The Pelican Prophecy

I saw something amazing as I drove in to church Sunday morning. It moved me to tears. It was very much on my mind during worship, and I finally got up and walked to the back of the sanctuary to speak to Pastor Greg. I told him briefly what I had seen, and then said, “I don’t know if it's appropriate to share.” He was intrigued, and he seemed to feel in his spirit that it fit in with God’s direction for the service, so he said he would call on me before he got up to preach.

This is what I said to the congregation:

I just wanted to share something that I saw on the way in this morning. I left at 9:30, and before I pulled away, I dialed in to the zoom room so I could intercede for the service with Rita and Lorne on the prayer team as I drove. I got to the Coal Lake hill and, totally predictably, I lost the signal as I came down the hill.

As I came through the valley, I looked out on the water and saw something. I didn’t know what it was at first. It was a white circle with gold in the center. I thought, What is that? and I looked again. It was a flock of eight or ten pelicans in a perfect circle with their bodies outward and their beaks inward. Their beaks were all touching in the center. It looked like spokes of a wheel with white around the outside and this brilliant gold of their beaks inward. 

And it just walloped me—with the glory of it. I believe it’s prophetic, although I have no idea what it would mean. But I do know they were declaring the glory of God. Just in the middle of an ordinary morning, ordinary birds, doing something extraordinary.

Pastor Greg‘s sermon was on unity. Further on into it, he began to speak from John 17, Jesus’ high priestly prayer. As he spoke of the harmony and beauty that come when people serve God in unity, I begin to think of the pelicans again. And then he said it himself: “Makes me think of something I heard about some birds.”

I have written before about how all living creatures submit to the Spirit of God with the notable exception of mankind. (Only man has been given the choice of whether he will listen to God or not.) I believe that those pelicans were moving in response to an impulse from the Spirit of God to gather in an organized and beautiful formation. And that made me think, as the sermon continued, But what glory will be displayed when mankind aligns themselves with what God is doing in the earth and they do it together!

It wasn’t until much later that I suddenly remembered I had prayed along the lines of John 17 with Lorne and Rita on my way in to church, after my Bluetooth got reception again. Another scripture had been on my mind the previous few days: “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In other words, sometimes when we share the good news of the kingdom of God, people cannot grasp what we are saying because their spirits have not yet been activated; and yet their spirits are where these spiritual truths must be processed. It’s like trying to open a program on a computer when you don’t have the software to handle it. So on the zoom room, I began to pray along the lines of the scripture in Corinthians, and then I found myself praying from John 17.

Help us, Lord, to speak Your words with Your power, that people would truly hear and receive the good news, that that supernatural conception would take place, where the spermata [1 Peter 1:23] of Your word fertilizers the seed of faith in their hearts and brings forth new life, new life in their spirits, so that they have the ability to understand the things of the Spirit of God.

Help us, Jesus, to remember what You said and really understand what it means: that You are in us and we are in You, and together in You we are in the Father [John 17:20-23]. Let this vital understanding be a daily part of our lives as we live and breathe and walk with You, so that this spiritual life can be passed on to others.

Although I did not clue in when Pastor Greg used this same passage from John 17 in his message an hour or so later, it afterward struck me as quite amazing. And yet we should not be surprised. As Graham Cooke said, “We cannot help but be prophetic; it is in our very bones. It is who God made us to be” (Approaching the Heart of Prophecy, p. 6). For those not familiar with prophecy in this sense, it is not so much a foretelling of future events, although it can include that; it is a telling forth of the mind and heart of God on a matter. With Pastor Greg preaching from the same passage that I had been praying from, it seems these verses  of John 17 were part of God’s own message to the body of Christ that morning. We come to expect such synchronicity as we understand another part of the 1 Corinthians 2 passage quoted above.

 For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.  Now we have received ... the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God” (v.11-12, NKJV). “ God has revealed them to us through His Spirit” (v.10).

