What's your greatest coincidence?

by ozziepost 47 Replies latest jw friends

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  bebu

  Leolaia, your phone experience made me recall another coincidence I had.

  It was in the summer of 1997, and I had traveled 10 hours (2 days) in a camper with my kids to go to the Cornerstone Festival in Illinois. There were about 25,000 folks in the place. We got there late, and went to bed. The next day, my 5-year old son went missing. I reported him missing to the main office, but then he was discovered not too long after that.

  The following night, I realized that I had not called my husband to let him know all was well with us on our trip. But the phones had a tremendous crowd about them, I finally gave up after 20 minutes of waiting.

  The next evening, I decided to try again, and as it was much later I only had to wait about 15 minutes to use the phone. I called him where he was working (he was on a late shift), but was told he was not there; he was looking for me. I got transferred to someone else, who told me the same thing: he had gotten so worried about not hearing from me that he had left that very morning to come to the Festival. I absolutely could not believe it, and was arguing with the guy (who was a doctor!), practically accusing him of trying to pull one on me.

  In the meantime, people were tapping me on the shoulder to get me to hurry up. I was so engrossed in this incredible conversation that I would yell, "Just a minute!" "Hang on!" and finally "Hey, just WAIT!"... because one guy just wouldn't stop tapping me on the shoulder.

  It was my husband!

  He had shown up an hour ago after driving 10 straight hours, and the only way he had narrowed his search to find me on that huge farm/campground was that my report to the office had given some information about which large section of grass we were camping in. That was it. In the crowd in the dark though, he found me by coincidence.

  bebu
• 

  MerryMagdalene

  My most recent coincidence...

  There is this person I've just recently begun to get to know and I'm actually quite taken with him. He lives probably 8 hours from me right now and I e-mailed him this poem the night before Valentine's Day:

  There are many things in the world and you

  Are one of them. Many things keep happening and

  You are one of them, and the happening that

  Is you keeps falling like snow

  On the landscape of not-you, hiding hideousness, until

  The streets and the world of wrath are choked with Snow.

  How many things have become silent? Traffic

  Is throttled. The mayor

  Has been, clearly, remiss, and the city

  Was totally unprepared for such a crisis. Nor

  Was I----yes, why should this happen to me?

  I have always been a law-abiding citizen.

  But you, like snow, like love keep falling,

  And it is not certain that the world will not be

  Covered in a glitter of crystalline whiteness.

  Silence.

  ----Robert Penn Warren

  Well, all day Valentine's Day, as far apart as we are, it snowed on both of us. We laughed as we told each other about it and he said that all that he could think of as the snow kept falling down was how loved he felt.

  And, no, I had no idea ahead of time what the weather forecast was.

  ~Merry (I feel all warm and glowy just thinking about it again)
• 

  FlyingHighNow

  Well, for starters I was born on the same day as myself. Then to top it off, my mom and dad aren't related and I still came out looking just like myself. Now that's a co-ink-a-dink.
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  kitties_and_horses_oh_my!

  I decided to go back to school and ditched my god-awful job in the middle of the night. Then I started working nights doing janitorial b/c it worked with my school schedule, but god it was hell. I'd go to the bookstore and study/sleep till they closed at 11, then force myself to go to work.

  One Monday I get a call from a mental-health services agency that I'd applied for prior to getting the first job I mentioned (the one I ditched). They'd hired someone else but she'd quit. I looked at my computer and out of the dozens of cover letters I'd sent out, this was the only one I'd saved. I went in for an interview that day, armed with the knowledge of exactly the spin I'd put on my work & school history in the letter I'd sent previously.

  Tuesday I was at the bookstore and had my legs over the side of the chair I was in. I fell asleep (I would be lucky to sleep for 2-3 hours during the night, so I was constantly falling asleep anytime I dared to sit down) and an employee woke me up when they were closing. I stood up - both my legs had gone to sleep, and I fell. Half-asleep and embarrassed, I tried to stand up again, fell again, and this time there was a loud "crack." My foot was broken, and badly. I quit my janitorial job that night (can't mop if you can't walk, you know?).

  The next day I was offered the job at the mental-health agency. They were thrilled that I could start right away b/c the 2-week notice I would have given my other job wasn't an issue since my foot was broken.

  I've been there now since October of 2003. It is, bar none, the best job I could ever have dreamed of. I love it! My boss is amazing, my co-workers are great, I have almost complete autonomy when it comes to my schedule and how I manage my responsibilities. Oh, and I'm a Psych major, so not only am I lucky to be working in the Psych field but I've been given permission to publish our programs results as a research study for an undergrad competition.

  Jehovah provides! (Oh, um, wait, I hadn't been going to meetings for a year at that point...okay, better rethink this one...)

  -Kitties
• 

  LittleToe

  So many to choose from...

  Shortly before I left the JW's I was reading the local newspaper, which I've never read through before in my whole life (nor since - it's a small island - if you'd read it you'd understand). There was a small one-off advert for a bible conference, which immediately caught my eye. I ended up going.

