After receipt of a sign, one of the most fascinating and enjoyable discoveries that can be made is backtracking to see how it was orchestrated. Sometimes a sign is put right in front of us and we notice it right away, but oftentimes it can take a spirit hours, days, weeks, or longer to push a sign through to us. We don’t recognize the actual process as it is unfolding, because we haven’t seen its conclusion yet. But once the sign is received, we can realize, in retrospect, what the spirit went through to make it happen. This beautiful story about a man and his great-uncle helps us grasp the concept that spirits are always at work in our lives, even when we are not cognizant of it.
Anthony’s great-uncle George passed away suddenly one fall morning at the age of eighty-seven. George was born and raised in the mountains of West Virginia and lived there his entire life. He was a hardworking family man who had been married to his wife, Marilyn, for sixty-nine years. Anthony didn’t get to see George as often as he would have liked, given that they lived several hundred miles from each other, but when they did get together, usually during summer family reunions, they enjoyed each other’s company very much.
Anthony found out that morning through a post on social media that his great-uncle had just been rushed to the hospital. George had evidently been sitting outside on the porch when he started to feel sick. Anthony called his mother (George’s niece) and told her what he had read. When she phoned Marilyn to find out how George was doing, she was told that he had just died. Less than two hours passed from the time George had yelled for Marilyn to call an ambulance to his death. It happened that quickly.
Anthony went to work that day, though his thoughts were focused on his great-uncle.
“He had that deep West Virginia drawl when he spoke,” Anthony said. “I loved to listen to him tell stories. As a hobby after he retired, he taught himself how to make wine, and he went all in with it. He had a lot of land, so he grew grapes and blackberries. He bought instruction manuals on how to turn them into wine. He purchased all the equipment he needed to do it. He even found a local bottle supplier. It was quite a one-man operation he had. He’d make so much wine that he’d run out of room to store it, so he’d have wine parties with his friends on the weekends just to get rid of some of it. Each time I saw him, he’d give me a few bottles. That blackberry wine was some of the best I’d ever tasted.”
What Anthony found funny as he thought about George that day was that he couldn’t get a particular song out of his head.
“One year we’d had a family reunion at a park near George’s house. One of my relatives had brought a cassette player and a tape with just one song on it: John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’ For those who aren’t familiar with it, it became the state song of West Virginia. The chorus begins ‘Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong, West Virginia. . . .’ One of my great-aunts played the song over and over and over during the reunion, driving some of my relatives crazy. I guess that memory, along with the fact that George was a true West Virginian, put that song in my head as I reminisced about him. Fortunately, I like John Denver and that song, so I was fine with it playing on a loop in my mind.”
Fast-forward to that evening. Anthony and his wife are in a monthly bowling league. They usually get to the alley for each match at about seven o’clock. They have fifteen minutes to warm up, and then the games begin. They bowl three games with their two teammates and four opponents. Sometimes they are finished by nine, other times by nine thirty, but never later than that. On this night, though, anything that could go wrong with the lanes did.
“Our first game started late because, after warm-ups, the power on our two lanes shut down. There were fifty-something lanes in that place, and ours were the only ones not working. Then, at least twice that first game, we had to go to the desk to ask them to manually adjust the scores because the electronic scoring wasn’t working properly. A little bit later, after two people had bowled, neither of their balls came back. When an employee finally arrived after several minutes to fix the issue, she had to unscrew part of the floor near the ball return to see what was jamming it. She reached in and pulled out an actual pin that had fallen into the ball return. I’ve been bowling for thirty years, and I’d never seen that happen before. It was as if our lanes were haunted. It was a very strange night, to say the least.”
By the time they’d completed the final frame of their third and last game, most of the bowling alley was empty. It was pushing ten o’clock.
“We had never been there that late,” Anthony said. “Not even close. Nearly three hours to bowl three games was unheard of. I’d never encountered so many problems on two lanes side by side.”
Anthony and his wife changed their shoes, packed up their stuff, and finally headed out. When they got to their car, he tossed his bag into the backseat before sliding behind the wheel.
“We’d had an enjoyable evening with our friends, and we really didn’t have a reason to rush home other than we had to work the next day, but my wife and I and everyone else were ready to get out of there after all the electronic and mechanical problems. Bowling is fun, but when you have to keep starting and stopping all night, and when you expect to be finished closer to nine than ten, it wears on you a little bit.”
When Anthony started the car, the radio came on. The station was tuned to the one he listened to 95 percent of the time. It played a lot of hit songs from the 1970s and 1980s. He was hoping to hear a good one that would lighten his mood a bit.
What he heard blew his mind.
Anthony threw his head back against the headrest, his mouth hanging open in utter disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding!” he exclaimed.
“What’s wrong?” his wife asked.
Anthony paused for a moment, trying to keep his emotions in check. “Absolutely nothing,” he said softly.
How could anything be wrong when the song playing on the radio at that moment was “Take Me Home, Country Roads”?
It wasn’t just the song. It was that song . . . on that station . . . at that moment.
“Over the last twenty years, I have listened to that station at some point nearly every single day, usually in my car, and I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever that I had never heard that song on that station. In fact, I can’t think of any John Denver song that station has ever played. That’s not to say they’ve never played one, but you would have thought that an avid listener like me would have heard one before. I wouldn’t have even considered calling them and requesting that song, because I never would have expected them to play it.”
Anthony knew who was behind it.
“There was no question to me, as I reflected on the evening after hearing that song, that George was responsible for every-thing that happened. In all the years I’d been bowling, I’d never seen so many problems arise the way they did on those two lanes. I mean, seriously, a bowling pin goes through the ball return? How many people have ever witnessed that? And for those delays to not only last as long as they did, but to be timed just right so that I would get in my car during the brief three minutes and eight seconds that song lasts — it was just astonishing.”
As you will read throughout all these firsthand accounts, spirits work in different ways to get signs to their loved ones, sometimes even orchestrating elaborate plans. George obviously knew what was playing in Anthony’s mind all day, and he decided to comfort his great-nephew in what he thought would be the most convincing and reassuring manner.
“If someone wants to claim that everything that happened that night was coincidental, then to each his own. But how many coincidences does it take for someone to admit that there could be something beyond this world that is responsible for what is happening around us? There were too many inexplicable occurrences that day, from morning to night and in perfect synchronicity, for me to believe that anything other than George himself was responsible. He did just about everything he could, short of making a visual appearance, to get my attention. When I went to bed that night and looked back on the entire day, from that morning when the song entered my mind to hearing it on the radio that evening, I realized what a beautiful journey George had taken me on. It is something that will stay in my heart forever.”