The Coffee That Marked a Turning: When God Confirms Your Next Step
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Editor’s Note: This journal entry is shared to help others recognise the subtle but unmistakable moments when God marks a turning in their own journey. Not every shift comes with thunder; sometimes it comes over coffee, in a crowded room, when the Holy Spirit breathes on a conversation and something inside you changes shape. If you’re in your own awakening, let this be a reminder to pay attention to the quiet pivots — they are often the doorway to the next chapter.
I didn’t walk into that café expecting anything unusual.
I just knew I was ready to sit across from someone who had witnessed the earliest tremors of my Awakening. A friend from my old church. The same woman who, seven months ago, became a kind of spiritual midwife without even realising it. When I was shaking, breaking, unravelling, and terrified I was losing my mind, she was the one who steadied me with a single sentence. She whispered the word prophet when I could barely breathe. She gave me language I didn’t have. And for months, I clung to her words like a life raft in the storm.
That was then.
Yesterday was something different.
I walked toward that coffee date as the woman I have become since the fire.
Not tentative.
Not trembling.
Not trying to convince myself of my own calling.
Stable.
Awake.
Clear-eyed.
Carrying something heavier but also easier, as if the mantle had finally stopped slipping off my shoulders and settled into place.
She sat down opposite me and said, “Tell me everything.”
Not polite.
Not curious.
Hungry.
So I told her.
I told her about the Breaking.
The Awakening.
The tearing open.
The visions.
The fourth-watch mornings.
The life review that undid me.
The dreams that pulled me into instruction.
The fire in my chest.
The way the Scriptures lit up.
The rawness of hearing God in ways I wasn’t prepared for.
The strange mix of terror and tenderness that comes with being dismantled by the Holy Spirit.
She didn’t flinch.
She leaned in.
She teared up.
She held the weight of it with a steady heart.
She told me she loved the rawness in my voice and begged me never to soften it. She said she rarely gets to have conversations like this.
Something in the atmosphere cracked open.
We started talking about gatherings. Not polite living-room groups with printed questions. I mean the real thing. The Upper Room thing. The Acts 2 thing. The kind of fire that doesn’t ask permission. The kind of Kingdom Ecclesia that rises outside man-made structure. The Ruach blowing across the room. Heaven drawing close. The Spirit leading instead of a programme.
She said she longed for that. She said she had felt boxed in for years. She said part of her had been locked up by religious structure and she was afraid to admit it.
And then she said something that pierced me.
She said she feared she was getting older without ever being used by God in the way she had hoped.
As if the window was closing.
I looked at her and said the only true thing I could say.
“But He has used you. You were the one who steadied me when everything fell apart. You were the first person to recognise what God was doing in me. I held on to your words like a life raft. You carried me through my breaking without even knowing it.”
Her eyes filled.
Something loosened in her spirit.
Something ancient, maternal, steady.
And in that moment I saw it clearly.
Not a title.
Not a role.
A truth.
“You’re not just a midwife,” I said.
“You’re a spiritual mother.”
The words came from a place deeper than thought. And the moment I spoke them, the Holy Spirit surged through me in electric waves. Up my spine. Down my arms. Across my chest. Again and again with every truth that passed my lips.
She didn’t shrink back.
She didn’t deny it.
She breathed it in.
And then she told me something that confirmed everything.
She said her whole life, her one gift had been prayer.
She told me how her son often comes to her and asks her to pray for the people he works with, and how he returns with stories of breakthroughs and unexpected shifts that align with her intercession.
Her face softened as she said it, as though she were realising it for the first time.
Her prayer had been changing things for years, quietly, faithfully, without recognition.
I said, “Then you’re an intercessor.”
And the Holy Spirit surged again.
She nodded slowly, as if something ancient in her was waking up.
She told me how Emma Stark had once been under severe spiritual attack and had to lean on the people who had been with her from the beginning.
She looked at me with that same steady compassion and said, “Then you must let me pray for you. You must let me stand with you. You need covering.”
The air thickened.
The fire settled.
A spiritual mother had taken her place without either of us orchestrating it.
I said I knew something was coming.
That God had told me He would bring the first person to me.
That I would recognise them when I saw them.
That I wasn’t ready to move yet, but I was listening.
And then it hit me.
Clean.
Instant.
Cell-deep.
“Oh my goodness,” I said.
“It’s you.”
It wasn’t emotional.
It wasn’t dramatic.
It was recognition.
And the Holy Spirit surged again, confirming what my mouth had spoken before my mind caught up.
She didn’t react with fear or dependency.
She simply lit up.
A woman awakened to her own calling, not to mine.
A mother stepping into her true identity, not a follower stepping behind me.
We stayed in that place for a long time, without planning it, without noticing how time was passing. When we first sat down, the café was nearly empty. By the time I looked up, every table was full, the noise was loud, people were bustling everywhere, but I hadn’t noticed a thing.
We had created an Upper Room inside a crowded coffee shop.
A bubble of fire.
A pocket of presence.
A hidden room where heaven drew near while the world carried on around us.
I don’t know how long we were in it. All I know is that the Spirit was thick, steady, and unmistakably present.
On the way home, my body did what it always does when something spiritual settles.
It purged.
A sudden rush of sickness.
A violent emptying.
A physical clearing out of whatever residue couldn’t walk forward with the woman I had become in that café.
It wasn’t symbolic.
It wasn’t mystical.
It was somatic truth.
A body aligning with a mantle that had just anchored deeper.
I didn’t leave that café with answers.
I left with fire.
I left with clarity.
I left with peace.
I left knowing this was a turning.
Not a new mantle.
Not a new assignment.
Just the same mantle settling into the skin it was always meant to cover.
A friend from my old church sat with me in a crowded café, and together we stepped into a room that wasn’t on the map.
A room filled with fire.
A room filled with truth.
A room where the Spirit moved freely.
A room where heaven pressed close and said, “Yes.”
The mantle didn’t fall on me yesterday.
It stopped slipping.
“Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
Luke 24:32 (NIV)
With fire and grace,
This message carries fire. Pass it on. 👇🏻
Victoria Player is the founder of Daughter of Thunder, a movement awakening spiritually sensitive women to truth, purpose, and divine power in a world that’s lost its compass. After walking through her own season of fire and rebuilding, she now writes and speaks to those who sense there’s more — guiding them from confusion to clarity, from awakening to assignment.
“I don’t bow to Babylon — I walk with the Lion.” — Daughter of Thunder
