When The Astounding Occurs

James Greenwood, a pastor at Faith Pentecostal Assembly church, (and this gives you an idea of the template he uses to interpret life events), tells a skin-tingling tale of coincidence, which he wonders aloud might be more akin to something miraculous.

The link to his experience is right here and I think it's worth the read. But I'll summarize his coincidence/miracle.

He traveled to a "developing country" in order to help install a water filtration system for a Christian camp that was forced to boil water for drinking.

Not being much of a handyman or "good with tools," he began to pray for two things: (1) that nothing went wrong in his effort and (2) that he would to see the purified water run before he left.

Once there they did run into problems with the installation and as he puts it: "We realized we were going to need more than what we had, and being in a developing country, we knew it would take longer than we had in order to find all the parts we needed."

It was decided that they would leave the water filtration system in hopes that one day it could be installed. But this was complicated by a "language barrier" between them and people at the camp.

Then the miracle/coincidence occurred when:

...a man with a plumber’s shirt walked by us. We quickly asked in our best Spanish if he was a plumber. We discovered not only was he a plumber, but he spoke perfect English because he was from Miami. And to top it all off he had a bunch of extra parts with him.

The man was only in the area for the week James and his friends were there to install the filtration system. James Greenwood did get to see the clean water running before he left.

In my lifetime I have experienced a number of these coincidence/miracles (and at the time I was a Christian and would have claimed these as answered prayers, just as Greenwood does). I've written posts about a couple of them. Since leaving Christianity I had another rather significant coincidence/miracles, and I posted on that a couple of years ago.

What to make of these things? I had quit praying (though I have since returned to the practice in a manner of speaking) because I had trouble making sense of how it was supposed to work. Was God something similar to a genie who granted wishes? Could God be petty enough to be cajoled into doing things? Or perhaps, I thought, it was time to take a second look at the Law of Attraction.

This I have discovered: people of all faiths and even those of no faith have usually experienced these happenings. I have collected a large number of these from friends, family, and acquaintances. I'm not so interested in how these individuals interpret these events. but just that they occur and make deep impressions on people. I have supplemented these with stories (like this one) that I have culled from the newspapers.

I can't help but be amazed and fascinated.