I will put this another way: There is no way I can really understand what you think and feel. Only your spirit knows that. And so, obviously, no one can really know what God thinks and feels. Only His Spirit knows. Oh, but wait a minute! God has given us His Holy Spirit, and He lives right inside us. So guess what? We can perceive God’s thoughts. Like I just quoted above, “[He] has revealed them to us through His Spirit.”

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Very early Tuesday morning during my quiet time, I brought some things to God that I was struggling with. I am trying to learn to bring daily matters to Him to find rest and guidance. One of these things was the cover for the republishing of my Made in Heaven book.

I had begun to work on it in earnest a couple of weeks earlier, sitting at the dining room table with my laptop, perusing all the excellent photos on the various royalty-free sites. But none of these photos was doing anything for me. Frankly, the images set forward in the many couples photos I looked at seemed sadly lacking as I compared them with the magnificent stature and countenance of my husband, especially the way he looked on our wedding day. As I looked at picture after picture, always moving on again, an image from our wedding album planted itself firmly in my mind, with this thought: “You could crop it right above the lips to give it some anonymity.” I dug out the old seldom-seen album and found the picture. So beautiful! And the amazing thing was, our lips were in almost perfect horizontal alignment, so the cropping idea really would work. I submitted the photo and my thoughts to the woman who has been designing my book covers of late, and so began the back-and-forth process. But a couple of weeks had gone by now and it just wasn’t coming together.

Here, as in the rest of my life, I was trying to trust God that I really do have the mind of Christ, as He tells us in the last verse of 1 Corinthians 2. I am trying to learn not to lean on my own understanding but to acknowledge Him in the process and let Him direct my paths, as He counsels us in Proverbs 3:5-6.

I think it was Graham Cooke who said that sometimes we have trouble hearing God because we expect Him to speak to us through our natural ears and our natural thoughts, when actually He can and will speak to us in many different ways. In fact, I find that He most often bypasses the natural channels, possibly so that our flesh is not so easily able to interfere with the message.

So I told God I would not try to think harder about the cover but would give it over to Him and forget about it until He brought it up again.

(“You delegated it,” said my daughter Rachel when I told her about it. She understands these things because she works in a managerial position. “Yes!” I replied, “and now that I’ve done that, I mustn’t micromanage what I’ve turned over to Him!”)

So now I deliberately turned my thoughts away from my conundrum and toward a scripture I had been intending to check out ever since I saw the pelicans. Because they looked like a wheel out there on the water, they had made me think of Ezekiel‘s vision. I looked it up in Ezekiel 1:5-21 and was musing on this strange description of the four creatures and their wheels when suddenly I was interrupted by a flash of inspiration coming across my mind.

The problem with the cover had been that having the picture cropped just above the lips, at the top of the book cover the way I had imagined it, could cause a problem when it came to trimming the cover. One never knows exactly where the cutline will fall, and yet for it to look right, it had to be cropped perfectly. What had just jarred into my mind in the middle of my scripture reading was that the picture should be on the bottom half of the cover with the title and subtitle above it, such that the edge of the picture would be set, written in stone as it were, against the bottom of the subtitle box.

I jumped up, went to my computer, and printed off what we had so far of the cover so I could cut it up and rearrange it and think about it. I was swept away with this for a good hour, and then I headed back upstairs for the “second shift” of sleep I always need. I settled down and, as a peaceful way to drift into sleep, opened the Scriptures back up to where I had been before God interrupted me.

I had been in Ezekiel 1:5-21, reading just those few verses; but lying there in bed with Bible Gateway’s mobile app, it occurred to me that I should start at the beginning of the chapter to get the context and see if there was something else God wanted me to see. I had been reading from the Young’s Literal Translation (1862), but now as I scrolled back to the first verse, I thought, I should read this in one of the modern translations. After brief consideration, I chose the New Living Translation and opened it up. What I read there absolutely riveted me.

