It was cold. He was huddled outside the grocery store.
"He loves bananas."
Tammy Lyons Wilkinson, running an errand days before Christmas, recognized those words as a message from God. What unfolded next was a lesson in faith for her, and it’s become the heart of a book she recently released.
On that day in December 2016, she bought bananas and some protein-packed snacks for a man outside the grocery store. She noticed fried chicken and wanted to buy that too, but there was another message: "I did not ask you to buy fried chicken."
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She struggled with that. What was wrong with buying hot food for a hungry person? But she didn’t buy the chicken. She went outside and handed a bag to the man.
Behind her was a woman also approaching the man — with fried chicken.
In her book Wilkinson recounts how, sitting in her car, she composed a Facebook post to share her story of God at work down to the details — only to inexplicably lose it as she tried to post. She then felt prompted to open Facebook Live, which she had not done before.
As she came to the end of the story, tears welled in her eyes, and she pushed out the next words in between held-in sobs.
"If you will just listen and trust that still, small voice," she said, " … he loves you and wants to speak to your heart like you’ve never been spoken to …"
The speaking, Wilkinson said, is not an audible voice that others nearby would hear. She likens it more to how you might already know what Dad or Mom would say about the trip with friends or the outfit.
"You can already hear your mom’s voice in your mind because you know her so well," Wilkinson said. "I know him (God) so well, and he knows me so well."
Wilkinson grew up in Charlottesville, later moving to the New Castle area after eighth grade. Andy Craig, a retired Hancock County Sheriff’s Department captain, was friends with her uncle and remembers seeing her at some of the friend’s family functions.
He watched the video and later looked up her book, "Faint Whispers."
"I’m glad that she did what she did and improved that guy’s life," Craig said.
There were others, some from far away, who saw the video and said they were touched by it.
Three people told her the day she posted the video was the day they had planned to commit suicide. Yet, "because they saw the love of Christ for a homeless man," she writes in the introduction of her book, "they chose instead to seek out God’s love."
The video drew more than 8.5 million views on Facebook.
Wilkinson began to get messages from all over the world; she said she still hasn’t gotten through them all. Viewers in Asia dug up a blog she’d written 10 years ago and asked to use content for a class for young women. Singers Reba McEntire and Marcus Stanley were among the celebrities noticing the video.
Months later, Wilkinson was at author and speaker Carol Kent’s Speak Up Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Even getting there was its own story of God providing, Wilkinson said, and she felt "outclassed" as she looked around the room.
Then someone recognized her.
"She pointed at me, running toward me, saying, ‘You’re the banana lady!’"
That someone was Athena Dean Holtz of Redemption Publishing, who hugged Wilkinson, ushered her into a classroom and did a Facebook Live with her to introduce her and have her retell the story.
"I knew she was someone I would want to help get into print," Holtz wrote in an email to the Daily Reporter. "Her experience is so crucial to a believer’s walk with Christ … to be able to hear His voice and be the ‘hands and feet of Jesus’ in every day life!"
Wilkinson said Holtz encouraged her to look for the common thread in the messages she had received. The video had made a lot of people ask Wilkinson questions. How did she sense God speaking to her? How could they recognize God’s voice? The answers grew into the book.
Wilkinson became a Christian as an adult and seeks to write in a way accessible to anyone. She doesn’t want to assume what people already know, because they might not know it. She didn’t.
"Honestly, I didn’t know anything about Christ until I was 25 years old … I don’t want you to (read the book and) say, ‘What does she mean by that?’"
Wilkinson first held a copy of the book in August, and she signed copies at the Women of Joy conference in Indianapolis. At the book table, women stopped by with more reports of how her story has touched lives.
The amount of attention the video drew surprised Wilkinson, and she wondered who she was to write a book.
"I just bought $3 worth of bananas," Wilkinson said. "It did not warrant the attention that God got from it."
Yet just as her grocery store purchase grew into a message that touched other people, she hopes the book will be used to encourage people to be less distracted and more attentive to God.
"We get so bogged down with everyday life … that we fail to stop and really pay attention," she said. "Intimacy with Jesus — it is possible. … He still speaks to us every single day, but we have to make him a priority."
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You can follow Tammy Lyons Wilkinson and her Healing Hem Ministries on Facebook under her name. To arrange a book signing or schedule her as a speaker, call her at 765-524-2751.
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