James 24:7

So there I am sitting in the infinite moment wondering if this person will look at me like some sort of alien or will encourage me to go on.

"Sure," she said.

I told her about what had just happened...about how I had just written down this definition of magical thinking when the woman to her left said what she said and how weird that seemed to me and how sorry I was to have bothered her but how I just could not let that pass especially since these "coincidences" had been occurring over and over again and how I seem to move through these periods of coincidences.

She seemed interested...or at least very generous.  (I wondered if perhaps she was a shrink and had decided in that moment to extend her professional ear to this strange man blathering on.)

I concluded my rambling by noting that she seemed to be interested in spiritual things. She said she had only recently moved with her family to Georgia and that she was taken with how many people go to church and so she was trying to make sense of Christianity if for no other reason than to give her a little insight as to how to give her children at least a base from which to make their own decisions about such matters.

We ended up talking for 30 to 45 minutes about matters of faith and family and life until each of us realized we needed to be somewhere else and we parted company.

And that was that...

However, since then my mind has been whirling with thoughts about coincidences- what they mean (if anything) and how one would even go about making sense of them.  I have been thinking about things I had learned in the past- things passed along to me as "hard truths"- about the curtains one dares open and the curtains one keeps closed. 

I have been thinking about magic and magical thinking and technique.

I have been thinking about the domestication of God and the possible motives we have for keeping God on a short leash- about how it seems that "our" God seems to fit so neatly into our well-ordered lives.  And I have been wondering whether the God we claim to worship is, in fact, a "Cliffs Notes" God whom we can manage and fit into our busy lives.

I have felt as if I am riding on the back of a wild God, not unknowable but filled with surprises.  (An image from a chidhood book flashes across my mind..a picture of Davy Crocket in his buck skins and coonskin cap riding a bolt of lightning across the sky.)

I see that God surprising everyone in Bethlehem.  I see that God baffling the ones in the know and lifting up the abandoned, abused and forgotten.  I see that God sending His Son (who knew he had a Son?). 

I see that God moving in mysterious ways.

And I think I see that in my own life..somedays...small, baffling glimpses.  (I think of God as dropping bread crumbs, little hints to remind me that God is not imprisoned behind my domesticating walls but still is, as Eugene Peterson recently put it, "playing in ten thousand places.")

I see myself as if in a mirror...trying to make things happen..."techniquing God"...the original JuJu man seeking lightning in a bottle...producing "results" in ways effective and efficient.

And all the while...God weaves.

God weaves.