Today’s Word: Odd

On more than one occasion, my former spiritual director said to me, “If it’s odd it might be God.” It’s a funny line, a very short poem perhaps, but nevertheless a grain of wisdom to which we would do well to pay attention. For while we very often — perhaps most often — find God in the plain and ordinary moments of our lives, there are also those odd moments of synchronicity, circumstance and coincidence that cause us to pause and wonder, “what’s going on?” And for those of us who hold tight to God and to our lives of faith, we can find ourselves asking, “what’s God up to?”

You know the moments I’m talking about. The phone rings and it’s the very person you were thinking about or needed to hear from to get you through a rough moment. A song comes on the radio and bears just the message you needed to hear. A scripture reading at church seems meant just for you at that very moment. Your dream job becomes available right when you’re best able to accept it. A series of highly improbable events comes together in perfect fashion, leading you to the place you most need to be. Fill in the blank. We’ve all been there.

We can chalk it all up to pure luck or the roll of the dice. We can “do the math” and come up with the odds. We can just ignore that it happened. Or we can begin paying closer attention to the moments and days of our lives and realize that these things happen more often than we ever realized. We can begin to see God living and moving in our lives and call the whole thing a miracle. When we choose that way of living, we find ourselves filled with hope and faith.

Ask yourself in silence: When was the last time “something odd” turned out to be God?