of the road - any road.  We were the youngest people in the small town by about 40 years.  My best friend was my neighbor, a retired Methodist Minister's wife who was 72 at the time.  Mrs. Jaggers was very small and fragile looking except for her hair which looked like the pictures you see of Albert Einstein.  She looked like she had been electrocuted but she was special.    She  and her husband gave me a wonderful gift when I met them.  They told me that they thought I was a smart young woman and they wanted to pay my college tuition while I lived there.  What a gift that changed my life.  Audie was still in college and there was no way we could pay for two college degrees at that time. 

 Every day Mrs. Jaggers would walk with me around our little neighborhood and tell me stories of her life.  I am sure she was trying to mentor me as a minister's wife as I was clueless.   One day she told me about the birth of her 5 sons.  She then told me about the birth of her one daughter.  She told me that her daughter had died at birth and she cried as she relayed the story.  In my young, naive mind I thought, " that was really a long time ago and I would expect her to be over that by now."  But I remembered that day. We moved from that little community but Mrs. Jaggers remained in my heart and life.  

Six years went by and I found myself as a young mother who had just had a baby girl die.  I was devastated.  Even though I had a 2 1/2 year old son and another newborn daughter, I was very mad and did not understand why God would let my child die.  Several people tried to comfort me during that time but nothing worked.  I did not want to hear one more person say, "God needed a little rose bud in Heaven."  Are you kidding me?  God needed my daughter to make a rosebud?  I know they were trying to just say something but it did not work.  One night I got a call from a little 78 year old friend who said "God will come to you."  I could believe that message because it came from Mrs. Jaggers and I had seen her life and I remembered.

It was at this time that I two prints that I loved.  One was a little blond boy who looked like my son and the other was a little girl.  I asked Audie if I could get these prints framed.  I told him maybe they would be a reminder to me of the children I had and I would let go of the grief of the little one I did not have.  He told me that our hospital bills were so huge at the time that we really did not have frames in our budget. Now, I am just being real here.  I said, "Not only does my child die but I cannot get these damn pictures framed!"

Two weeks passed and one day I received a large package in the mail.  The package was from a professor at the University of Kentucky.  I had worked for several professors there while Audie was in graduate school.  There was a note inside the package that read, "Marcia, I cannot explain this but when I saw these pictures I knew you had to have them. " Inside the package were the identical prints to the ones I had - matted and framed.   I felt like I had received a letter from God.  He knew me.  I still did not have answers to hard questions, but God knew me.  

Squire Rushnell wrote a book about God Winks.  In it he says that many people experience coincidences in their everyday lives that are too strange to be chalked up to just mere chance.  He calls them God Winks.  A personal communication from God to an individual, which is usually a circumstance or event that seems like a coincidence but is too personal and unbelievable to be so.  God Winks.

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