Eerie Occurrence in the House of G

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey… stuff.

Do an online lookup of the tracking number to see what it says a out date delivered.

Did anyone besides you see it prior to the “second” delivery?

@WJT,

No. But Thursday morning I did describe the dimensions of the box to the family, the heft, the crumpling at the corners, and the battery sticker on the outside. They agree that the actual package matched my description.

The only rational explanation I can see is that the package ended back up on the front porch somehow (maybe my memory of putting it on the table is bad) and during some other delivery it got picked up by a driver who thought it was a drop off and got routed through their system and back to us.

In opening the box part of the tracking number got destroyed

The tracking # may be in an email confirming shipment.

Your family’s choice of the word “delivered” brought to my mind the usage of that word in scripture, denoting protection from or decisive advantage over an adversary or tribulation.

This led me to consider that perhaps you have just experienced the ministering of angels in a more concrete than usual form.

Something almost identical happened to me about a month ago, in my case, it was a book. I held the book in my hand and put it on the counter. I came back and in was gone. I asked my family about it, if they had moved it, but they hadn’t seen it. I described it in detail, pointed to where I put it, said, “I was holding it in my hand right here,” mentioned the unfortunate position of the barcode sticker on the cover, and they witnessed me spending half an hour searching for it in the usual, and some unusual places. No luck. I figured it would turn up eventually, and anyway, I’ve always got a big backlog stack to work through. The next day, I get a stuffed-to-bursting padded envelope in the mail, take it to the same counter, open it, and glitch-in-the-matrix level deja by, it was exactly the scene I remembered. Freaked out, I dropped the book on the counter and took a step back, and that was exactly the scene I remembered too. Barcode sticker in the unfortunate place and everything. I yell, “it’s the book!” Wife dismisses this entirely, “you’re crazy”, son takes my side, “it’s exactly like he said, and he asked us for it, and was looking for it.” He is freaked out too, but also Bill and Ted style, “whoaaa, duuude.” Wife presents a thorough and comprehensive counterargument, with facts, evidence, and logic, just kidding, she just repeats, “you’re crazy”. Eerie is right.

I admit that I have gone on with my life as is this didn’t happen and could not have happened, updating no priors about either how things work or the my neurological fitness. I know that can’t be right, but don’t know what to do with it, and, more interesting, don’t feel and pressing need to adjust. There is an easy comfort in just thinking “aberration” and then, not quite forgetting, but putting the experience into permanent storage.

“I admit that I have gone on with my life as is this didn’t happen and could not have happened, updating no priors about either how things work or the my neurological fitness. I know that can’t be right, but don’t know what to do with it”

This speaks to me. Me too, except if I had some idea of *how* to adjust my priors I probably would. But its so inexplicable.

@Books,

no, nothing. But the vendor sent me a personal email on Sep. 18 saying they were planning on shipping that day.

“And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:”

There are fixed points throughout time where things must stay exactly the way they are. This is not one of them. This is an opportunity! Whatever happens here will create its own timeline, its own reality, a temporal tipping point.

G, Handle: WJT might call your situations “Shining Buddha Problems.”

https://narrowdesert.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/shining-buddha-problems/

Whether they are miraculous/prophetic or of mundane origin, either way they could be lessons from the Lord, for both you and your family — shades of things to come — reminding you/them/us to prepare for the real thing, even if this was a mundane simulacrum or prefigure. (The Lord can have a hand in mundane things as well.)

Some day, you may have to do something drastic, which involves cooperation from the entire family, and they need to trust you in that day when you say it’s from the Lord. (Think Lehi.)
—

Sometimes I’m tempted to consider my encounters actually mundane, totally explainable by statistics, etc. And perhaps what I consider promptings, to be imagination, and whatever encounters that leads to is just shooting at the side of the barn, and then go drawing a bullseye around the arrow.

But then I remember…. (aside from previous corresponding spritual experiences) I know some statistical stuff from math courses. Statistically, the odds are too remote for such events to be repeated so often — after a certain number, they can’t be chalked up to coincidence.

Though, isn’t it within the power and intelligence of God to craft His interventions/operations in ways that _look_ perfectly mundane to a mortal observer?

There’s a phenomenon I’ve read about, common enough in (if memory serves) Norway to have a name in the local language, where a person returning home after a long absence is preceded by a “phantom” return which is heard and sometimes seen about an hour before the person really returns. This is apparently so reliable that, for example, a wife might start preparing dinner when she hears the phantom return, so as to have dinner on the table when her husband really comes home. Your own experience seems broadly similar to this.

Bookslinger, while I appreciate the link, I would not consider this a Shining Buddha Problem — almost the opposite, in fact. An SBP is when something occurs that seems obviously meaningful or providential but which was clearly caused by well understood, meaningless physical processes, such that it is hard to see how God could have had a hand. The original SBP involved a Buddha’s face appearing to glow miraculously when in fact the light was created by a malfunctioning kitchen appliance. Another example would be a rainbow or a beautiful sunset.

G’s experience is the reverse: inexplicable but seemingly meaningless.

Handle, what sort of book was it? Did the book turn out to be an important one that had a major impact on your life?

I tracked down the Norwegian phenomenon I mentioned and have posted on it, in connection with this post, here:

https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2020/10/phantom-arrivals.html

“G’s experience is the reverse: inexplicable but seemingly meaningless.”

Correct. Ditto Handle’s.

Now I and my family did pray several times so you could see it as a meaningful answer to prayer. But the *way* it was answered is what is inexplicable and meaningless. Why not just find the thing? We have had dozens of prayers for lost items answered by being guided to look in the unlikely place where we left it, we even have a book recording them. And usually our lost items are items we use and move around. There is no reason the battery delivery should have been lost. The table I put it on was our dumping ground table.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that I experienced a “phantom” package delivery. But why?

The company I worked with is small and pretty disorganized. It is possible, I suppose, that they accidentally shipped 2 at different times due to poor record-keeping and we managed to somehow completely lose the first one.

A possible spiritual explanation is that my Father wanted to use an incredibly baroque, overwrought, and ostentatious method of answering a prayer because in days to come I will need to pray in faith for the kinds of miracles that involve brute displays of supernatural power–limbs regrowing, seas dividing, objects appearing out of thin air. An intimidating thought.

I wouldn’t say meaningless, and I wouldn’t automatically discount your own physical senses.

We pride ourselves on understanding Relativity and Time, but if God can answer all prayers, it is pretty clear we don’t, because that is necessarily super-luminal, and that implies time travel of some sort. One of the lessons of Christ’s first coming is that we don’t understand the nature of God. In smaller writ, we don’t understand the physical world any better.

I got the tracking. It was not delivered twice. It took a peculiar meandering route to get to me but on the day when I thought I got it, it was bouncing around a random state which is not the state in which I live.

Same thing happened to me with an umbrella I ordered. It came, I opened it up, commented on the size of it, wondered what the little plastic ring thingy was in the box (figured out it was a hanging loop) and put it away. Several weeks later a long box shows up on the porch and I open it, do the same thing with opening it and wondering what the rubber ring is when I start to have the sense I’ve done all this before—“hey, didn’t we already get one of these?” I say to anyone who will listen, and a few people remember but don’t seem bothered. Maybe I accidentally got shipped another one? I emailed the seller and said I think I got 2 by accident (but all this time I’ve never found the first one). No reply. We packed up and moved two weeks later and I’m still thinking maybe I’ll find a second umbrella in box somewhere…but so far, I still can only find the one! Haven’t made a concerted effort to look for it, though.

And there’s absolutely NO spiritual element to this story! I still think I must have gotten two somehow??