We encounter numbers all day, every day. Whether we’re dealing with money, dates, or time, or even just changing the radio station or television channel, numbers are always in front of us. But sometimes a number, depending on its associations and the timing of it, can have meaning beyond face value. As frequent a role as numbers play in our daily lives, why wouldn’t spirits use them to try to connect with us? They do, and one named Justin did so quite frequently with Judy.
When a relationship Judy was in had ended, her girlfriend in Florida suggested she get out of New Jersey for a while and fly south to spend some time with her.
“My flight got in late, but some friends of ours down there were night owls and told us to come over as soon as I arrived. A little while after we got to their house, a guy named Justin rolled in. It was about 1 AM and he had a bottle of champagne. I jokingly said, ‘What, no caviar?’ I spoke too soon; it was in his other hand.”
After getting to know each other that evening, Justin asked her out. Judy said yes.
“We discovered that both of our previous relationships had ended on the same night. We really had a connection with each other. After I returned home, we stayed in contact with weekly letters and cards. We traveled by train, plane, and automobile to see each other. We eventually got engaged, we married a year later, and I moved to Florida. Our marriage lasted thirty-nine days short of five years.”
Justin died from an infection. Judy was devastated, but she received some comfort soon after his death through various signs she knows came from her husband, including seeing someone who looked exactly like him, hearing songs that reminded her of him, and finding coins.
“At one of my readings with Bill, Justin came through and joked that I must have found twenty-five dollars in loose change since he had died,” Judy said. “He was right, and the coins would always be significant based on the type, the year, or when I found them, such as a penny I came across the moment I was thinking about him that had the year he died on it, or a Canadian dime I found in my office at work just before I left to take a trip to Canada.”
But it was when Judy decided to move to a new home after Justin passed that his presence burst through unlike any signs she’d ever experienced.
“We had been talking about moving before he died, and I decided that it was time,” Judy said. “The day I started looking, there were two places in particular I made appointments to see based on their cost and the neighborhoods they were in.”
She had the directions, but she hadn’t given the numbers in the addresses any thought until she arrived at the first place. When the address registered with her, she considered not even looking at the second place.
“The address was 51926,” she said. “Justin was 51 years old when he died on September 26. I was absolutely certain that was a sign from him. How could those numbers be the address, and in that order? But since I already had an appointment to see the second place, I decided to look anyway.”
When she got to the second residence, it was not only the numbers but also the street name that convinced her she couldn’t go wrong picking either place.
“The address was 5426 Poppy. I realized that when you added the first two digits together, it was 926, the date he died. And poppies were the flowers we had chosen to have at our wedding. On top of that, orchids were actually Justin’s favorite flower, and this house had beautiful orchids out front. There was no question that this was going to be my new home.”
Not long after that, Judy flew to San Diego for the annual Soaring Spirits International convention, which is held for widows. “When I got to the hotel, the woman behind the desk gave me a choice of two rooms. I asked her what the room numbers were. Of course, one of them was 926.”
On the final day of the convention, Judy was standing in line waiting to get a number for a 5K race she was about to run while in town. “I get up to the table and they give me my number. It was 51,” she said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people running this race. They were coming in by the busload. And somehow, out of every number I could have been given, they gave me that one.”
No matter where Judy goes or what she does, the number 926 or 51 — or both — continues to pop up.
“The first night I slept in my new home, I cried,” she said. “I thought because I had left the house he and I had lived in, I had in some way left him. But when I looked at it more from a spiritual perspective than a material one, I realized that that house we had was nothing more than a shell and that Justin had led me to this new one through the address. He was with me wherever I went. And that was proved again in San Diego with my room number and race number. I receive so many signs from him through numbers; they keep me comforted.”
There is no question that numbers can be manipulated. Through addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication, you can probably come up with any combination you want in any situation. But when you consider that those same unique numbers continually appeared to Judy in some of the most emotional times of her life — when trying to find a new home after her husband’s death and while at a convention for widows — it is difficult to deny that Justin, though gone from this earth, was still actively playing a significant role in the life of his true love, from the other side.