I watched a video today that moved me. It portrays the kindness of a store keeper to a little boy whose mother is sick, and how the debt is repaid thirty years later. The skeptics among us may think such a series of events are unlikely. But I believe it.

In my own brief years such coincidences have sprung up in unexpected places. When I was wrestling with the decision to put my oldest daughter in school in third grade for the first time, I was nervous. Homeschooling had become my turf. As the principal showed John and me around the school he mentioned that the teacher's name was Mrs. Danilov. How about that. My fourth grade teacher twenty five years ago in a different part of California had that name. I liked her. She liked me.

We reached the classroom for introductions and I was stunned. Here she was, with gray hair. She hugged me and told me she had saved my poetry all these years. In fact there was one of them on her bulletin board. I burst into tears at what to me was a Divine assurance that Chara would be just fine.

When Benjamin was in the hospital for severe failure to thrive I was wracked with guilt and fear. Would he live? I prayed about the story of Isaac, and how his father Abraham had been commanded to sacrifice him on a stone alter. Was I being asked to give Benjamin back? The hospital's name was Cedar Sinai, which is kind of like Mount Sinai, and although I was not as old as Isaac's mother Sarah I was in my forties. One day a new respiratory therapist came to work on him and we engaged in limp conversation. I was a shadow of myself, and to even say hello took effort. But he was chatty and I soon realized that he was from Ghana.

"My husband went to Ghana!" The flat line of my heart started to blip. We chatted about fufu and hypnotized alligators. When he reached for the door to leave I asked his name.

"Isaac."

In the silence after the heavy door thudded shut I knew Benjamin would live, even as Isaac had been saved by a ram caught in the thicket. My baby would come home.

From our ant's eye view we believe the illusion that life is random. The notion that we could be part of an intricate plan spanning centuries seems far fetched. But the suggestion that my actions today are unrelated to events fifty years ago or fifty years hence seems much more ridiculous to me.



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