| Sunny Side Up! November 28,2001 � 2001, Kathleen Gibson No coincidences�only divine appointments A reader emailed me recently. �Do you believe in coincidences?� �No, I don�t believe in them �atall, atall!� I answered her. �Only Divine appointments.� Recently a pregnant young Calgary woman lapsed into unconsciousness while driving. Unguided, her car crossed the highway and sailed over the embankment, plunging into the water on the other side. Walking his dog nearby was Jeff Liberty, a member of Canada�s Olympic diving team. He stripped to his shorts, dove in and rescued the woman. Coincidence? A friend�s brother was scheduled to be in New York for a breakfast meeting at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11/01. He made a last minute decision not to go, and his Alberta coworkers went without him. That Tuesday, they overslept; missed the meeting. If their colleague had been along he would have rousted them, even at the cost of dumping water over their lay-a-bed heads. They would have been at that meeting just in time for the terrorist attacks. Coincidence? A good friend of mine and her travel companion were cruising the Alaska highway in a late model motor home. Margaret smelled smoke. A few seconds later they heard a voice shouting�. �Pull over and get out. Your rig�s gonna� blow!� They did, and managed to escape without injury. Forty minutes later the motor home was a smoldering skeleton. The voice? A police cruiser �just happened� to be travelling behind them. Coincidence? Divine appointments have punctuated my own life. For example�.. I phone my parents weekly, always in the evenings. Recently�on impulse�I called in the afternoon. My father answered the phone, confused and distraught. My frail mother had fallen only minutes before and was lying on the floor in intense pain. My call from two provinces away calmed them both. We talked and prayed until the ambulance arrived twenty minutes later. Coincidence? There was no reason to wake that night, but I did�gripped by an urge to pray for the daughter of a friend, a young woman I barely knew. I obeyed, not knowing that in the wee hours of that morning Jean�s car had skidded on black ice, landing in the black waters of Vancouver Island�s Cameron Lake, where it sunk to the bottom; but not before she and her boyfriend managed to escape. Someone 3,000 miles away was praying. Coincidence? My husband and I decided to walk to our dinner engagement that evening. We never walked anywhere in those days. He was pointing out the home of a couple he�d recently married when we were startled by the sound of shattering glass and the sight of a red tea kettle tracing a high and steaming arc across the lawn in the dusk. From behind the hole in the window came the hysteric sound of a woman�s screams. Rick bounded up the stairs precisely when a counselor was most needed. Coincidence? There is no such word in God�s dictionary. Only perfectly Divine timing. You can respond to this column at [email protected] |