As it Turned Out: A Story of Coincidences

Have you ever had a moment where you realize that that coincidence was not actually a coincidence at all?  One night at this inductive Bible study I was attending, the women at my table were sharing about our lives and I happened to bring up that I feel called to become a missionary pediatric nurse.  Now, at this point, I did not even know if this was a real job, but it’s still something that I’ve been led to for just about a decade at this point.  Then one of the other women at the table starts talking about how her husband is on the board of an orphanage in South America who just hired a nurse, just a few years older than me, to be nurse at their orphanage.  My mind was completely blown.  After (slightly) recovering from the shock and awe I felt learning that my dream job was a real job, I remember thinking, “it’s a small world when the God of the universe is the one orchestrating it.”  I had a moment of clarity that this happenstance conversation was not coincidental at all, but was clearly orchestrated by God to guide and encourage me.

In the book of Ruth, Ruth had one of these moments when she came back to Bethlehem to help her mother-in-law, Naomi.  In order to get food, Ruth had to go glean leftover grain from a local field.  Well, Ruth 2:3 tells us that “as it turned out” the field she chose to glean from just happened to belong to their family’s kinsman redeemer, who also just happened to be Ruth’s future husband, Boaz.  I love the way the book of Ruth is written because it would be so easy to make it seem like the events and circumstances of Ruth’s life were purely coincidental.  How lucky that she stumbled into the right field and met the right guy (and I'm really wishing for a sarcasm font right about now).  But the way the author writes Ruth, it is clear that “as it turned out” is not meant to indicate a coincidence.  “As it turned out” could also be read as “as God orchestrated it,” because it is evident that God is in control every step of the way throughout this story.

My life is filled with coincidences and happenstances.  I’m sure yours is, too.  But I’m curious to see when I get to heaven just how many of those “coincidences” were actually events purposefully orchestrated by God.  I was told the analogy once that life is like a tapestry.  The back of the tapestry, the tangled and messy jumble of strings is what we can see now.  Occasionally we can glimpse how a few of the strings connect, but for the most part it is a mystery.  But when God looks at our lives, he is able to see the front of the tapestry, where all those messy strings come together to form a beautiful picture.

Me, I’m inpatient.  I want to know what the front of the tapestry looks like now.  I want to know how what I’m doing now relates to what I will be doing ten years from now.  Mostly I want to know what I’ll be doing ten years from now.  Being fairly young, I still have a lot of avenues open to me.  And sometimes it is difficult to see where God is in those options.  But I have to trust that the God who takes this huge universe and makes it small is also able to take my life and orchestrate it for my good (Romans 8:28) and his glory.  Even if I can’t see how things relate right now, I’m taking a page of out Gibb’s handbook and remembering rule #39: there’s no such thing as a coincidence.  And while I don’t have a narrator to give a sneak peak of my future and say “as it turned out,”  I will trust that God has it under control anyway and is working to ensure that it “works out” according to his perfect plan.

Have you had any “as it turned out” moments in your life or moments where you realized that “coincidence” was really God’s hand at play?  If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comment section below.