My wife and I were attending a funeral in the USA. We’d rented a car and were out running errands. Personally, I wanted to find a watch repair shop where I could purchase a new battery and get it installed in my old wristwatch. In the first two commercial centers we had visited, we asked around, but there was no one that we spoke with who knew where we might find one. A Google search was also unsuccessful, and I reluctantly gave up on that errand.

As we drove, my wife and I were reminiscing about our relative who passed away, and I told her it was hard for me to imagine how Jesus could appear personally to so many different people, meeting them when they arrived in heaven. With so many billions of people on earth, and so many dying each day, how does God keep such intricate tabs on each of us and meet so many of us personally when we go up to heaven?

I was just finishing expressing all this to her, confessing my somewhat negative wonderment, when the impulse hit to not give up on searching for the little battery for my watch just yet. So I said, “I’m going to ask around one more time,” and I turned right, off the main boulevard. Amazingly, the very first thing I saw as we pulled into the strip mall was a store, right in front of us, with a large sign: Watch Repair Shop.

My wife started laughing and said, “See? He just answered you. This is how!”

She got it before I did. God was telling me, in a memorable, succinct manner, Not only can I greet each one of you individually when your time comes to come here, but I can meet your smallest needs, even down to a tiny watch battery, in unpredictable ways!

So God intervened that day and answered my question! And there we were with a pleasant and skilled Vietnamese gentleman, surrounded by beautiful clocks. He had just the right tiny battery, and after inspecting my watch, he assured me that although it is a very old watch, it was still in very good condition.

It reminded me of the intro to Psalm 139: “You have looked deep into my heart, Lord, and you know all about me.  You know when I am resting or when I am working, and from heaven you discover my thoughts. You notice everything I do and everywhere I go.”1

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