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I believe God uses synchronicity and coincidence to speak to us. I don’t believe God’s Word has been encapsulated and is therefore limited to the pages of a single book. Of course, this opinion this may get me into trouble with some folks, however I have to confess I see evidence of Divinity at work everywhere, all the time. To be more direct, I believe God is in everything, everywhere–otherwise there is a limit on God, is there not?

To this last point, years ago I dove into a passionate theological debate with the older brother of a very dear friend of mine. Actually, the brother happened to be a father; a ordained Roman Catholic priest. I told him my understanding of God-Divinity included omnipresence; God is everywhere. He agreed–at first. Then, holding up a piece of silverware, I took him to, “God is this fork.” That did it.

“Nonono. God is not the fork, but only through God can the fork exist,” he said.

I said, “Well then there is something God isn’t, and therefore God has limits, and frankly, I just don’t believe that’s true.”

Around and around we went, each trying to convince the other. It was a wonderful bout of theological tug-of-war. Our other friends in our dinner party would occasionally listen in, but none wanted to commit to getting messy with us.

My priest friend agreed God was limitless and all powerful, but we never reached an agreement that God’s limits didn’t stop at the surface of that fork. I’m sure I ended up on his prayer list after that.

Over the years, I have had the good fortune of ending up on many prayer lists. This usually happens–not often during the dark times in my life–but more when a friend feels I’m off in the bushes, spiritually. For instance, when my wife and I became pregnant with our first child, I was added to a prayer list or two, mostly because those who knew us figured we were heading toward a train wreck. At that time, we had only dated a month and a half and our nubile relationship had been fiery and tempestuous. In fact, my wife had fully intended to break up with me on the day she found out she was pregnant. We had a raging fight the previous evening, which climaxed in the slamming my front door as she left for her apartment across town. Alone, I paced the house trying to decide whether to call or not to call. After 10 minutes, I concluded I would call. I picked up the phone, dialed her number, and heard someone dialing the phone in my ear.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello,” I returned.

“Whoa. That’s creepy. I just picked up the phone–it never rang.”

(As she would confess later, she wasn’t calling me–she was calling her ex-fiancé, whom had only been her ex-fiancé for about two months. Do the math. Indeed, synchronicity seemed to have reached out and placed me in front of her. The timing was perfect. She told me had I called a moment before or a moment later, she would have refused to pick up the phone.)

I said I wanted to come over to her apartment to talk. She hesitantly agreed. (This was before years of counseling would teach me about the futility of pursuing during storms.)

Suffice it to say the face-to-face approach–while tensions were so high–did little to mend the rift between us that night. I eventually said the wrong thing and she asked me to leave amidst sobbing and tears.

[At this point in our story, you should know my wife had been recently told by a psychic friend she would be pregnant by the end of summer. This same friend had already correctly predicted the end to Grace's engagement (which had been met with incredulity,) so Grace was already watching for any incoming babies.]

The next morning marked the last day of summer that year. I believe it was September 21, 2004. I received a call at 7:30 that morning. She said, “There’s two lines.” I had no idea what she was talking about and she had not yet told me about this prediction. I thought for a moment she was referring to lines drawn in the sand. She was forced to clarify.

“I took a pregnancy test. There’s two lines.”

“Oh. I’ll be right over.”

By 7:45, I was sitting on the edge of her couch with the oracular “pee-stick” in my hands and what I saw confirmed it: two lines.

As I discovered, all sorts of thoughts rush in at a time like this. I hail from good, conservative Catholic stock. No doubt this pregnancy-out-of-wedlock would rock the family with scandal. I felt a number of things all at once. Among those feelings were astonishment, shame, alarm and budding resignation, in that order. As we talked about what to do next, the only thing that was clear in that moment was that I was going to be a father, God willing. Grace knew my staunch pro-life views and later would ask how I would have dealt with things had we not decided to stick together in the relationship, especially if she had not wanted to keep the baby. I told her I would have asked her to carry to full term and then I would have taken the child off her hands and made the best of being a single parent. She was apparently pleased by this.

We walked into work side-by-side that morning. Her apartment was only two blocks away from our office building. Throughout the day, we would email each other. At one point, we walked over to St. Mary’s cathedral, sat in the echoing silence and prayed. Afterward, we went outside and sat on the steps. It was that moment I think we decided to make a serious go of our relationship. We made plans to visit Target that evening and pick up a wonderful book called “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Within a month, we also began seeing a professional counselor with the intent of working through our childhood junk so we might stabilize as a couple.

That was over five years and three kids ago. At the time of this writing, we’re pregnant with Number Four. We attended counseling for years, sometimes as a couple, but more often on our own. We’ve read books on parenting. We’ve watched shows on parenting. We’ve even taken a class on parenting. We love our children very much and are keenly aware of the herculean responsibility that comes along with bringing them into this world. We try our best and we try not to beat ourselves up when we fall short (and we do.)

Would I have ever seen my life going down this path? No. But just as I believe God is the fork, I also believe God is the journey and while I may not have foreseen this particular fork in the road, I certainly see Divine Design all through it.

Thank you to all of those who have ever placed me on their prayer lists.

I think it’s working.

Main Entry: syn·chro·nic·i·ty
Pronunciation: "si[ng]-kr&-'nis-&t-E, "sin-
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -ties
: the coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before ithappens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

Dictionary.com, “synchronicity,” in Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary. Source location: Merriam-Webster, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/synchronicity. Available: http://dictionary.reference.com. Accessed: March 03, 2010.

