Intertwined

It’s fascinating to me how your life can suddenly be intertwined with someone else’s.  You can’t help but wonder – is this God orchestrating?  Or is it sheer luck?  Or, in some instances, bad luck?

When I moved to New York my life conveniently got intertwined with this brilliant editor and writer named Alissa Wilkinson.  She’s a writing professor at The King’s College and she and I served as Co-Advisers to a group of students known as The House of Corrie Ten Boom.   Last year she agreed to edit some of my work and I was blown away by what she presented to me in return.  If there was a top 100 list of the best editors in the US, I’m certain she would be on it.

At Student Leadership Training Aug. 2010 - Rope Challenge

Today, over facebook chat, Alissa filled me in on some of her upcoming endeavors which include a trip to Pasadena to help Fuller Seminary launch a magazine, and a trip to Santa Fe to meet with her writing mentor, author Lauren Winner.  Alissa confessed, she's a wee bit intimidated by this Lauren Winner person, and I confess, I’m not.

I heard Lauren speak 4 years ago, but I’m far more impressed and intimidated by Alissa than I am Lauren.  Alissa doesn’t realize how fabulously amazing she is – yet!  It’s true - she’s waaaaaay smarter than me, but when we meet, we typically do so over beer and dialogue about my latest guy sagas – which she finds (or pretends to find) to be fascinating.  Somehow beer and guy stories level the playing field; they almost always do.

But back to people encounters, are some encounters more divine than others?  I mean, is God "in" some meetings more than He is "in" others?  I suspect we can't know in the moment, but rather as we move into the future, we can look back and say, "Ah ha... God used this person in my life in such and such a way, and clearly God had his hand in our meeting."

But perhaps what is even more mysterious, is when you have an encounter that is seemingly miraculous, and you think God is about to do something huge, only for nothing to happen at all.  I'll admit, I'm still pondering a Central Park encounter I had a year ago, and a Midtown encounter I had this past Spring.  I now know He wasn't in the Central Park encounter, but perhaps He could still be "in" the Spring.