Here is the scene: it is about 6:45 this morning and I, my wife, and my baby daughter are in the kitchen of our home in Louisville, Kentucky. My wife is sitting at the breakfast table eating Cheerios, and I am feeding the baby her rice cereal. My wife is actually sitting at the table's farthest chair, a seat that neither of us ever sits in. She has sat there because it is where the baby cannot see her; if she is in my daughter's field of vision then the baby will be too distracted to eat her cereal.
Consider this: it is extremely strange for all three of us to be in the kitchen at one time in the morning. My wife and I take turns getting up with the baby and feeding her, while the other one gets to sleep a little later. I can only remember one or two other times that all three of us were in the kitchen in the morning. My wife is up with us this morning because she has to get ready to drive to Alabama to see her family. She had planned on leaving Friday with the baby, as she usually does, but she decided to leave Thursday instead because the forecast for Friday across Kentucky and Tennessee was for heavy rain. Again, my wife has visited family in Alabama dozens of times in the four years since we have lived in Louisville, but I can never once remember her leaving on a Thursday.
My point is that the state of affairs that we found ourselves in this morning was highly out of the ordinary due to various factors. Now let's go back to the kitchen table. I am feeding the baby and my wife is eating Cheerios. Out of the corner of her eye she sees a robin sitting on the fence of our neighbors' house that is two lots down from ours. She admires the beauty of the bird and carries on with her breakfast. A few moments later, she sees something bright red or orange fall down from the gutter of the same neighbors' house. She thinks it is the robin but does not understand why he would be making a nosedive toward the ground. She looks closer at the house and sees a thin stream of smoke coming from the gutter area from which she had seen the orange-colored thing fall. At this point she says to me, "Brian, I think our neighbor's house may be on fire."
I get up from where I am and lean down to where I can look out the window - we have Roman shades, so you can only see out the bottom third or so of the window - and I see the smoke. But it is so small that it only looks like steam coming from a vent somewhere. Although it wasn't a very cold morning, I just assumed my neighbors had their heater turned up high. Just as I tell my wife she is imagining things, we both see the small tongue of flame at the corner of the house.
Now, being the paunch-bellied philosophical superhero that I am, I jump catlike into action. The heroic mode is not one that I customarily find myself in, but being an American male I quickly find that I fill the role of the hero quite easily. In my favorite pair of red pajama pants and a beat-up t-shirt I run to the closet and throw on my brown casual shoes, and as I sprint outside I look like a homeless track star. As my wife calls 911, I dash to my neighbors' house and begin fervently ringing his doorbell. I ring it perhaps 8-10 times, during which his dog comes to the door and starts barking maniacally. I figure that since nobody comes to the door with such a racket going on, my neighbors had already gone to work for the day.
Now it is up to me to save the house and the poor dog. I run around to the side of the house. But my neighbor has a six-foot privacy fence and there is no gate. I run to the other side and find the gate. When I get to the corner of the house that is on fire, the flames have grown considerably, along with the volume of black smoke. I also see the culprit: a bird's nest that was sitting on top of a burning floodlight.
Adjacent to this corner of the house is my neighbor's waterhose. I pull it free and turn the water nozzle. No water. I turn harder. No water. I turn harder and faster. Still no water. All of the houses in my neighborhood were built by the same company and in most cases have the same hardware throughout the structure. At my house, I have had trouble with my outside water nozzles not connecting with whatever piece of hardware actually gets the water to come out. So in some cases you can just spin the nozzle and nothing happens. Think of trying to use a screwdriver with a stripped out screw but imagine the nozzle as the screw and you'll understand what I mean. So apparently my neighbor has the same problem.
I yell down at my wife who is in our backyard that I can't get the hose to come on. I ask her if we have a fire extinguisher, and she informs me that we do not (I know this is a safety faux pas; I plan on buying one ASAP). So I run to another neighbors' house - the one that is between my home and the burning house - and I begin feverishly banging on
his door to see if he has a fire extinguisher. He does not come to the door. By now my wife has come outside carrying the baby in a blanket. I hear her say that she thinks someone has come out of the house.
I run back into my neighbors' backyard and he is standing there in his pajamas with a wild look on his face and a fire extinguisher in his hand. He has just doused the flame, but not without minor damage to his house. He had slept through my banging on the door and the barking of the dog, but I woke him when I yelled down to my wife asking her about a fire extinguisher. "What happened?" he asks me bewilderedly. I explain the situation to him, the fire department arrives, and all ends well.
Why am I telling this story? Because I think that in some small way it provides justification for my belief in a providential God. Consider the following facts:
- That my wife was leaving on Thursday is highly out of the ordinary.
- That my wife was in the kitchen this morning with us is highly out of the ordinary.
- That my wife was sitting at the far end of the table - the only seat from which she could have seen the fire - is highly out of the ordinary.
- My wife saw the fire literally at the moment it began.
If she had not seen the fire, the first time anyone would have detected it would have been when the burning siding became strong enough to smell. By that time the fire would have spread considerably. I was shocked by how much bigger the flame grew from the moment we saw it to the moment when I was standing beneath it struggling with the waterhose. And it was still six or seven more minutes before the fire trucks arrived. By that time the fire would have taken a large portion of the house, including the bedroom where my neighbor was sleeping. Now, I have to ask the following question: do the above events provide evidence and/or justification for my beliefs in the providential God of Christianity?
It's hard to say. I don't have the capability to calculate the probability of all the unordinary events coming together so that my wife could witness the start of the fire. However, I do feel that my worldview provides a great deal of
explanatory power over such a sequence of events. If God didn't want that house to catch on fire, He didn't have to allow it to happen, but perhaps He wanted to use it for His glory to achieve certain ends. What might those ends be? There could be many. Maybe he wanted me to cultivate my relationship with my neighbor a little more, or maybe I just needed to feel like a hero as a buttress to my fragile self-esteem (highly unlikely). At any rate, this morning's events seem to me to be a small but legitimate building block in the task of constructing a cumulative case for the truth of my Christian faith.
The nonbeliever may say that my use of this situation as evidence for my belief in God is a textbook example of wishful thinking. This is certainly possible. But the fact is that believing Christians can give you many examples of strange occurrences that seem to bear the hand of God. I'll give another example. Last summer a dentist told me one of my wisdom teeth was about to abscess and that I needed to have all of my wisdom teeth immediately pulled. My insurance had no dental coverage, and the estimate from the orthodontist was for thirteen hundred dollars. A few weeks later we got an unexpected check in the mail from our bank for thirteen hundred dollars. Apparently we had overpaid on our mortgage. Does it make me irrational to view such events as acts of a providential God that loves and cares for His children? I don't think so.
As a final note, my wife can attest that I have an annoying tendency to get a single song stuck in my head for days, weeks, or even months on end. Since Tuesday night when we watched
Walk the Line, I've been singing Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." Just an observation.
Have a blessed day!