3 gifts white

#288  dandelions

Even though they are weeds, they still look like pretty little flowers that kids and kids at heart like to blow and make a wish.

#289 white eggs boiled, ready to color

#290  white pages of books read today.

In the post last week ‘3 gifts uncovered’, I mentioned “coincidence”.  Was it coincidence that both the not-so-common joy searches, 3 gifts uncovered and 3 gifts redeemed, happened to be words in those days bible readings, too?

This afternoon my daughter and I were lying in the shade under a tree, on a beautiful spring day.  We were reading.  She was reading a great classic, one of my childhood favorites, Anne of Green Gables.  I was reading, too…a book I hadn’t picked up in a while.  It’s a book made up of daily devotions focusing around single words each day…sacred and ordinary words.  Frederick Buechner is a witty author and sometimes makes me really have to think to understand the point he’s making.  

And what a coincidence it was today…I opened that book, Beyond Words, to where I left off reading and low and behold, the word for today…”coincidence”.

Here is Buechner’s definition of “coincidence”:

“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 that I have spent the morning writing about.  A car passes me on the road, and it’s license plate consists of 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 that people laugh at coincidence as a way of relegating it to the realm of the absurd and of 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 even think that you’ve been forgotten.’”