Photo: I waited all through a dark, dreary, rainy day to be able to go out for a walk. Finally, in the early evening, the sun broke through.

This is going to sound weird because, well, it is weird.

About 4 ½ years ago we had a particularly difficult week in our family. We received three bits of bad news, any one of which meant a change in lifestyle –and all of them negative. Two were diagnoses of incurable degenerative diseases and one was about a business my husband put a lot of effort and time into, which literally went south.

Then I had a strange experience. I awoke hearing a voice with a BBC accent saying, “Follow 228 ban our tires.” It sounded like a commercial that adds a voice-over saying, “For further information go to www dot…”

It was so clear I grabbed a pen and pad and wrote it down, like it was a phone message.

In the morning I looked at it and felt rather silly. What an odd thing to write down. I never told anyone, but secretly, later in the day I googled it.

Nothing. I put the experience down to stress.

The next day I was thinking about the strange note to self when I remembered the voice had a British accent and in the UK tires is spelled tyres.

I googled it again using the “proper” spelling.

This time I followed the trail to a British bicycle shop site selling tyres which were featured in a click-able box at the top. On the side of the page was a box with an advertisement for Ray Ban glasses. Featured in the center was a photo and description of a head lamp for a racing bike. It must have been for very serious bikers because it cost 228 pounds.

Here’s the odd thing. The lamp was an LED Vision lamp made by the Hope company and called the Endurance model. What jumped out at me when I looked at the page was this:

Hope: Vision-LED Endurance.

As a person who suffered from depression for many years I know that living without a sense of hope is hell, but I wasn’t sure what hope really was. I knew it didn’t mean “a dream is a wish your heart makes” or “any dream will do”. I believe God was giving me a puzzle to solve in which the answer was a definition of hope, “vision-led endurance.” The Bible says without a vision (I believe the word there is a God-given active rhema word) the people perish. Hope means endurance that is attached to a promise from God. Hope gives a reason to live and a purpose with which to fight discouragement.

God is faithful. Those three problems which loomed so large that week are no longer big problems. One was healed out-right, quite miraculously, shortly afterward; one became less threatening when God had an unusual creative solution and is much improved, (hubs is not wheel-chair bound, in fact, he jogs six kilometres nearly every day); and the project is back on the rails –with much more reliable partners this time.

Jesus never ceases to amaze me.