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Stuart Revercomb

Stuart Revercomb is a marketing consultant and joyously married father of four children. He seems to remember someone once telling him he ought to be a writer. "The Unseen Here and Now" -- Thursdays.

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"Thursday's Fare"

Sometimes God can't help but be obvious in order to save us from our selves. Sometimes he must surely squint his all-seeing eyes and hold his holy breath to allow grace to work itself out in the full light of human consciousness.

Sometimes he must allow a coincidence to occur.

We have all experienced them, great and small -- sometimes seemingly pointless and often even silly and awkward in their simplicity, but other times they are remarkable and beyond our ability to fathom. A coincidence can point to something wondrous and inspiring and true -- reaffirming in our seeking hearts the "great mystery" in which we move and breathe and live our lives.

Not long ago I was building a fence and needed one more 2-by-4 to complete the last section and "re-close" the yard. It represented the final act of a year-long renovation process that included a large addition to our house. I sorted through the few odd length boards I had left and lifted one up to measure it between the post and the new shed wall to which it would be attached. It was the exact length I needed -- making a perfect fit to within a sixteenth of an inch when placed in the "final gap."

I had still been wrestling with our decision to add on, hoping that we had made the right call in renovating as opposed to moving to a larger house. This remarkable "perfect fit" on the last board seemed to be the "whisper" I needed.

A couple of years earlier as part of a "Pastoral Nominating Committee" for our church, I was surprised to see an application with the name "George Anderson" on it. It was the name of my great grandfather as well as my first son: George Anderson Revercomb.

"Wouldn't that be something if HE turned out to be the guy," I remarked to the committee one night early in the process. More than two years, 200 applications and numerous weekend trips later we called one George C. Anderson to the pulpit of Second Presbyterian Roanoke.

But not before one of our committee members laughingly remarked one night, "Here's a resume from a guy that lives on an interesting street ... "George Anderson Lane."

Whack us over the head with a perfect fitting 2-by-4, why don't you.

Carrying his little joke one step further, the Holy Spirit arranged for a house to come on the market right next to ours at the perfect moment that the Right Rev. Anderson and his brood were seeking to move from Mississippi.

"I'm not sure WHAT I think about living next door to a minister," I told him, "Much less my own."

"You?!" Anderson replied, "Now you'll know who I REALLY am!"

Two days after moving in, I caught him flying paper airplanes off his porch roof to the neighborhood kids below. I knew who he was all right, and coincidence or not, he and his family would be a perfect fit in the gap on Stanley Avenue.

Sometimes such moments don't offer the kind of immediate clarity we might hope for, but their providential goodness seems apparent enough. Such was the case in 1980 as several of us milled around in the shell-covered driveway of a South Carolina beach house after a "post high school graduation week." The cars were all packed and we were attempting to say goodbye to several friends whom we knew we might not see for a very long time.

Most of us were more than a little bleary eyed after seven endless nights of teen-age celebration and revelry. Our wallets didn't look so strong either. We were, for the most part, flat broke. I stood barefoot in the drive counting change with my riding partners, Bill and Big Al. Would $11 and three-quarters of a tank of gas get us back to Roanoke? We were hoping so.

As we concluded our deliberations, I noticed out of the corner of my eye what appeared to be a dollar bill blowing across the sandy flat next to the side of the house. No one seemed to be in pursuit.

"Wow, we could sure use that," I thought as I began to gingerly step among the sand burrs to go retrieve it. I must have looked like a desperate refugee crossing a mine field as I "ouched" and "expleted" my way over the tiny round sand thistles. I pondered going back for a moment, but that buck might just mean a couple of hamburgers in Rockingham.

I persevered, but just as I came upon it a gust of wind blew it from beneath my grasp. I probably would have turned back then, but I was sure I had seen a corner that had both a "1" and a "0" in it. "Hey guys -- I think it's a Ten!," I bellowed across the dune I was now scaling.

"Riiiight!" came the not so believing reply.

Forgetting my throbbing feet, I took three more quick steps and pounced on the wayward green tumbleweed. I jumped up and holding it high as I looked back to the skeptical gallery, declared, "SEE, I TOLD YOU... IT'S A TE....," I hesitated. There was another zero in back of the first one.

"Son of a... IT'S A HUNDRED !!!" I yelled.

"Revercomb, come off that dune and quit playing around with that buck. We've gotta go ..."

"NO JOKING GUYS -- IT'S A HUNDRED SOMOLIANS ... LOOK!!!"

My enthusiasm quelled their skepticism. They began to squint their eyes in an effort to see the number. As I approached the car with the bill in my teeth, their mouths began forming big sagging 'Os.' No one else claimed it. I was the hero of the hour. Lunch and a little "high test" were on me.

Later that day my friends and I would encounter torrential rainstorms across the Piedmont of North Carolina. And just south of Greensboro in the heart of the worst storm cell as day faded to night, the wipers on my 1972 Pontiac would give out completely. Thanks to the $100 bill we were able to consider the possibility of stopping at a hotel for the night, which we wisely did. I can say with great certainty that without it, our daring young minds would have journeyed on, wipers or not.

We arrived home the next morning to the news that one of our schoolmates had been killed the night before when the car he was riding in skated off a rain soaked road in Roanoke. It wasn't long before that $100 bill -- and the opportunity it later provided to stop in the midst of the darkening storm -- seemed more blessing than coincidence.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that such moments of coincidence are, even at their simplest, more than we would readily laugh them off to be. That a "coincidence" might best be seen as an echo of hope returning back to the heart of faith from some distant and eternal place -- an occurrence when the subtle voice of creation is somehow less hidden in the details of our lives.

Writer Frederick Buechner has a wonderful perspective. A coincidence, he says, "is a whisper from the wings that goes something like this: You've turned up in the right place at the right time. Your doing fine. Don't ever think you've been forgotten."

Try to remember that the next time the vending machine is all out of your favorite drink but you get one anyways when you press the other button. Or you see the name of a town where you have just accepted a new job spelled out on a license plate on the car in front of you.

Just a coincidence?

Maybe.

Or maybe not.