So I walked out of the house one frozen morning last Tuesday thinking, “I’m going to be in meetings until 2PM today–I should grab some apples.” Well, we didn’t have any apples to grab on this particular day. We almost always have some in stock at our house and on most days I eat two, but alas, we were out on this day. So what’s a guy (who is already running late for his networking meeting) to do? Well, I wistfully daydreamed of having one of those monster-sized Michigan-grown honeycrisps and made a soft resolution to stop by Kroger’s on the way back to the office after my last meeting ended. Then I forgot about the whole apple affair and drove to my first meeting.

Wouldn’t you know it, but as I sat down for the second meeting (the Mental Makeover class, led by Dr. Christopher Henley,) Dr. Christopher reaches over the table and places a monster-sized apple in front of me!!! I shouted in surprise, held the apple over my head in victory and exclaimed, “I’VE MANIFESTED!”

I mean, how often do you get given an apple during the normal course of your day? Never.

Unless, of course, you call it in.

Just had a “Cousins’ Day” with a favorite cousin of mine where she or I will travel to one another’s respective neck of the woods and simply spend the day knocking around town, always beginning with breakfast. Well, in our reporting out, I told her how I have been going through another cycle of feeling like I’ve been working too hard for too long and that there HAS got to be an easier way. I’ve been looking for answers (contracting more, streamlining, even considering network marketing models) and all the while I am burning myself out. This week, I took off four consecutive evenings from working on my business; this is a lot for me and the current workload. I wonder if it’s the holidays (alt. holi-daze) that begins this cycle of discontent? As in, take a break for a few days and now it’s a matter of “objects at rest tend to stay at rest?”

This is the second year in a row I have really had a “come to Jesus” meeting with my entrepreneurial efforts. Last year, I put things down long enough to start a whole new company as I simultaneously began negotiations with a strategic partner/competitor/friend of mine for him to take over my web business. It only took a month or two and the feeling passed, but in those two months, I started a new company in a new industry. Though it’s still active as a small renewable energy certificate reseller, the departing flurry of initiative that gave birth to that company has long since let it go adrift.

So, I’m still searching. I’m searching for an easier way–a smarter way. My body needs sleep, after all, and staying up until 1, 2, sometimes 3AM only to get up at 6-6:30AM with the kids so I can go work for The Man is NOT my cup of tea.

But, I chose it, right? Shoot, I choose it every day, apparently. Bugger.

This searching is what led me to Dr. Christopher. I ran into Chemo–a true local icon–one day at a nearby cafe. We exchanged pleasantries and he asked me how business was going. I told him it was going almost too well. Business was (and continues) to come in, hand over fist, and the challenge is not bringing in more–it’s how to properly handle the work we’ve got! He said, “Oh, you’ve got to talk to Dr. Christopher. She’s really good, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.” He scratched a time, location and the good doctor’s name on a random piece of paper and told me to go to this networking meeting and seek her out. I said thanks, pocketed the info and from there it would be relegated to the bottom of the piles of paperwork that litter my desk at home.

A few months went by and one night, after I finished putting my one year old daughter to bed (she is the youngest of our three kids under five,) my wife called me into our bedroom. She had her tarot cards out and insisted on practicing on me. I went along with it. At one point, near the end of this impromptu reading, she says, “Looks like you’re going to have a mentor… probably a woman… does that ring any bells?” I said no at the time but the only thing that came to mind was that note Chemo gave me. I dug it out of the stack that night and followed up on it the next day. After a couple phone calls, I was scheduled to go to visit a local networking group on the other side of town.

Turns out, Dr. Christopher works with EFT, a.k.a. Emotional Freedom Technique, a method of tapping on the body’s energy medians (think acupuncture without the needles.) She does this with a focus on clearing the blocks we experience in business and in the pursuit of abundance. The meeting ran its course and at the end of it, she approached me and told me we needed to talk. She did not yet know I was there to see her (or, at least, I hadn’t told her this yet.)

It turns out, she is in the process of architecting a business of her own and she is interested in maintaining my web services as a cornerstone in that effort. Of course, I’m wallowing in the gutter of my own burn-out, so she and I are working through that currently.

How goes the search? Maybe the answer is the project Dr. Christopher is working on. Maybe it is a change that occurs in my own business. Maybe it is something altogether new and undiscovered. I don’t know. What I do know is I’m still searching.

I told my cousin all this over breakfast. After we finished eating, we opted to go find a bookstore. Her boss had recommended the popular, out-of-print sales book “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive” by Harvey Mackay. I drove us to the other side of town to a large mall. We could have gone to the one that was only five minutes away, but we didn’t. We trucked all the way across town, wove our way around the mall to the side where the Schuler’s was waiting, and as we pulled into a spot in one of the furthest corners of the parking lot, I gasped, rolled down the window and said, “Dr. Christopher!!” as she was walking to her car. I introduced my cousin, we made a quick hi-g’bye, parted ways and I turned to my cousin and said something along the lines of, “Holy sh!t.” We were both a little stunned at the cosmic implications of what had just happened. I’m still not entirely sure what it means, but you can bet my eyes and ears are open.

As for my cousin’s book hunting, it was fruitless at the mall. Once she told me the title of the sales book had something to do with “swimming with sharks”, I guessed what it was. Turns out, I had an old copy of the very book. I acquired it in a trade for a couple large landscaping rocks (a.k.a. “character rocks”) years ago.

Serendipity all over the place.