It was on Mother’s Day, May 13, 2018. I woke up to one of the most beautiful mornings in a long time: the sun, bright and calm, was shining through my kitchen window.

I looked at the time while trying to charge my phone in order to return Mother’s Day greetings from my cousin in Texas.

It was then that I remembered I had promised to help my pastor cook a pot of yellow rice for Mother’s Day, since he had traveled to visit relatives up north.

You see, this year the men fed the women in our church. We have done this before and it always turns out wonderfully when the men are in the kitchen because there is not the usual female drama and fussing.

I was already sore from hosting my son’s graduation party at our house the day before. Nevertheless, I had promised so I must deliver.

I grabbed my rice cooker washed it out and thank God for Sam’s Club! Dinner was already fixed, so all I needed to do was pour the already seasoned rice into the cooker and add water.

As I tried to close the lid it wouldn’t lock, so I kept slamming it closed — and each time I did, it popped right back up. This went on for a while until a voice said to me “Why not check around the perimeter of the cooker. It may have some rice around it from yesterday’s cooking.”

When I did this, to my amazement I found dried rice all around the mouth of the cooker. I saw what was preventing it from closing and the light bulb in my head came on — wow!

So this is what has been happening in the past and I couldn’t figure it out. Thank you, Lord, for using the rice cooker to open my eyes!

My experience with the rice cooker no doubt came as a teachable moment from the Holy Spirit, which reminds me of the Biblical character Balaam in Numbers chapter 22, who had an encounter where he kept beating the donkey because it was not complying with his instructions to move — just like I kept slamming the lid of the rice cooker because it was not shutting properly.

Just as God used the donkey to open the prophet’s eyes, so did He with the rice cooker open my eyes.

Sometimes God puts road blocks in our path to open our eyes to some spiritual truth or lesson for our own good that is right in front of us, but that we cannot see with our human eye. For Balaam, it was the donkey; for me, it was the rice cooker.

Friends, what is God using to get your attention? To open your spiritual eyes? The lesson in this for me is that whatever God is using to teach me, I want to submit to Him and do the right thing once the illumination has taken place.

Also, that we need to listen and obey the voice of God when He reveals something to us and do what He is asking us to do, to change or to correct.

For it is only when we learn to listen and obey His voice that He moves in unbelievable ways to make things happen for us.
Balaam could not progress in his journey and mission until he decided to obey God. I could not go on with my cooking that day until I decided to listen and do what the Lord was telling me.

God will always speak. It is for us to listen whenever He speaks.

Felecia Wesley lives in Salisbury.