The Determination Of Spirit

We’ve been here for nearly a month now and are due to return home on Tuesday. This time, I’ve been unable to do as much work with Spirited Talk as planned. I lost a few days in the early weeks after my chest infection returned.

I have been able to sit every day so far for WFSIW, which now means I have completed enough to cover most of this year’s online editions. Why am I including this as an edition of TIS? I’m not doing so to show off that we’re abroad again. I know some people might think that way, but believe me, that is not my style. No, I just wanted to share a short personal story as part of the explanation.

I have had permission to print this story, which hopefully shows you how the power of spirit works through us to ensure an important message is received. The person mentioned in this story has also suggested I follow this article up with some of the actual details of the communication that took place. However, I’d prefer to omit the private details for this article. Perhaps in a more appropriate article in the future.

In October 2023, I visited my family in their hometown of Weymouth, on the south coast of England. But the story started a few weeks before that when I received an email from a friend I’d not seen or heard from in 20 years. His name is Jon, and I’d known him from working with his wife, Susan, in an outdoor gear company administration office in Bournemouth. 

Susan was a lovely lady, a good friend, and fun to work with. I was new to my mediumship path, naive, and still learning a lot back then. Susan believed in life after death, though I probably gave her no reason to strengthen her views. I was new to this way of life. But we did share one very important aspect of life in common. We had recently met what we’d call ‘our soul mates‘. I had met Jane a few years before, and Susan had found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. 

Jon was everything to Susan and her to him. Susan loved how I doated over Jane, as it mirrored how she felt about her man, Jon. That was a couple of decades ago, and after leaving the company, I lost contact with Susan and Jon. At first, we moved to the New Forest, then left there to move to the north of England. 

Bringing the story up to date, I received an email from Jon a few weeks before we were due to visit the family in Weymouth. At first, I didn’t remember who he was. The email was vague in details because he wasn’t certain the details he’d used to contact me were accurate. I worked out who I thought it was and emailed him back. It was Jon.

In his email follow-up, Jon asked if he could arrange to talk to me on the phone as a matter of urgency. I sensed this was important and agreed to a time with him. I was sitting in my office in the sanctuary when the call came through. Immediately we spoke, I sensed something was not right. I asked Jon to tell me how I could help him, and I recall asking how Susan was.

Jon’s voice changed. He said, “You obviously haven’t heard. Susan is dead.”

I experienced one of those Alfred Hitchcock shifting zoom focus moments as the news sank in. I was lost for words, shocked and trying hard to comprehend what Jon had shared with me. Surely not? Surely this can’t be right?

Jon was audibly broken. His emotions were raw, and I was struggling to hold myself together, too. At this point of the story, I’m deliberately omitting some of the details of our conversation. I will say that Susan came to me loud and clear during that call, and the details she gave me to share with Jon were staggering. These are things that I could never have known, such as details of her funeral and much more. 

But this didn’t come as much of a surprise to Jon. He had known she was trying to make contact. For some inexplicable reason, Jon had known that he must contact me. This involved him searching for weeks and months to try to track me down. 

Susan’s passing had been painful for both Susan medically and for Jon emotionally. Even though months had passed since that horrid day, Jon was lost in his world. Everything he had lived for was now gone, and he didn’t know where to turn or what to do. But he did know he had to find me because Susan had wanted him to, in messages he’d received during his sleep.

At the end of that telephone conversation, I told Jon I would travel to Weymouth in the coming weeks for family reunions. He asked to meet up and travelled from his home in Poole to meet Jane and me at the hotel we were staying at in Weymouth.

Jon arrived at the hotel and talked for an hour or so. While Jon shed some emotions and talked of Susan’s passing, I became aware once more that Susan was standing behind him, with her hands on his shoulders.  Again, I relayed some of her messages. They were a mix of details that Jon had not shared with me and instructions to me to help Jon get back on with his life, with the knowledge that Susan was with him all the time. 

Jon and Susan were church-goers. But since her passing, Jon had found the church difficult to visit and unable to help him with his grieving. Without overstating it, I suggested Jon might find comfort in visiting Lawrence Savil’s Poole Christian Spiritualist Church near his home.

Since that meeting in the hotel, Jon has indeed become a regular at Lawrence’s church and is now actively involved in some of the events and learning to unfold his own potential for this work. Jon is becoming stronger and with renewed hope and belief in his life. Susan is with him, watching with pride as he rebuilds life without her in the physical form with him, but there in spirit and strength. 

Jon and I now exchange emails every few days. He has read most of my written work and was the spark that inspired me to build the new website that I’d been meaning to do for many months. As an Envoy of Spirited Talk, Jon comments on many articles and was the inspiration behind the “Curious Questions…” series.

Jon gave me one of the most important messages when we met in that hotel: to do everything we had planned now, not tomorrow. Jon and Susan had so much planned for the future. But that opportunity was taken from them. Jon was assertive in telling Jane and me that now was the time to do what we’d planned and not to leave it until it was too late.

That message resonated with Jane and me. Our health is not as it should be, and we’re getting to the age where travel will become increasingly harder every year. That is why I’m here in Lanzarote, enjoying the sixth week this year so far. And we have another six weeks already booked for the rest of this year.

Jon’s message is more important than one might at first imagine. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, but it will be a welcome gift should we get it. The luggage allowance is zero when we leave this earth plane and move to the next life. We’ll take nothing- Everything we possess will remain here on earth. So enjoy it now, today.

Don’t be one of those people who think tomorrow is certain. It’s not. Don’t be someone so busy saving, so busy working, so wrapped up in surviving that nothing else matters. Live tomorrow today.

That’s my message (and Jon’s) for this week. The sun is slowly cooking Jane whilst I’m in the shade chasing blessed flys away. Tonight, we’re off to the local favourite restaurant, La Caleta. Tomorrow – who knows!