For the last many days I had been doing a final proofread of the story of our marriage. I had been reminded again and again of God’s moving in our relationship: how we prayed that God would give us everything in marriage that He ever intended it to be; how He promised us, through a devotional we happened to read together on the night Greg proposed, that He would make us one, even as the Father and Son are one (John 17 again); that the kingdom of God would fully come in our marriage and bring the healing we both needed. All this caused me to marvel and give thanks over and over again for the wonderful man God brought into my life back then. And then with the work on the front cover, I had been spending long hours staring at a photo that was taken on our wedding day, July 31 of the summer when I was 30 years old.

Now I had turned to Ezekiel 1:1, NLT, and this is what I read: “On July 31 of my thirtieth year, ... the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.”

I was so amazed and excited; the awareness of God’s glory was so intense in that moment that I didn’t think I would ever be able to go back to sleep. But sleep I did, deeply and restfully. Later on, after I had begun my day again, I went to my computer and checked that verse in the other 50 English translations on Bible Gateway’s full version. Every other one of them expressed the date by the Hebrew calendar, “in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month,” except for the Living Bible, the predecessor of the NLT, which had the date roughly pegged as “late June.” I had randomly chosen the only English translation that had carefully pinpointed the date of Ezekiel’s vision on our calendar, and it was the same date as our wedding. Furthermore, I was 30 years old and Ezekiel says he was “in my thirtieth year” when God showed him His kingdom and His glory.

With full confidence now of God’s involvement and blessing, work on the cover went forward in the direction I believed He had shown me. When at last it was mostly to my satisfaction, I sought out a couple of opinions. Our daughter Melissa was up for a visit; I showed it to her first. Although she was careful to find some positive things to say, the main drift was that she felt the photo was too dated to appeal to my target audience: young adults, especially young women. My best friend, when I sent it to her, felt the same way. I had sensed the same from the designer, when she encouraged me, earlier on, to look again at the royalty-free sites. And in my gut, I knew they were right, from a marketing point of view. I know that the cover of a book is the most important part in selling it, as that is how people judge a book (in spite of the proverbial advice to the contrary!). Now I was in a quandary about what direction to take.

In my questioning, I was drawn again to Ezekiel’s vision: “All four wheels looked alike and were made the same; each wheel had a second wheel turning crosswise within it” (1:16, NLT). It’s been suggested that this describes a gyroscope. A gyroscope is an instrument for orienting oneself and finding the right direction (for instance when piloting an aircraft) when the natural senses might leave one in danger of confusion and error. Surely allowing the Spirit of God to orient us and determine the correct direction when we are uncertain and in need of guidance is the safest and wisest way to proceed. The creatures and their wheels “went in whatever direction the spirit chose” (v.12, NLT).

After Ezekiel’s vision, God began to share messages with him that he was to take to the rebellious nation of Israel. But first He gave him this advice, which I take to heart as well: “Let all my words sink deep into your own heart first. Listen to them carefully for yourself” (Ezekiel 3:10, NLT).

For a while I had had a sinking feeling that in spite of my consulting God on the matter—and receiving His three powerful responses, I was going to have to start over on the cover and yield in the end to worldly wisdom.

But as I deliberated back and forth about whether to choose the world’s marketing savvy or what I believed were God’s directives regarding the cover design, I saw clearly how God had interjected these ideas into my mind independent of my own thought processes. I could not pretend they were just some more of my own thoughts, on par with the “marketing savvy” that was now coming my way, to be accepted or rejected on a whim. They stood out clearly as God’s counsel in the matter. I was free to choose, certainly, but why would I choose in the line of common sense, my “own understanding” (Proverbs 3:5), when I had asked God to supernaturally direct me—and He had?

Perhaps the most important lesson of this story is that we learn to yield our intelligence and, as do the lowlier creatures of land and sea and air, hear and obey the subtle promptings of the Spirit of God. With my whole life I am trying to live by the rhythms of the kingdom of heaven. Here was an opportunity to throw my entire lot in with God (and what I understood Him to be saying) and let Him prove Himself to me—let Him establish the reality of His guidance and the wisdom of His counsel. I will choose to submit to the gentle nudging of His Spirit and allow Him to direct me, the same way He directed a small flock of pelicans into a simple and spectacular formation, for my eyes only, early on a Sunday morning.