(This is blatantly and particularly churchy. Anyone disinterested may skip it without offending me.)
Yesterday I was thinking a lot about Joseph Smith’s “First Vision”, as it has come to be called, when God the Father and God the Son appeared to him. Actually, I was thinking that there may be many earthlings who have seen visions of God the Father – Lehi in THE BOOK OF MORMON apparently saw a vision of God:
.. he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels.. – THE BOOK OF MORMON, 1st Nephi 1:8
In the late evening Tia related a comment she heard in Relief Society – which of course I didn’t hear, not going to the women’s meetings in my church đŸ˜‰ and it’s a comment I hadn’t heard before anyway – it is that people have looked back through records of the weather in the year Joseph Smith had his vision, and correlated these reports with Joseph’s comment on the weather the day of his vision, to guess that his vision was probably on March 26th. Joseph’s weather comment is in this verse of his witness:
So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty.. – JOSEPH SMITH—HISTORY, verse 14
Apparently the only clear day in early spring of that year was March 26th.
Blatantly, I see it as more than coincidence that I was thinking heavily on the First Vision on the apparent anniversary date of it, unaware. If it’s not the anniversary, the synchronicity of thought is striking. None of this is proof to me; only signs (I see a distinction between the two), if this hearsay is verifiable. Whatever the case, my faith rests on more certain things.
.. Another significant coincidence: about mid-two-years ago I woke up thinking I should get in the Christmas Spirit (as it were, and I never really did, and I often am abysmally not in that spirit), and that it was probably halfway to Christmas. I didn’t know it literally was until I looked at my calendar and calculated. I forget the date now đŸ˜‰ as I don’t consciously track dates. I unconsciously track them. .. I could doubtless benefit from consciously tracking them, except that now I’m curious what other signs I’ll find unconscious, drunken and not with wine..