One of the best qualities a person can have when it comes to receiving signs is patience. They usually don’t happen immediately, or when you want or expect them to. The more patient you are, often the greater the reward.
Johanna’s father and her two uncles had passed away within a few years of each other. When she had come to me for a reading, her dad and one of her uncles came through very clearly, but the other uncle, Charles, did not. The only thing that came through that didn’t make sense to her during the reading was the number 14. I was hoping that this number would somehow connect to Charles to give her some comfort that he, too, was okay, but she could not relate it to him or either of the other two men.
“I was really worried about my uncle Charles,” Johanna said. “The three of them were brothers. It didn’t make sense to me that two of them would come through and one wouldn’t.”
Johanna is a hostess at a fine-dining restaurant in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. She works with customers face-to-face every day, many who are regulars and some who aren’t. Two days after her reading with me, with her uncle on her mind, Johanna was working the register when a customer she’d never seen before came up to pay his bill.
“It was a typical transaction,” she said. “We exchanged pleasantries, and he said his meal and the service were great. I ran his card through the machine, waited for the ticket to print, and had him sign it. Then we thanked each other, I gave him his copy, and he left.”
Several seconds later, after the customer had walked out the door, Johanna took a closer look at the receipt.
“I don’t always look at the receipts after I watch people sign them,” she said, “but for some reason I looked at this one.”
Her body trembled when she saw the man’s name.
“I blurted out, ‘Oh my gosh!’ and ran out the door to chase him down. My boss probably thought I’d really messed something up when, in fact, everything was actually aligning perfectly, at least for me personally.”
What made her take off after the man? His name: Charles Hankel.
“That was the name on the receipt, the name that was on his credit card,” Johanna said. “That was my uncle’s name, letter for letter. How many Charles Hankels are there in the world?”
She ran out the door and spotted him about to get in his car.
“I ran as fast as I could and was out of breath when I reached him, not so much from the distance I had to run but from the emotions I was feeling. My adrenaline was at an all-time high. When I got to him, I said, ‘Mr. Hankel?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ no doubt wondering why this crazy cashier was so frantic. I calmed myself down the best I could and explained to him that that was my uncle’s name. I didn’t tell him about my reading with Bill, because I didn’t know how he’d react to that, but I did tell him my uncle had recently passed away and it just struck me that they had the same name.”
Mr. Hankel’s reaction blew Johanna’s mind.
“He smiled at me and said, ‘Wow, this really feels like something that was sent from heaven.’ He had no idea . . .”
The two talked, and Johanna learned that he was from Louisiana. He was simply passing through town on vacation, and his visit to her restaurant was purely random — at least as far as he knew. The two exchanged email addresses, and Mr. Hankel went on his way.
“This was the validation I needed that my uncle was okay,” she said.
But the validating was far from finished.
“When I emailed him later to thank him for coming into our restaurant and for talking to me, I noticed his middle name was part of his email address. Would you believe it was ‘Christian’? My uncle’s middle name was Kristian. Different spellings, but they sounded the same. It couldn’t have gotten any better.”
And yet, it did.
“I was mesmerized by that receipt with his name on it,” Johanna said. “When I looked at it again even more closely, I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Mr. Hankel had been sitting at table 14.
“Chills shot through me. I showed everyone at the restaurant, and I sent a picture of it to my grandma. These were her three sons. I could never bring them back for her, but I certainly was able to bring her some comfort with this.”
Johanna’s story offers a couple of good lessons about receiving messages and signs.
The first, which you have already seen in many of these stories, is that spirits can come up with some bizarre ways of communicating. As I stated when I discussed how they communicate with me, rarely do they say what they want to say in straightforward, black-and-white terms. Why Johanna’s dad and other uncle were so direct and Charles wasn’t, I do not know for sure. I can never guarantee who will come through in a session, and certain souls are quieter than others. This could have been a situation in which Charles wasn’t shy, but he wanted to make a more lasting impression, which he obviously did. The answers we seek may not come through crystal clear or immediately. They can take time, patience, and a lot of focus on our part.
The other lesson is that we must trust what the spirits are saying to us, even if we don’t initially understand it. So often I receive messages that don’t make sense at the outset, but we have to trust that they will eventually. Johanna and I didn’t know what “14” signified, or if it would even have anything to do with her uncle Charles, but there was no question that, in time, that number would mean something significant to her.
“Here I was, two days after my reading with Bill, wondering why I didn’t hear anything from my uncle. Then some guy, who lives twenty-five hundred miles away in Louisiana and who shares my uncle’s uncommon name, stops into our small-town restaurant on the day I’m working behind the register and pays with his credit card so I can see his name. Oh, and he happens to sit at table 14?
“Yeah,” she said with a huge smile. “I’m confident my uncle is doing just fine.”