It's a Providential Life

My family speaks movie.  When my siblings and I get together, we can have entire conversations comprised of little more than movie references strung together by a handful of original thoughts.  And, we’ve found, there are few conversations in life that can’t somehow be enhanced by an It’s a Wonderful Life movie reference.

True story—when the elder of my two-headed brothers got married, our younger two-headed brother toasted him with these words:

To my big brother Chaz, the richest man in town.

 They’re both a little bit off their nut.

A few years ago, my church threw a party for our pastor to celebrate his twenty-five years of service to our congregation. For the event, I wrote a skit entitled, It's a Providential Life. My brother (the elder two-headed one) made this sign which was carried back and forth across the stage as someone played, Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight? on the ukulele.

In the skit our pastor, portrayed by his son, found himself trapped at an elder’s meeting during which fine points of church order were being argued and debated in mind-numbingly excruciating detail.  At one point, the pastor’s character banged his head on the table and cried, “Sometimes I wish I’d never become a pastor!”

Of course, Clarence the angel appeared and showed him all the babies never baptized, the sermons never preached, the marriages not performed. We even caught a glimpse of his wife, pastor’s wife extraordinaire, living instead as an old maid. “Why, I’m not even Presbyterian!” she cried.

During the course of my daughter’s wedding, my dear pastor made reference to that skit and to that sign which continues to hang in his office. Speaking from the book of Ruth, he reminded my daughter and her new husband that God’s providence was, and remains, everywhere present in bringing them together and as they begin their new life together.

Ruth as he reminded us, found herself widowed and in poverty and gleaning in the fields of a man named Boaz. Boaz, as it turned out, was her near relative who became her husband and redeemer.  Later in scripture, we read that our true Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ descended from this man who just so happened to have a field where this impoverished widow gleaned.

My pastor emphasized these words:  as it turned out, and it just so happened. To the believer, he reminded us, there are no coincidences; all is Providence. According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, God’s works of providence are defined as his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions, all of which is a fancy-schmancy way of saying, God's got this.

Since my daughter’s wedding, I have been thinking quite a bit about the holy, wise and powerful acts God used to bring us to that day. When my husband and I made the decision to adopt, it just so happened that I had a former roommate whose husband worked for Bethany Christian Services. After we were approved for adoption, our daughter’s birth mom read our file.

As it turned out, she chose our family because she wanted her baby to grow up in a family with other adopted children. It just so happened that my in-laws had adopted about twenty years earlier. We saw evidence that God’s plan in bringing our daughter to us had begun taking shape years before my husband and I even met.

When our daughter was young, we happened to hire a lovely young woman as a babysitter for her on a regular basis. That babysitter happened to grow up, go away to a small Christian college, and find a husband. They returned to live near us and, during the course of a seemingly random conversation, my husband offered a job to our babysitter’s young husband. Some years later, as it turned out, he became president of the alumni association at the small Christian college from which he had graduated. When our daughter was looking at colleges, he took her there for a visit and she fell in love with the place.

Shortly after arriving at college, our daughter met a young man who just so happened to live in an area in western Pennsylvania where my husband lived during high school. As it turned out, his family attended the very same church in which my husband had grown up. It just so happened that all our people knew his people.

(This happy providence, by the way, proved most useful when my daughter and her boyfriend began to date. I was able to warn him that my daughter’s grandparents continued to live on in legend in his family’s church and, should he ever even begin to formulate an inappropriate thought toward my daughter, the good people of that congregation would gladly pummel him--possibly even bludgeon him. He never really knew if I was just really, really funny or just plain crazy which, providentially, worked to my advantage.)

As it turned out, my husband and I realized we had already met the parents of this young man, having been introduced to them earlier that year at a fund-raising auction for a college ministry we support.  We learned that the boyfriend’s parents had met and married while attending the same small Christian college our daughter attended. As it turned out, his mother’s college roommate became a teacher in a small Christian school in New England. Last year, that former college roommate was my nephew’s teacher.

