A greatful believer is born

Many of you know my cousin Adrianne Reynolds

was brutally murdered 3yrs ago.

When she first died, my kids would look for "signs" that she was still with us, and that she was ok. It helped them deal with what happened, and helped them to feel better. Below is a story that was in today's paper, about a "sign" that Uncle Tony, finally got.

Tony Reynolds didn’t stop talking to his daughter, Adrianne, after she was killed. He talks to her all the time.

When a family member told of having received “a sign” from the deceased teenager, Reynolds started asking Adrianne to send him a message, too.“I started reading about people who’ve had a butterfly land on their arm on the anniversary of their mother’s death or a special kind of bird that shows up at the front door on a certain day, but I need more than that,” he said. “I guess I’m a skeptic.“I told Adrianne, ‘You’ll have to hit me in the head with a brick.’”The brick didn’t come, but something else did.

Rewind to the months following Adrianne’s Jan. 21, 2005, murder in the parking lot of a Moline Taco Bell. That spring, Reynolds bought a 1966 Mustang. He’d had a 1969 model when Adrianne was just a little girl, and the two of them loved to take rides together.“She used to say, ‘Make it mad, Daddy!’” he said of her enthusiasm for speed. “She was so little back then, and I called her Lil’ Bit.”When he bought the second Mustang, Reynolds knew he had to have “Lil Bit” on the license plate to honor the passenger he lost. But it wasn’t to be. No matter how hard the helpful woman at the Secretary of State’s office tried, the plate, in all variations, already was taken.Disappointed, he gave up. But he kept asking Adrianne for that sign.

Then came the Saturday two weeks ago when Reynolds was having his usual early morning run. He took to jogging shortly after Adrianne died because he found that it cleared his head, and he could talk to her privately in the silent light/dark of morning.He was headed back home, just a half block away, when he spotted something in the street. It was an Illinois license plate.“I picked it up, and it had, ‘L-I-L,’ then a space and, ‘B’ a space and ’74,’” he said. “I thought and thought about LIL B 74. Then I looked at the alphabet, and I realized that ‘G’ is the seventh letter in the alphabet, and ‘D’ is the fourth letter.”In other words: LIL B GD“Then it hit me like a brick: I figured Lil’ Bit was telling me she’s with God.”The retelling of the story puts a lump in Reynolds’ throat.“How many millions of license plates are there in the world?” he asked. “And I find this one a half block from my house. That meant the world to me. To me, that plate says, ‘Daddy, here’s your sign.’”It is the best thing that has happened to him since he lost Adrianne.“I wanted to believe she could hear me,” he said. “I needed to know she’s all right.

“I could have won the Lottery, and it wouldn’t make me feel any better than it did to find that plate.”