In all things ...

I have a "spiritual adventure" book by David Mains that talks about "God sightings" -- coincidences that seem to obviously reveal God at work in our lives. I don't use that phrase much but it certainly came to mind today.

Yesterday morning in Sunday School, we barely touched Romans 8:28. It was after the final buzzer when I brought it up and briefly mentioned a personal example of how God works for good in all things. My example was of how having an older member of my family go to prison for the last few years of his life was obviously a tragic thing, but how God has used that tragedy for good in multiple ways in my life.

That was Sunday. This morning, I was gathering up house clutter and sat down with a newspaper over a week old that had joined the clutter without being read. The headline announced that a classmate of my older daughter had been sentenced to 10 years in prison. This was a result of an accident over two years ago involving a truck, an Amish buggy, and a .24 blood-alcohol content which resulted in one death and multiple injuries. It's a sad, sad situation within the Mennonite-Amish community that packed out the courtroom for the sentencing hearing. The article indicated that there were few dry eyes in the courtroom. Tears ran down my own face as I read it.

A couple of hours later, I headed to the post office to mail out a textbook my younger daughter sold over the internet. As I chatted with the postal worker, someone came through the door behind me. I turned around to leave and there was the mother of the young man from the article. I live in a small town, but that's pretty coincidental. Our paths have crossed only two or three times since the accident. I know her because we did volunteer work together 18 years ago when our children were in grade school, but we haven't gone beyond exchanging greetings more than a dozen times since then. Yet, here she was in the post office just a couple of hours after I came across the latest news about her son.

Now, you may think me tactless, but there is absolutely no gentle way to bring up something like this and I didn't want to pretend I was unaware of this latest development, so I simply said, "Well, hi! I was just reading about you in the newspaper this morning!" She acknowledged that the family had become local "celebrities" against their druthers. I then asked some questions and mentioned my own family's experience with being on the wrong side of the law. We moved out onto the sidewalk in front of the post office and talked several minutes more. It was good to share someone else's burden. I know one of the things that helped me most during my own experience was finding people who weren't afraid to talk about it with me. There's nothing to kill a conversation like mentioning what happened at last week's prison visit. I hope and pray that offering a listening ear was a blessing to this mother like it was to me.

As we both went on our way, it occurred to me that tomorrow marks nine years since prisoner #963602 moved out of the prison walls and on to sentencing at the hands of a merciful God. I had been totally oblivious to that impending anniversary.

And yet ... "in all things God works for ... good" I can truly say that there was good along that path. How odd that I mentioned that personal history in Sunday School yesterday, that I picked up that particular piece of "old news" this morning, and that my brief visit to the post office placed me square in the path of this grieving mother almost exactly nine years after death brought my own "prison experience" to an end. It seems that I may have had a "God sighting."