The Touch I Still Can’t Explain

I was standing in the grocery store, list in hand, doing the same weekly shopping I’d done a hundred times before. And I was in despair.

My son was going into fourth grade, and he wanted, more than almost anything, to attend a Christian school instead of the public one down the road. My husband and I wanted that for him too. We just didn’t have the money. Not close to it. I don’t even remember if I prayed that day, in any formal way a person prays. I just remember standing there under the fluorescent lights, quietly falling apart over a decision I couldn’t make happen no matter how I turned it over in my mind.

And then something touched me. Not on the arm, not on the shoulder, in my heart, in a place I didn’t know could be touched at all. I have never felt anything like it before or since. I couldn’t have described it to you in the moment, and I still struggle to now. But I knew, without hearing a single word out loud, that Jesus was there. And that He had already taken care of it. My son’s school was handled.

I didn’t have a check in hand. I didn’t have a plan. I just had that. And somehow, that was enough to carry me out of the store and into the car and home.

When I walked through the door, my husband was waiting. Before I said a word, he told me he knew exactly how we were going to pay for our son’s school. And he was right. It worked. He went.

“I didn’t have a check in hand. I just had that. And somehow, that was enough.”

Here is what I want you to know, because I think it matters more today than it ever has: that grocery store moment wasn’t a one time miracle I keep in a memory box and take out on special occasions. It’s ordinary for me now. Not in the sense that it stopped being holy, it’s ordinary in the sense that I’ve come to expect it. I ask. Regularly. About the small things and the enormous ones. And more often than not, I feel a nudge, a thought, a certainty, a pull toward one direction over another, that turns out to be exactly right. Not perfect, every time. But enough. Enough that I’ve learned to trust it the way you’d trust a friend who has never once let you down when it counted.

This is, if I’m honest, the whole reason I write what I write. Every book I’ve ever put into the world walks someone through darkness, real darkness, the kind with teeth, because I believe, all the way down, that the darkness doesn’t get the last word. I didn’t invent that idea in a writer’s room. I learned it in a grocery store. My characters walk through fear toward light because I have walked through fear toward light, more than once, and it has never once failed to hold.

I don’t share this to convince you of anything, or to suggest my faith looks the way yours should. I share it because the world right now is loud, and it is frightened, and it is angry in ways that leave very little room to breathe. And in the middle of all of that noise, I want you to know that a quieter voice is still available. Still reaching. Still willing to touch a place in you that nothing else can reach, in a grocery store or anywhere else, whenever you are ready to let it.

You don’t have to have the right words. You don’t even have to be sure you’re praying. You just have to be willing to stand still long enough to notice when something answers.

Mary Ann Poll is the author of the six-book Ravens Cove Iconoclast supernatural thriller series and host of the podcast Real Ghost Chatter. Her stories explore the unseen with faith, hope, and the conviction that light always outlasts the dark. Learn more at maryannpoll.com