There are moments in life that forever divide time into before and after. For me, one of those moments came just a few weeks before September 11, 2001.
At the time, I had no idea what was about to happen. I only knew that God had impressed something upon my heart with an urgency unlike anything I had experienced before. It wasn’t symbolic. It wasn’t vague. It was startlingly specific.
“There’s something not quite right with Barb’s flight from Washington Dulles to Los Angeles. Change the date.”
There was no explanation. Only certainty.
To understand why I trusted that prompting so completely, I need to go back a little.
In January of 2000, my wife Gloria passed away after an almost two-year battle with breast cancer. Losing her shattered my world. Like anyone who has lost the love of their life, I wasn’t looking for another relationship. I was simply trying to survive my grief and somehow make sense of a life that no longer resembled the one I had known.
Then something happened that I never could have anticipated. Out of nowhere, I received an email from my very first high school sweetheart, Barbara. We hadn’t seen or spoken to one another in thirty-six years. Even more remarkable, only a couple of weeks before her email arrived, I had found myself wondering whatever had become of her after she had mysteriously disappeared from my life all those years ago. Now, suddenly, there she was. She had found me online and simply wanted to say hello.
One conversation became another. Phone calls grew longer. Laughter slowly began replacing grief. Looking back now, I can’t help but believe that God had already begun weaving together a story neither of us could yet see.
Eventually, I invited Barbara to visit me at my home in Los Angeles. She booked a flight from Washington Dulles International Airport. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary.
Until the whisper came. It wasn’t an audible voice. It was something much quieter—a gentle inner prompting that, over the years, I had come to recognize as one of the ways God communicates with me. Again came the message: “There’s something not quite right with Barb’s flight. Change the date.” I didn’t understand why. I only knew I couldn’t ignore it.
I immediately picked up the phone.
“Barb,” I said, “I need you to change your flight.”
She laughed. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
“Are you getting cold feet?”
“No. I just know something isn’t right.”
She kept asking for an explanation. I couldn’t give her one because I didn’t have one. All I could say was, “Please trust me.” Reluctantly, she agreed. She changed her reservation to three days later.
Then came September 11. Like millions of people around the world, I sat in disbelief as the unimaginable unfolded on television. Only afterward did we realize what that one phone call had prevented.
Barbara’s original reservation had been on American Airlines Flight 77—the aircraft hijacked after departing Washington Dulles before crashing into the Pentagon. Had she remained on that flight, she almost certainly would not have survived. Instead, she arrived safely in Los Angeles three days later.
Barbara and I eventually married and shared twenty wonderful years together until the Lord called her home in September 2021.
People often ask me whether I can explain what happened. The honest answer is, I can’t. I don’t understand the mechanics of divine guidance. I only know what I experienced.
Looking back, I wasn’t surprised that God’s guidance had been so clear. By then, I had spent decades learning to recognize that gentle whisper whenever it came. That relationship with God didn’t begin in 2001. It began when I was three years old.
As a little boy growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania, I became aware of a quiet inner guidance that seemed to know things I didn’t. At the time, I simply accepted it as normal. Only years later did I come to understand that what I was experiencing was one of the ways God had been faithfully leading me from the very beginning of my life.
Sometimes His guidance encouraged me to move forward. Sometimes it warned me to stop. Sometimes it gently redirected my path. And on that September morning, I believe it saved the life of the woman I would one day marry.
Many years later, during a season of prayer and reflection, I felt God impress upon me the phrase The Invisible Architect. In that moment, I finally had words for the unseen Presence that had faithfully accompanied me since childhood. That experience eventually inspired me to write The Invisible Architect: How to Design Your Perfect Life from Within. The book didn’t create my relationship with God. It simply gave me a way to describe a relationship that had already been unfolding for a lifetime.
I’ve learned not to expect God to speak the same way to everyone. Sometimes He speaks through Scripture. Sometimes through prayer. Sometimes through other people. And sometimes, He speaks through a gentle whisper that quietly settles into the heart with unmistakable clarity.
I’m not asking anyone to believe my story simply because I tell it. I can only share what happened. For me, it became undeniable evidence that God is still present, still guiding, still protecting, and still speaking to those willing to listen.
Sometimes we expect God to announce Himself through thunder, or through dramatic signs and wonders. My experience has often been different. More often than not, He whispers. And every now and then, listening changes everything.