God spoke to my Mum and Dad through Dog Poo!

This is another of my favourite stories from a few years ago and shows that God has a sense of humour! NB: Since this was written I was able to lead my Dad to the Lord just days before he passed away…

When my mum and dad came to visit me in New Zealand I knew it was going to be spiritually significant somehow as I’d been praying about it with my friends for a long time and God had reassured me. Close to the end of their visit I took my mum along to a women’s night at my church. I left my dad and Aunt at home with some Christian reading material to browse through if they were interested.

At church we watched a taped sermon during which the pastor quoted a bible verse with ‘dog poo’ in it! During the discussion afterwards, my mum laughed and commented on it prompting us to check it out in different bible versions to see if it really said that. Most versions just said ‘dung’ or ‘garbage.’

When we got home, we didn’t mention it to the others and were all sitting in the living room when my dad laughed out loud and read out the same verse from the book he’d been flicking through! It was the ‘dung’ version this time. We told him we’d just been discussing that at church and I said that meant God was speaking to them, but they just thought it was a coincidence.

The next day I was at work, milking the cows and praying as I often do. I told God that he had to do it again to show them it wasn’t just a coincidence, and I got the answer in my head to watch the Christian TV channel together on my lunch break. I was sure that the quote would come up again. At lunch I went home and turned on the TV to find that my favourite soap ‘Shortland Street’ was on, repeated from last night, which I’d missed to go to church. I knew God was testing me as that was something I’d been struggling with recently – getting too hooked on this damn soap! I attempted to get round my dilemma by recording it, but when I did that I was not able to receive the Christian channel at the same time! Then I thought ‘I’ll still have time to watch the soap first, then the Christian channel’, but just at that moment one of the characters said “There is a God! I prayed for a miracle and here it is.” I immediately changed the channel and told my parents to watch closely!

The programme we watched was about being receptive to signs from God, but the quote didn’t actually come up again. I was disappointed and told my parents what I had been expecting and that God had told me it would happen. Then I picked up the 40-day devotional book that I had been reading for the last week and opened it up to the right day to read as I usually did in my lunch break. The quote was right there! I jumped up and showed my parents excitedly, but yet again they just smiled and thought it was a coincidence. My Christian friend later told me that many peoples’ hearts and minds are so firmly closed to the idea of miracles and the existence of a relational God that it is easier to just explain things away as coincidence or luck. I’m no statistician, but I reckon the statistical probability of all of the above events being a result of random coincidence is in itself a miracle! A bit like the Evolutional theory of existence and the Big Bang theory – how can the complex world we see today (and the conditions that sustain it) possibly have been due to a set of random events/coincidences?!

I continue to pray for my parents’ salvation and know that ‘With God, anything is possible’. One thing that humbles me also is that God would’ve done it even if I had disobeyed him completely and continued to watch the rest of my soap – we just would have missed the extra bit about being receptive to his signs!

“But Christ has shown me that what I once thought was valuable is worthless. Nothing is as wonderful as knowing Jesus Christ my Lord. I have given up everything else and count it all as garbage (dog poo). All I want is Christ and to know that I belong to him.” Philipians 3:7-9.