BTS,
There have been many but two always make me laugh.
The other happened during a busy season. I was at church 3-4 times per week for meetings and classes. A friend had a monthly gathering and wanted me to come. But I was tired. The running around on foot was exhausting. Especially during winter. I wanted to go home. I said, I'm tired. The Holy Spirit answered, "I didn't tell you to do that."
~Bella
Reminds me of a situation decades ago in my manufacturing business.
We had a couple of machines we used for the final assembly of our products which had been part of the original equipment when I bought the company. These machines kept breaking down, bringing production to a halt. I had fixed them on many an occasion, but I had a young engineer who was quite adept at dismantling and fixing the fragile and complicated innards of the machines, so they lived on to work another day.
I had looked at replacements, but they would have cost many tens of thousands we didn't have at that time.
On one Thursday, my production manager came into my office to announce that one of the machines had stopped completely. My engineer was on holiday, but would be back after the weekend, so I told him to just use the other machine, which he didn't like one bit.
Later in the afternoon, he returned with the news that the other machine had also packed in. I was busy and tried to persuade to just stack parts till the engineer returned on Monday, but he was getting very indignant at what he perceived as my laziness.
Finally, I grabbed my work coat and walked into the workshop. As I crossed the floor to the machines, I distinctly heard the Lord speak.
"I didn't call you to do this did I?"
I stopped dead in my tracks, pondering for a moment, then swivelled in my tracks and returned to my office.
I didn't know what was going on, but I had a real sense of peace in that decision. God obviously had it all in hand.
A few minutes later the production manager charged into my office red faced. What the heck is going on...
I stood my ground and eventually he left furious at my apparent laziness. Although he was also a Christian, he wasn't listening to the Lord on this issue.
The next day came and went with a massive log jam of parts and unfinished orders threatening our delivery schedules. Despite being the boss, I was not popular with any of the staff. Friday end of day was a relief.
Come the Saturday, I needed to go back to work to collect some tools I wanted for home use. As I walked across the workshop floor, focussed on collecting my tools, out of nowhere in front of my eyes came an open vision. It was of a strange shaped lump of metal, and with the vision came the clear revelation of its purpose.
The recalcitrant machines had very complicated inner workings and because of their age, it was these parts that kept failing, with no possibility of replacements. The peculiar shaped piece of metal in the vision was intended to fix externally, bypassing the need of the inner mechanism, doing exactly the same job but in a far simpler fashion.
The lump of metal was in fact, a redesign of the machine.
I forgot about collecting my tools and set out to fabricate the modification, which in less than 2 hours I had done and fixed to the machine. Switching it on, it instantly worked and did its job perfectly. It was so simple I didn't even bother with the broken parts, I just left them inside the machine redundant.
On the Monday, my engineer came in, looked at the fix, tested the machine and burst out laughing. He immediately replicated it on the second machine.
Following the intervention of our creator God, those machines never broke down again!
There is a great joy in running businesses with the Lord, and I have lost track of the times that the God has intervened with his solutions to problems.