Just a few days before the wedding, my daughter received a message from her brother-in-law to be, asking if she had an Uncle Andy. As it turns out, the two were sitting only a few feet away from each other at a conference, having just learned they worked for the same company.

Uncle Andy, by the way, is the younger two-headed brother.

You see people; it really is a providential life.

This is a slightly edited post from the archives. Linking in community today with Jennifer and KD:

Write What's In Front of You

Though gas prices had topped four dollars a gallon, I loaded my beach chair and sunscreen, my journal and pen, and opened wide my sunroof to drive south toward the Connecticut shoreline. Although my calendar told me it was just the first day of spring, my car’s thermometer kept inching higher into the seventies.

I thought I should be using the day responsibly, sitting at my computer and trying to write something. But I knew I would just keep looking out the window thinking, “On a day like this, I should be at the beach.” I couldn’t imagine a better way to celebrate winter’s end than by sticking my toes into the forty-seven degree water of the Long Island Sound. So I obeyed the call of the salt water in my veins, packed up my journal and a book full of prompts, and decided to indulge in a day of free writing.

My husband reminded me that temperatures would be much cooler along the shoreline and suggested I stay closer to home. As I watched my dashboard’s temperature display drop slowly, degree by degree, I realized he probably was right. Maybe I was being foolish heading to the beach so early in the season.

When I’d left the house, I hadn’t yet decided on which beach I was going to camp out. I figured, since I wouldn’t actually be going in the water, I could skip the swimming beaches and head for the one with picnic areas, formal gardens, and the sweeping lawn which sloped toward the water. If the day turned out to be too cold to sit near the water, I reasoned I could still curl up somewhere in the corner of a garden and breathe in some salt air.

I parked my car among few others and found only a handful of people sitting at picnic tables in the park. Most wore jackets and long pants against the chill of sea breeze in early spring. My husband had been right. I’d wasted gas and my morning making this drive. Still, because I was there, I needed to walk down to the boardwalk and onto the sand to feel it rub between my toes.

There was no wind, and the sand felt warmer than I’d expected. The sun, shielded by fog and mist, seemed determined to burn its way through and offer me some blue sky. I opened up my pink beach chair, sat down in the sand, and picked up my pen.

Write what’s in front of your face, said my book of writing prompts.

While in my neighborhood spring was erupting in a symphony of color, at the beach beige sand yielded only to gray. Gray fog enveloped gray water and gray sky. Water vapor rose out of warm sand, coaxed by sun still shielded by mist. Rocks cloaked in seaweed and silhouettes of waterfowl skimming the surface offered the only hints of boundary between earth and heaven. Rows of seashells washed ashore during winter months waited in abundance to be picked through and pocketed by summer visitors.

Quiet waves of water lapped against rock and sand. Low, somber notes of a foghorn warned in the distance. On a day like this, the necessity of foghorns along the rocky New England coastline became obvious.

Few others walked the lonely beach. In the distance, near a rocky outcropping, a trio of dogs on leash strained toward the water. Every so often one was set free to do what dogs were put on this earth to do, retrieve something tossed into the surf.

As I looked into the gray searching for things to write about, I noticed a man walking by himself along the water’s edge. He seemed lost in thought. As I watched him, I started thinking he looked an awful lot like my brother.

My brother and I live about ten miles away from one another. We attend the same church. Each Sunday, during coffee hour, we ask each other, “What’s new?” We exchange greetings. We compare notes on our most recent conversations with our mother.

What were the odds, I thought, that my brother and I would both end up on the same beach on the same early spring day, miles away from where either of us lived?

I watched the man walk further from me and tentatively, assuming I was mistaken, called out my brother’s name.

“I was just thinking I should have called you,” he said.

We sat together on the beach, each of us confident the sun was going to burn through the fog. We talked about beaches we’d visited together as children. We talked about family and faith and work and church and God. We swapped stories about raising teenage boys. We drank in salt air.

And we talked about the providence of God which, as it turns out, is sometimes right in front of our faces.

Joining Jennifer:

And KD Sullivan and the Painting Prose community: