I have endeavored to make a record of how God has answered some of my questions. This is only a tiny sampling of the many many prayers that God has graciously and creatively answered. This selection is meant to illustrate the conversation, the back and forth, the give and take between a mortal human who seeks to know God better, and the Creator who seeks to instruct me. Praise His holy Name!

Another time I was learning about fasting and having difficulty understanding how to fast effectively, when the Holy Spirit seemed to say, “First let me teach you how to eat.” So I asked the Lord to teach me how to eat.

Shortly thereafter I signed up for a healing class with the lovely Tada family. As it turned out, half the class time was spent teaching healing techniques and biblical principles of healing, and the other half addressed health issues, including proper diet. Sweet as they were, I still found the Tada family to be overly strict in their recommendations. Everything had to be organic, and the water had to be filtered not once but three times, and you had to take a basket full of supplements, and be sure to consume so many grams of fiber per day, etc. I found myself nurturing a bad attitude toward their teaching on health, until one day it occurred to me that the Lord was using them to answer my question. Because I didn’t like the answer I was getting I hadn’t seen that it was from God.

Once my eyes were opened to this, my attitude improved. I tried to make some changes to my health habits accordingly, and made a commitment to honor their recommendation based on scripture to avoid pork and shellfish. One day I accompanied Jerry to a fancy gig at a winery and couldn’t resist the prawns and crab cakes that were being offered as appetizers. My idea of swearing off a food was that you could still have a little sometimes if you felt like it. As I ate the forbidden foods, my face began to swell in an allergic reaction.

I understood what was happening because my son suffered anaphylactic shock in reaction to prawns at age 12. I was able to control my body’s reaction by drinking lots of water and by renewing my commitment not to eat those foods. I had the sense that I had been gently chastised for not keeping my word, since I have many times eaten those foods in the past without any reaction at all.

When I had a dream in which Jesus gave me a new skirt, I asked the Holy Spirit to show me what the dream meant. He gently prompted me to go to my bible. “But what scripture should I read?” I asked. He seemed to gently prompt me to just take up where I had left off in my daily progression through the bible. This happened to be Lamentations 1, in which Jerusalem is described as a widow and a slave who has sinned against the Lord grievously, worshipping other gods and forgetting the Word of the Lord. The following words came forward: “Her uncleanness was in her skirts.” The Lord was showing me through the dream and the reference to this scripture how through the grace of His salvation I was purified of my sins and clothed in a clean new skirt. Thank you, Father!

When I asked God to help me rid my house of filth, the following event occurred. I had three tiny glass vases sitting in a row on the coat hanger shelf by the front door. In each tiny glass vase was a miscellaneous collection of miniature objects, including glass animals, seashells, bird bones, toys and such.

One day I found that the shelf had tilted forward and one of the three glass vases had slid off and crashed to the floor. In cleaning the mess I found a tiny Buddha that had been in that vase unbeknownst to me. Interested to confirm whether this event was divine or random, I spilled out the contents of the other two vases to see if there were any other offensive items hidden therein. There were none.

Clearly, God heard my request and came to assist me in cleansing my home of false idols. Thank you, Father!

At the time we also suffered from an infestation of rats beneath the house. We asked for help from God with that as well. The rats could be heard nibbling, nesting and scraping inside the walls. I instituted a program of eradication that started with a device that emitted a high frequency pitch to repel them. This caused them to move to another part of the wall. Then I placed three loaded traps in their vicinity. All three traps snapped without catching any rats.