Out of the relentless black night, a flickering neon sign beckoned from the distance, “Vacancy.”
Oh yeah! This is our sign! We laughed.
Ready to call it a day after ten tedious hours on the road, I swear I was asleep before I hit the pillow.
Early the next morning, I noticed feeling more emotionally squishy than usual. Maybe it was sleep deprivation, or driver delirium or early recovery shaking things loose, who knows.
I just felt I needed some support.
Something instinctively moved me to reach out to non-physical energy, something or someone who might be on my team, so to speak.
Over the years, I’d been told I have guides, we all do, yet up to that point, I had little evidence of their existence in my life. Maybe today would be different.
After loading my stuff in the car, I looked to the sky and managed a little request, loud enough so that I could hear myself speak the words.
“Hi! I have to ask you something.
Don’t get me wrong, I want to believe you are always there for me, or mostly there. But today, well…I think I need a little extra help feeling your presence. So, if you don’t mind, could you give me a sign, you know, that you ARE there…for me?”
As I settled in and locked my seatbelt, I mentioned my little ‘prayer’ to my friend.
“Just in case something happens, would you be on the lookout with me?”
She looked somewhat amused by my request, and smiled, “Sure. Happy to.”
Having a witness just in case something happened was my insurance against my overactive imagination and propensity for making stuff up.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a recovering person who felt that first year of recovery was a cakewalk. Mine was predictably roiling with fear and uncertainty, primarily because the world I once knew, and the brain I once used, was in the process of being reformulated, to put it unscientifically.
Trust was a primary issue for me at the time.
First I needed to acclimate to the idea of trusting myself to live with integrity, in other words, say what I mean and mean what I say.
Next, I had to learn to trust others and finally, become worthy of someone’s trust. Clearly, my work was cut out for me.
All packed, we said our goodbyes to our roadside refuge and headed to San Francisco.
My friend was driving. I was acting as navigator, fingering a rumpled map stretched over the dashboard. We were maybe twenty minutes outside of Tucumcari, New Mexico when I happened to glance to my left and there it was.
The sign of all signs!
Thankfully, my friend was a pokey driver or I might have missed it.
As we drove passed a looming granite cliff face in red paint, no less, were the words, TRISH I LOVE YOU.
I totally took the message personally despite a couple of wrong letters.
Startled nearly out of our bodies we screamed…for the next ten miles, easily. We could hardly believe our eyes, yet, there it was! My answer…emblazoned in fire-engine RED.
Waves of shock and awe rocked me.
We shrieked through it all, wiped away tears, paused to catch a breath and erupt into even more laughter and head-shaking shock…then, disbelief, “Wait, did this really happen? My witness stood by her own eyes, “Yes it did!”
I’m curious, what ways have you been visited by the presence Love from your ’band’ of guides in grand or subtle ways? Have you asked? Have you noticed their response? Are you curious? Might you be ready to ask or seek?
In my experience, they are here to serve. We just have to ask.
“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”
–Matthew 7:7-11, King James Version
In wonder,
Tryshe