Coin Flipping and Praying

I decided to flip a coin to make a decision between two alternatives. I was in my apartment in Lexington, Kentucky.

If the coin landed on its head, I would do one thing. If it landed on its tail, I would do the alternative.

I flipped a normal coin. It landed on its edge.

Amazed, I looked at the coin carefully. I'm confident that it was a normal United States coin. The coin was similar to one of those pictured in the photo below that I took February 8, 2023, when revising this article.

I decided to flip a coin again. For this second flip, I think I pulled a different coin from my pocket, but it may have been the same one. At any rate, it was a normal coin.

I flipped it. It landed on its edge, too.

Then I heard an inaudible voice inside me, inaudible but loud and clear: "Now stop flipping coins and pray." Astounded, I did stop flipping coins and pray to decide how to proceed between the two alternatives.

Coin flipping reminded me of the importance of prayer.

National Day of Prayer in the United States 
As I see it, any time on any day is a great time to pray. But I originally wrote this article shortly after midnight Eastern Daylight Time on the first Thursday in May of 2016, the annual National Day of Prayer here in the United States. Below is a quote from the President's proclamation for 2016 on the White House website.

". . . .I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim May 5, 2016, as National Day of Prayer. . . ."

You can read about the history of the National Day of Prayer in many articles, including one on a webpage on ReligiousTolerance.org.

Concluding Thoughts
I urge persons to seek to pray, meditate, and/or reflect on how to better their lives and world, as their particular faiths lead them to. Personally, I consider prayer the greatest power on Earth available to humans.

At the time of the coin flipping discussed in this article, I'd already been a Christian for years. However, even many years ago when I was an agnostic, I prayed daily and received answers sometimes, though I didn't know whether the answers came from God, from my own inner thoughts, from ESP from another person, from some extremely intelligent life far away in the universe communicating in some advanced way, or from something else. In the years since becoming a Christian, I've come to value prayer much more than I did as an agnostic, but not as much as I could or should. God used my coin flipping that day to refresh my memory about the importance of prayer.

NOTE: This post May 5, 2016 is adapted from and very similar to two Facebook posts I made a day earlier, May 4, 2016. This Google Blogger post basically combines the two Facebook posts into one blog article.

I last updated this Blogger post on February 8, 2023.