I heard in some of my early meetings that coincidences were God's way to preserve His anonymity, and I seemed to get plenty of them back then. When I went to the AA Central office in Sydney to find a shoulder to cry on before going to my first meeting because I wanted to hang onto my teaching job, the guy on duty for 12th Step work that day was a deputy principal. I recall my first trip back to the US after getting sober in Sydney when I was sober for about 18 months. I found some addresses of members in my home area, the Illinois-Iowa Quad Cities, wrote to the one closest to my parent's house in Rock Island and got a reply in record time from a guy who, as it turned out, had been on the phone to my father most days for many years when they were both cost accountants working for Deere &
Company. On the way back, I ended up sitting next to a guy I worked with in
my first job in Sydney on the plane across the Pacific and then with people
I had so much in common with on the next two flights that it was like being
escourted home. There were lot of little coincidences, like getting to meetings almost by accident and hearing what I needed to hear just when I needed to hear it. I was assigned a young student teacher who told me she was also a member when she saw the AA slogan at the front of my classroom. When I became a member of the religion I am still active in, I gave an NA card with my phone number on it to a guy who had recently moved to Sydney from Melbourne who was going to take my to my first Bahai feast. He turned it over and said, "So you are in NA too." I was a bit shocked that he had even heard of it because there were only three or four small meetings a week in Sydney and one in Melbourne. It turned out that he had lived in the back of a house next to a house where one of the one of the guys I'd met and and spent quite a bit of time with when I went to Melbourne to help them start the first meeting, and he had recently also become a Bahai. It seems like the frequency of these miraculous "coincidences" had declined quite a bit since then, or perhaps I've just gotten more used to them. Perhaps they were about the only way that God could guide and protect me back then, and He doesn't think I need them now. |