Meaningful Coincidences

Suppose that you go to a park for a picnic and end up meeting a stranger there who becomes a lifelong friend. Or suppose you take a college course because it fits an open time slot, and the course evokes a passionate interest that leads to a career choice. Some people have an urge to understand events that could be regarded as matters of chance as having some deeper meaning. An extreme form is the view that everything that happens to you is for a reason. The opposite tendency is to reject the idea of deeper meanings when we can attribute what happens to chance. 

There are undoubtedly occasions in which the appearance of some deeper meaning is just an appearance and nothing more than chance is involved. But what we attribute to chance may depend on whether we acknowledge powers other than ordinary physical causality. For example, meeting a particular person might seem like a chance occurrence, but could it have been something God arranged? 

A potential problem here is that once you start thinking of some events as being arranged by God, you may be tempted to extend the idea of God arranging things in problematic ways. The term “God thing” has been applied to such outcomes as weddings going well, remodeled kitchens, and finding a parking place near a store entrance. It’s fine to be grateful for good things, but the idea that God is especially concerned to shield favored people from inconveniences that are a part of life raises questions about God’s priorities. Rachel Held Evans describes being troubled when during the weekend of Hurricane Katrina, someone called it a God thing that all the wedding guests had arrived. She wondered why God would be more concerned with securing full wedding attendance than with people experiencing life-and-death issues from the storm surges.

Particular references to God’s involvement presuppose ideas about God’s purposes, and some of these ideas are questionable. For example, it seems questionable to think of God micromanaging relative minor matters for the benefit of a favored few while ignoring major problems. It also seems questionable when people automatically assume that tragic events are a sign of divine punishment. What people imagine God to be doing is sometimes shaped more by their own agendas than a reflective understanding of biblical revelation.

Aside from the question of what events God arranges, the idea of God bringing about meaningful coincidences raises the question of how God does such a thing. Some people may be content to say that God can do anything and leave it at that. But suppose we ask whether this kind of display of God’s power involves miraculous interventions in which God overrides the ordinary operation of nature. Christians who think such a thing are likely to think that this kind of miraculous intervention is common. But believing that such miracles are common raises a problem when we consider that there are many occurrences of terrible things that God doesn’t intervene to prevent. The more frequent you imagine miraculous intervention to be, the more difficult it is to explain cases in which it seems needed, but doesn’t happen.

But suppose we don’t think of arranging meaningful coincidences as instances of overriding the natural order. Could we think of them instead as cases of God working through nature? Perhaps, but that would mean that God acts through some power within nature. It is a standard Christian view that God sometimes works through human powers. Some Christians have thought that God is limited to working through human agents. There is a poem attributed to St. Teresa of Avilla containing the line, “Christ has no body on earth now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.” The idea expressed in the poem is that God’s work is done through human agents who are aligned with divine purposes. Even people who think that there are exceptions to this rule may acknowledge that what God does in the world is for the most part done through created beings, and that this kind of action depends on responsiveness of those beings to God’s purposes.

But could human powers be connected with meaningful coincidences? Suppose that human powers include capacities for extrasensory perception and for direct influences of minds on physical things (psychokinetic influence). In that case it becomes harder to distinguish between a chance occurrence and one that involves more than chance. You pick up the phone to call someone who is already on the line because she is calling you. It might be a coincidence, or it might be a telepathic connection between minds. You become uneasy about taking a flight and cancel your reservation on a flight that subsequently crashes. Was it a coincidence or could there have been a precognitive awareness of a danger? You are trying to stop someone from driving while intoxicated, and just as the car is driving off, the fuel pump stops working. Was it a chance occurrence, or might some unconscious psychokinetic influence on your part have been involved?

So, might God sometimes use remarkable powers of mind to bring about meaningful coincidences? Consider an example. A young man who had decided to kill himself was sitting in his car at an isolated lake ready to end his life. Another car pulls up, and his brother steps out of that car. The man asks his brother why he is there. The brother says he doesn’t know. He got in the car not knowing where he was going, but he knew he needed to get in the car and drive. If you accept telepathic influence, you might suspect that a connection between minds was the means through which the beneficial result occurred. If you believe in God, you might think that God did something to activate the telepathic influence, or you might think of the event as a fortunate result of the kinds of powers God has built into the world.

For a fuller discussion of this topic, see Chapter 20: God Moves in Paranormal Ways in Making Room For Mystery: Anomalous Events, Extraordinary Experiences, and Christian Faith.