I have always been in awe of my friend Janet's absolute faith in God. She puts all her trust in him. When she went off to be a missionary in the Congo she gave away her car. She had absolute faith that if she needed a car in the future God would provide. When she returned from Congo she found she did need a car. What she did not know was that a friend of hers was thinking of selling his car on Jersey Insight but when he slept on it, he woke feeling a strong urge that he must give his car away so he phoned Janet and gave her his car.
I was telling my two children this story yesterday as we were walking back from the COOP. We have a Christmas Fayre at church on December 3rd 2011 and I was explaining how important it is not to cling on to possessions and give them more worth than they deserve. I then told them Janet's story. Just as I finished Maia said "Look Mum, a pound note". She immediately said her brother could have half (so she gave freely). A few steps later Max said "Another one!".
I think they really believed those notes had come from God. When we got home, Maia packed up boxes of toys for the Christmas Fayre!
Christian friends call this a "God-incidence". I find the word clunky and contrived. I know what they are saying. I've written a previous post on this sometime ago.
Jung calls it "acausal synchronicity".
Whatever it is labelled, it was a special moment.
I've come across "acausal synchronicity" recently but in a trivial context - I was looking through a book (Fortean Book of Weird Deaths) and he was telling me how interesting and bizarre it was, and as he cited a particular anecdote saying it was about a chicken, I said, no, it was a pigeon - I had it open on exactly that page at that time, and from where he was, I was holding the book in my hand and he could not see it.
ReplyDeleteRupert Sheldrake calls this kind of event part of morphic resonance", and he also cites "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home" as another strange example.
I keep a very open mind. It's too easy to dismiss these odd events out of hand. But it feels at times like a melody is playing softly against the background noise, and every so often we hear snatches of it, and think - so it's not just random noise, if we could only hear the whole pattern of notes.