“Coincidence,” in Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’S of Faith

pp. 62-63

“I think of a person I haven’t seen or thought of for years, and ten minutes later I see her crossing the street.  I turn on the radio to hear a voice reading the biblical story of Jael, which is the story I have spent the morning writing about.  A car passes me on the road, and its license plate my wife’s and my initials side by side.  When you tell people stories like that, their usual reaction is to laugh.  One wonders why.  I believe people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it the realm of the absurd and therefore not having to take seriously the possibility that there is a lot more going on in our lives than we either know or care to know.  Who can say what it is that’s going on?  But I suspect that part of it, anyway, is that every once and so often we hear a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: ‘You’ve turned up in the right place at the right time.  You’re doing fine.  Don’t ever think that you’ve been forgotten.’”