I believe God can speak to you in any communicative way that He sees fit. I believe today it was through a movie.

Nowadays, I have many channels to watch movies. Of all the many movies at my disposal, I chose to watch one on YouTube, called Our Father’s Keeper. I read what the movie was about, and my initial thought was the father got sick, died, and the family had to cope with that. Maybe there some unresolved issues to contend with, etc. The movie began with the father having some health issues, though he did not know what it was. He even tried to do some online research about drooling from his mouth and he didn’t know it . I thought he was about to have a deadly heart attack. Boy, was I wrong. After an out from left field verbal outburst at Thanksgiving dinner with the whole family present, his wife took him to the doctor for tests. It wasn’t his heart; though he was in his late fifties, his brain scan showed he had onset Alzheimer’s disease. When I saw the picture of his brain, and all the black areas where there should have been tissue, it took me back to when I saw my mother’s test results.

This scene took me back to the 2016, when I was sitting with her in the neurologist’s office, hearing him meticulously reviewing all the results with us, particularly the way her brain looked. It was fascinating to me how there were so many disconnects and dark areas of her brain, which did not look healthy at all. I remember the doctor telling me I was a good daughter, and then he turned to my mother and tenderly told her to enjoy the rest of her life; she had dementia and there was no medication that would reverse what was happening to her brain.

The movie showed the father’s facial expression, how he seemed to look so blank, like he was living on another planet. There are times I see that in my mother. Because of the pandemic I cannot see her, and we mainly communicate by phone. This past week I knew the disease was progressing, as she called telling me to contact Debbie and let her know she needed to come and take her to choir rehearsal. I told her she was talking to Debbie. A short pause before the next response, and then she said the same thing. The conversation was a mishmash of sentences that didn’t make much sense. I tried to be patient and tell her she wasn’t at the church, she was at the nursing home. Sometimes her brain connected with that, but during most of the phone conversation it did not. She was convinced she was at the church and needed a ride home.

Regarding the movie, the father eventually passed away about six years after he was diagnosed, but the family felt a closer bond, getting along with each other better since the diagnosis of their father. A lot of parts of the movie I could identify with, but throughout the movie I kept asking God, of all the movies I could have chosen, why did you make sure I chose this one to watch?

I truly believed God was telling me something. After the movie ended and I looked out my window as the sun was beginning to set, it was as if the clouds had formed a big hand in the sky. I stared at it for a few moments, thinking if someone else looked at it, the fingers and the large hand would not have been seen. But for me, that’s what it was, like God was saying He has His hand over the situation, and He wanted me to know that though there may be something that would soon happen, not to be afraid: He was in control of it all…