Coincidences
Did you ever notice when you get a little money like a refund or possibly a check you weren’t expecting you then get a bill a couple of days later you didn’t expect and it is for the same amount or a little more? Life is full of these strange things and it almost seems like they are planned by some unseen power. I am not talking about God, who certainly wouldn’t bother himself with such trivia. Coincidences seem to be a part of life no matter how weird they seem. One coincidence which has happened to many of us is the phone call coincidence. That is when you are thinking about someone and at that moment, they call you. I have heard about this happening probably the most.
A man was working in the post office. A better civil service job became available with a different agency but a test was required and you had to mail in an application. He decided not to go for the job but almost everyone else at the post office station did and they came to the man with a filled out form and envelope with stamps on it and told him they were going to mail it for him. The man couldn’t believe how nice they were to worry about him. When the test came, they all took it. The man was the only one who passed out of approximately 30 people and he got the job.
A family went out to a beach while visiting Florida. While they were having fun, they took a photo of the beach which included a large crowd of people. The family was composed of the mother, father, and three daughters. One of the daughters noticed something in the photograph after she had gotten married and showed the photo to her new husband. He was one of the people in the crowd on the beach that day. He had been in the navy and on leave.
I have told this story before but it is worth telling again. A man was in a pub in either England or Scotland and had a lot to drink. He wandered out of the pub and disappeared and people began to worry about him. After awhile a search party was formed. As they searched someone called out his name and one of the searchers answered. The guy was drunk and joined the search not realizing they were searching for him.
I saw a strange case of coincidences which was published on the internet. It was about twin brothers who were separated at birth and were unaware of each other growing up. They both decided to become cops. When they were adopted, they were both named James and married women named Linda. Both had sons and named them James Alan and dogs named Toy. The brothers eventually got divorced and remarried. The new wives were both named Betty.
A story had been written in Time Magazine in 1938. It had to do with an incredible coincidence. There was a man named Joseph Figlock who was walking down a street in Detroit. As he was walking a baby fell from a fourth floor window and landed on him. There were injuries but both recovered. A year later Mister Figlock was out sweeping an alley. As he swept another baby fell on him, but both survived. Was this divine intervention?
Sometimes you have to wonder if something more is involved than just sheer coincidence? Take the case of a group which had choir practice scheduled in their church. There were 15 people in the choir, and on the particular day they were supposed to practice everyone of them were late. So far this was a coincidence but not for the reason of lateness alone. The coincidence was amplified because the church exploded 5 minutes after the time set to practice but no one was there yet. It seemed everyone had a different reason for being late.
When I got a new job, I was an officer assigned to Family Court. One of the first cases on the court calendar was a paternity case and the respondent was someone I worked with on my prior job. Talk about embarrassment, the poor guy was humiliated to see me there. What were the chances of that?
One scientist who is an expert in psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences has said its synchronicities which are indicators of an invisible network that connects everyone and everything. I don’t know how I feel about that idea.
Photographs have proven to exhibit some coincidences from time to time like the one at the beach I talked about above. There is a painting of Jesus Christ which a person took a selfie with and his face is identical to the face of Jesus. Another photo shows two groups of children on a beach among a larger crowd. The children were young and didn’t know each other. It turns out a girl from one group married a boy from the other group many years later and then discovered the photo which had been taken by the girl’s grandfather. Another photo showed a boy in a carriage who was about 3 years old and in front was a Disney character with his hand on a girl’s head. The two didn’t know each other but met and married many years later.
Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert was traveling from New York to Washington. A crowd of people were pushing on the train platform to get to the conductor to buy tickets. This had pushed Robert against the train. There was a space between the platform and the train and the train began to move and Robert fell in that space, but luckily was pulled out immediately. The man who pulled him out was the brother of John Wilkes Booth, Edwin. As we all know Edwin’s brother would later murder the president.
Is there something about being alive on this earth we don’t realize and does it cause coincidences to happen? It could mean we don’t have the entire story of life on this planet, we only think we do. There may be a more mysterious side to life which we don’t realize. Some say with all the people on this planet there are bound to be coincidences just based on the sheer amount of people. Most scientists will also go along with this, but you have to admit some of these coincidences seem so strange they seem they shouldn’t happen. It is one thing to do a statistical study, but an entirely different thing to experience some of these things.