Me, Sara and Sue at our last together in June 2019 before Sara’s passing in March 2021.
Within days of my going back to church in September 2016 for the first time since my teenage years, I received a text message from my Jewish friend, Sara, who had moved to London some years previously.
Sara was a lovely, warm and comical person but, in all the years I had known her, she had never sent me any sort of text message, let alone one about God! Sara had no idea I had recently gone back to Christianity so it hit me straight away that, yet again, this was another of those occasions when a coincidence, or “God-incident”, had happened. I’d experienced these coincidences many times in the past but had never linked them together as being part of God’s watchful eye on me until I came back to Christianity. I had always just taken them at face value, even when some of the coincidences included almost being involved in terrorist acts or other things where incredible things had happened.
Many of these “God-incidences” have happened throughout my life, so many in fact that I started keeping a book of them. Some are small incidents, some much larger, but nonetheless all strange coincidences or signs.
One of the most memorable was in 1984 when I had just been promoted to Public Relations Officer for the police, a civilian role. There was a no-warning training exercise at the airport to see how the emergency services would respond in a major incident. From a public relations point of view, if the real thing had happened, it would have meant setting up an on-site Press Office; liaising with the Gold Command of police, fire, ambulance and airport senior staff and issuing on-going press statements; dealing with enquiries from the world’s media; setting up interviews; liaising with the families of victims involved, etc. We had to go through the exercise as if all this was happening.
Coincidentally, several years later, I was taking some public relations examinations. I could hardly believe my eyes when one of the questions was how would I deal with a major incident at the airport! What were the chances of my having been involved in just such a training exercise? I could hardly believe my luck!
Other coincidences have involved us going to New York just a few days after the 9/11 bombing there when it could so easily have happened to us. Similarly, we were in the Cairo Museum just a few days after a bombing there had taken place – again, it could so easily have been us had we gone a few days earlier. Again, in 2016 we were back in New York staying in an adjacent street to where a pressure cooker bomb went off – we’d just missed it by a day after we’d gone back home.
We also narrowly managed to avoid terrorist attacks in several other places we’ve visited throughout our world travels. I’ve often felt that I was being guarded and protected by a greater power and, along with other “God-incidences”, my many near-miss experiences and several other incidents have reinforced that belief.
Oh yes….Sara’s text message. It centred around a scene in God’s mail-room. In the first office there were millions of prayer requests whizzing in asking God for various miracles, acts of forgiveness, begging for mercies, intercessions and so on. In the second office, a similar number of replies were zooming out with the requests being fulfilled. Sadly, in the Acknowledgements Office, not a single movement. Moral of the story? Always thank God for every blessing, large or small!
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