  For the two weeks previous I had been doing an indepth study on Isaiah 52, 53, and lo and behold that turned out to be the subject for the first evening. It was a deep study, but nothing new to me as I'd studied all the points and come to the same comclusions, myself.

  During the course of the weekend I met up with the only local church Minister in attendance, who happened to be the writer of a weekly short column in the newspaper I mentioned. I briefly discussed" Baptism" as an issue that I was concerned about, given my previous JW one. Finally we exchanged email addresses and parted.

  As a sidebar, for the following two weeks his column was discussing baptism, even though the articles had been submitted many weeks before.

  Anyhow, we were now corresponding, and the following weekend (after the conference) I received an email from him stating that he knew a woman in their denomination who used to be a JW, and offered to get contact details for me. I immediately replied that i would love that, as I had never met an ex-JW at that point (I've made up for it since ).

  Before I could get a reply I went to the local religious bookshop to buy a bible concordance. This was my first time in the shop, and I was single-minded about just looking in the bible and concordance section, as those kind of shops are possessed by Satan, doncha know!

  Anyhow, after trawling through that section, in an empty shop, I finally had a purchase. By now there were a couple of customers and so I queued for the counter. While in line my eye cast down on a rack of books by the counter and was struck by the spine of just one, a green and black one entitled "Fearless Love". I reached out and plucked it off the shelf. Its full title was "Fearless Love: Understanding Today's Jehovah's Witnesses", and the author was a Scottish ex-JW called Anne Sanderson, so needless to say I bought it on the spot.

  The very next email I received from the Minister contained the address of the woman he had mentioned. Her name was Anne Sanderson, and she became one of the first ex-JWs that I would meet (though not until I finally left the JWs myself).

  Over the next few weeks I continued studying doctrine and the JW movement, and as I would do so I would break to read a chapter or two from that book. Coincidentally again, I would find myself repeatedly reading stuff that I had just discovered for myself. This happened time after time.

  After I left the JW's I shortly began attending a local theological class, to get a better idea of mainstream Christianity (a further coincidence being that my doctrinal position had been transformed into a rough parallel with the Westminster Confession of Faith, which is the subordinate standard of the local church). It was being delivered from Edinburgh by means of video-conferencing. After a few months on the course, who should I find had been faithfully attending it for months, in Edinburgh, but Anne Sanderson.

  There aren't that many Scottish exJWs, and even fewer who attend church. As for those who also write books, especially about JWs...
• 

  trevor

  Some years ago I had a friend - No that?s not all I had to say!

  We were very similar in many ways and we would know when changes had taken place in each others lives without telling each other, by way of occasional dreams. He lived in Wales and I lived in Sussex UK. During the course of One year I met him entirely by chance on three different train station platforms in places hundreds of miles apart. We both drive and rarely caught trains during other years. Neither of us had ever been to theses stations before. We were only at the stations for a matter of minutes.

  I then read that when two friends meet at stations they have never been to before three times in a year, one of them will die very soon. I thought it might be me. The next year he was killed in a car crash. He was not driving. I don?t know what to make of it but it was great loss to me.
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  diamondblue1974

  My gran was in hospital recovering from being seriously ill, she was on the mend it seemed; given this i decided to go see my then girlfriend and stayed away from home. It was New Years Eve and I was in bed because we didnt celebrate it then you see; and i woke and sat bolt upright and felt totally stunned but for no apparent reason....it was like awaking from a nightmare...I looked at the clock and it read 00.13. I couldnt sleep for another hour or so but couldnt understand why.

  Later that morning i woke and the phone rang; i had the most horrid feeling ever and said to my girlfriend that it would be my mum telling me that gran had died....and i later found out that the time of death was 00.13 exactly.
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  TresHappy

  My grandfather told me this story a couple of times...it was really spooky for him to talk about it. I forgot to say what happened to that couple. In the late 50's they were driving to Texas for a convention when they went missing. They were going to stop by my grandparents' house on their trip to say hello. My grandparents never heard from them the day they were supposed to arrive. My grandmother finally contacted their daughter to tell this to her and she was trying desperately to find her parents. They were missing for 2 years before their car turned up in a creek in Kentucky. They had cut a sharp corner and went into the water during a powerful rainstorm that had hit the area. Two years later, when a drought in the area set in and caused all the creeks and lakes to go dry, their remains were found. Very sad ending.
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  cindykp

  Hmmm, after fifteen years of being inactive, I Prayed to Jah for medical reasons. In my prayer I told him I would go back to the meetings if he would help me. The next day I get a knock at the door. We all know who it was!!!!!!!!! But, I didnt get what I was looking for. After two calls, and 1 meeting that they talked me into going to, I am now getting disfellowshipped-again! So the question is, was this what Jehovah had in store for me when I prayed to him? The CO came along on the second call to my house, encouraged me to go listen to his talk that thurs night. Come and mingle, and talk to everyone he said! Knowing that the next sunday I was going to get the axe. So why bother to go, get all encouraged from one meeting, just to be disfellowshipped by the next?
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  IP_SEC