The first time I watched The Color Purple, this Shug Avery reconciliation scene touched THAT spot in me. Listening to her sing the beginning lead of God Is Trying to Tell You Something had me going in a spiritual kind of way. I own the DVD but don’t watch the movie because I’ve seen it quite a few times already. However, if someone is watching the movie, I always ask them to let me know when this scene starts up so that I can race to the TV and watch it. It is a powerful moment in a powerful film.
Although I am a rather infrequent churchgoer, I do believe that God sends signs and messages. I’ve spoken to people who’ve received signs and/or messages. The Death-Defying Lady is just one person recently. There have been times where I have received signs that seemed like small pieces of guidance in order to go in the right direction (or more accurately, avoid the wrong direction). Today, however, I did not receive a sign but a message. While sitting on a park bench earlier today, I got into a conversation with a woman who stopped to marvel at how beautiful the weather was today (it was quite beautiful). We talked about how good it felt now in comparison to the heat of summer and compared the local weather to the weather in the places from which we respectively came. She was walking laps around the park; I was sitting on a bench reading. When she came around again, she stopped and told me God told her to tell me something. So she delivered the message. My eyes began to water immediately because the message was spot-on for something that had been weighing heavily on my mind. It weighed on my mind so much so that I made a phone call related to the matter a few hours prior to her delivering the message. Her message negated my phone call.
One of the firmest beliefs that I have is that God works through others and as such, we each, at some point in our lives, have the potential to deeply touch the lives of those with whom we come in contact. I have had countless experiences happen that I couldn’t readily explain. Today’s experience was God telling me something through the mouth of a stranger who had no idea what was going on in my life when she told me the message God told her to deliver.