I Met God in Amsterdam

It’s almost been a year since I went to Amsterdam last November on what I thought was just a lucky trip to the city I’ve dreamt of visiting. One day, out of the blue, the family I nannied for asked me to take care of their son during the nights there so they could go out. That left me with ten days of daylight to take starry-eyed walks through the autumn-kissed streets of Amsterdam—morning strolls past buildings that looked like drawings straight out of a children’s book and dream-like wanderings through Vondelpark.

I knew God’s kindness was behind this the second I was invited on the fully-paid trip to my dream city, but I didn’t know His revelational intentions behind it. I’d spent the prior months engulfed in depression & loneliness, mistaking it as the absence of God. It was through the windy trees of Holland, God planned to whisper, “I’ve been with you all year long. I love you, and here’s the proof.” There, He loudly reaffirmed the Bible verse He assigned to my life: Esther 4:14.

“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” Esther 4:14 (NIV).

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe God speaks to His children in ways He knows they’ll understand, and for me it’s always been through what look like “coincidences.” They’re just too precise, too on time, too repetitive, and too time-defying to simply be coincidental - it’s our language. He makes conversation through coincidences. He’s spoken to me this way before, but never as miraculously & intentionally as He spoke this time. This trip was His plan to prove His loving, never-absent presence to me – on the royal grounds of Amsterdam.

The funny coincidences were endless. Upon returning home, I noticed half the things in my bedroom were prophetic hints of this trip. As a writer, I’d always admired Anne Frank. “Coincidentally” I found myself walking through the very house she wrote her diaries. I didn’t know until I got to Amsterdam, however, that the Van Gogh Museum was there. I stood before the original paintings I happened to own in the form of journals and bedsheets. I later spotted I had a photo of a pink bicycle leaning against a canal on my wall—and now on my camera roll was an almost identical photo of one that I’d taken myself. But it wasn’t until I noticed the number on the red-brick house we stayed in (I somehow didn’t catch until I got home) I was left speechless: 414. God had literally placed me in a home that whispered, “I brought you here, daughter.”

Unlike Esther, I wasn’t brought there to save a nation. The Netherlands didn’t need my saving. God brought me there to save me. There is where He saved my faith, making conversation through “coincidences”. The audible voice from the sky I wanted wasn’t the quiet promise I needed. If you’ve ever felt unseen or unheard by God, perhaps you’re missing His still, small voice in the small things. God may be the flower on the ground you prayed to receive on Valentine’s Day, or the hug from a friend after saying you feel unlovable. For me, He was a number carved into brick. I thought I had nowhere to be, no reason to live – but those “coincidences” whispered, “Perhaps you were made for such a time as this.”