I love God's coincidences...

The most delicious red and yellow plums are growing at Villa Eden this month. As married couples arrive for the couples’ retreat this week, they’ll be able to pick their very own fruit from the “garden of Eden.” My parents are also arriving today and will be here in Spain for a month’s holiday. No doubt we’ll find time to go over to Eden to swim and sample the plums.

Yesterday morning, in the Old Testament, I was reading a story about a man called Jacob. After a conflict with his twin brother, Jacob had fled from his own nation of Israel and run away to a place called Paddam Aram, where he got married and began a family. In the course of his journey, however, Jacob turned his life around, committed himself wholeheartedly to God, and began to see God’s blessing in his family and in his farming. 

When we get to Genesis chapter 31, Jacob is about to embark on a transition, because God tells him to leave Paddam Aram and go back home again. To be more exact, God told him to return to his native country, the land of his fathers. I wonder if Jacob felt these instructions were more about leaving home than going home. You see, Paddam Aram was the only home his wives and kids had ever known, and Jacob himself had lived there for more than twenty years. But God had reasons for asking Jacob to uproot and head back to the part of the world he’d originally come from.

I experienced something similar just eight years ago, when God showed me that it was time to leave South Africa and return to Europe. I’d been living there for fourteen years and South Africa truly felt like home. Returning to Europe was one of the most difficult things I’d ever had to do, but God confirmed the step by speaking to me through the first verse of Isaiah 51: Look to the rock from which you were cut and the quarry from which you were hewn. Look to ... your father and ... the one who gave you birth. I understood it to mean that I was to return to where I’d come from, not just geographically to Scotland and Europe, but also to the ministry I’d been doing before moving to Southern Africa: working with the leadership development course and the KKI ministry in Europe.

But leaving Cape Town still felt like leaving home, and I confess that I felt “homesick” for Cape Town with a sense of loss that dragged on for nearly three years. I wonder if Jacob felt something similar when he considered the prospect of uprooting his family, leaving Paddam Aram and moving back to Israel. I knew, though, that “home” is not something static, and I remember writing in my 2007 journal about my awareness that a new place would eventually become home, if you embrace it and allow it to be. This month I look back in amazement, when I realise that I’ve just passed the eighth anniversary of my leaving South Africa, and that I’ve now lived in Alhaurín the same amount of time that I lived in Durbanville, or in Muizenberg (the two places I lived in South Africa.)

God was so faithful on my transition journey, and there were more than a few times where Bible verses He’d spoken to me took on a strangely specific meaning, in what I can only describe as one of God’s “coincidences." Just before I left South Africa, for example, He’d spoken to me through Exodus chapter 15, a story that ends with the people of Israel arriving at a place with “twelve springs and seventy palm trees.” Imagine my surprise, after arriving in Alhaurín, to discover that the town had been known since Roman times as a place of springs, a place for refreshing the troops... and in the little park at the end of my street, I was astounded to discover that there were exactly seventy palm trees.

Re-reading Isaiah chapter 51 yesterday morning, I suddenly had to laugh as I spotted another of God’s “coincidences” in the third verse. You see, in context, this prophecy was given to the people of Israel while they were in exile, and verse three promises Israel that, He will make her deserts like Eden, her wastelands like the garden of the Lord. The reason for my laughter was that the name of my town, Alhaurin, comes from Arabic and dates back to the time when the Moors occupied Spain. It’s comprised of two words: Allah, meaning God or Lord, and jardín, meaning garden. In other words, I live in a town that is called “the garden of the Lord” and one of our retreat centre villas is called Eden. 

Sometimes you just have to smile at God’s coincidences... but it’s also a reminder that He knows the future even before it happens, and He invites us always to trust Him, follow and obey Him.