Let One Of Them Count

You keep them in a drawer you never open.

Not an actual drawer. The one behind your eyes, where the odd things go. The train you missed by forty seconds in October, the one that would have put you on that road at the exact minute of the pileup. The message that arrived at eleven forty at night from somebody who had not spoken to you in two years, on the one night you needed a human voice more than you needed sleep. The job you did not get, which you cried about in a stairwell with the fire door open, and the other job that came six weeks later and changed the shape of everything after it.

You have a word for each of them and the word is always the same. Coincidence. Sometimes you upgrade it to timing, and once, out loud, at a table with people you liked, you said lucky, and then you laughed and changed the subject because you could hear how it sounded.

You are not a cynic. That is the part nobody understands about you. A cynic would not keep the list. A cynic would have forgotten the train and the message and the stairwell, and you have not forgotten one of them, not a single one, and you could put them in order right now with the dates on them.

You keep them, and you will not let them mean anything.

Because if one of them counts, then somebody has been in the room. And if somebody has been in the room, there are questions after that, and the questions have a direction, and you are not ready to be a person who went in that direction because of a train.

So the drawer stays shut. Every so often, usually late, something new goes into it, and you look at it for a second longer than you meant to, and then you file it and go to bed.

Not a pile of coincidences but a record of visits

I want to be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does damage. The cheap version takes that list and turns it into proof, and proof is not what this is. Somebody could line up every one of those moments and explain each one on its own terms, and honestly, most days, so could I.

But something is off about the explaining, and it is worth naming. Explaining one thing at a time is a strange way to look at a pattern. If a person walked past a window every day for eleven years, each walk could be accounted for separately, and the one at the window would still be the only neighbor on the street who had never noticed a neighbor.

Here is the sentence I would put in the drawer with the rest. Acts 17:27 says God arranged the whole world so that people might feel after Him and find Him, and then it adds a clause that is doing all of the work: though He is not far from every one of us. Not far. Not somewhere. Near, at close range, in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been closing that distance the entire time. You have been living inside a nearness you have been calling coincidence.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.Acts 17:27

Feel after Him. That is a picture of somebody in the dark with their hands out, which is not a flattering picture of the human race and was never meant to be. Nobody in that verse is doing brilliantly. And the reaching that matters in the sentence is not the one being done by the hands in the dark.

Read the grammar of your own list and notice who is the subject of every sentence in it. The train left without you. The message arrived. The job came. None of that was arranged from your side, and Scripture keeps the initiative in the same place every time: in Luke 15:20 the father is already running while the son is still a long way off, and His Spirit has been running toward you in exactly that way. You were reached, and the reaching was never yours to organize.

There is a moment in the record where a soldier who has run the execution detail for a career watches one particular man die and says out loud that this one was the Son of God. Nobody argued him into it. Mark 15:39 gives him no debate and no lecture; he stood facing Him and something in him gave way, and the same Spirit who did that in a Roman soldier is the one at work on the drawer in your head. You have not been failing to reason your way to God, and nothing on this page is a charge against you for keeping the drawer shut.

The drawer was never dishonesty, either. A person who has been let down learns to hold things loosely, and holding them loosely is how somebody survives being wrong about something that mattered. Keeping a list at arm's length is what care looks like after care has been burned.

So let one of them count. Not all of them, not the whole drawer at once, not a conversion of the entire filing system in one evening. One. The one that came to mind while reading this without being sent for, which is almost certainly the one that has been loudest all along. His word says He is not far from any of us, and the Holy Spirit is standing beside that specific memory tonight. You are not being asked to prove anything, and you were never the one who had to establish that He was there.

One straight thing in the middle of this, because it belongs here more than anywhere else. If one of the items in that drawer is a night when something in you wanted out of your own life, or if that thought sits nearer to hand now than it used to, then say it tonight to one living person. A friend, a doctor, whoever picks up. In the United States, 988 takes a call or a text. Anywhere else, emergency services or the local crisis line. Doing that is not a collapse of faith, and it does not turn anybody into a burden. Real rescue very often arrives with a face and a phone number, which is how God has always liked to work, and reaching for it is obedience rather than defeat.

Two words do not fit what is in that drawer, and using them was never a sin. Luck is a word for a universe with nobody in it. Strength is a word for a rescue a person performed on themselves. Neither one accounts for a train that pulled out forty seconds early.