Pastor's Prophesy About Oprah Winfrey Comes True
As a young reporter, Oprah Winfrey received a prophetic message that eventually manifested itself into a media empire.
Wintley Phipps, a gospel singer and pastor, met Winfrey early in her career when she attended one of his performances. He recounted their divine meeting during an episode of the show "Super Soul Sundays" that appears on Winfrey's OWN network.
"I remember coming down off the platform, and there was a tap on my shoulder.You said, 'Excuse me, sir," Phipps recalled on the show. "I just heard you sing and I feel like I can talk to you. Do you have time to talk to me?"
Phipps responded by inviting Winfrey into the home he shared with his wife where prayer and conversation took place. Then, the preacher relayed a prophetic message from God.
"I said, 'Before you go, God has impressed me to tell you: He's going to bless you and give you an opportunity to speak to millions of people,'" he said.
While Winfrey questioned if God could do what the preacher said, even Phipps was surprised to witness the impact she has had on the world.
"You know, when God impressed me to tell you that you'll be speaking to millions of people," he said, "I didn't think it was going to be every day!"
The media tycoon previously revealed that her relationship with God started when she was a young girl whose life centered around her family's church, Buffalo United Methodist Church in Kosciusko, Mississippi.
"Church was our entertainment and church was our comfort, and church was our sanctuary. And being with church people was how we served our community," Winfrey said in a YouTube clip promoting her series "Belief."
"The hours and hours and hours and hours and hours that I spent in that little white church by the red dirt road in Kosciusko, Mississippi, formed the interior meaning for my life. Actually, as I've often said, it's how my broadcasting career began, speaking in front of the church."
In another YouTube video, Winfrey was overcome with emotion as she spoke about how much the Bible has shaped her life.
"Today, I feel the fierce love of all that is God so deeply, so strongly and so purely in my heart that it lifts and carries me. Sometimes I actually feel weightless in the love that is God, because I feel it in all things," an emotional Winfrey said in a video shared with millions of Facebook fans
"I've reached a point in my life where I actually pay attention to every breath. And my spiritual practice is that I awaken and the first thought is 'thank you' and the next thought is 'I'm still here in this body.' And my heart's desire is to want to live and be in this body fully present to everything, to not miss this experience of being here now on the planet we call Earth."
For years, Winfrey has shared different elements of her faith and how it helped her overcome a past full of molestation and abuse. In a previous letter written to her 19-year-old self for the May 2012 issue of O magazine, Winfrey advised her former self to lean on God.
"Through it all, you've held onto a belief in God and God's belief in you," Winfrey wrote. "That will be your single greatest gift: knowing there is a power greater than yourself and trusting that Force to guide you."