Our current church school class on Sunday mornings (we are studying The Christian Life (A Geography of God) by Michael L. Lindvall which is part of the Fondations of Christian Life series) is being led by our pastor, Catherine Taylor. One of the points Catherine has made is that sometimes people ignore the moving of the Spirit in our lives. Often times people dismiss as mere coincidence things which she feels were signs of God's moving in our lives. Could it be that I have recently experienced such a God touched moment?
I was browsing the web and had visited my Usual Haunts. Having been reading some different church related sites I thought I'd check out some old bookmarks in my Church Favorites folder which I hadn't visited in a while. The first one that caught my eye and I chose was Mary & Martha's Place. I cannot remember how I came across this site originally or what prompted me to save it. It had been months at least since I last looked at it and I couldn't even remember what it was. Of course, the fact that it is named for the same biblical characters as my wife made the name resonate with me, but that would not normally be a reason for bookmarking a site. However, the home page featured a link to a mention of a book discussion of Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile by John Shelby Spong which I finished reading just recently. That was interesting enough, but not very useful because the book study was scheduled for Wednesday night when I was already committed to choir rehersal.
Still, the fact that they were studying a book in which I was interested led me to read more about what they were doing. When I clicked on one of their links about scheduled Contemporary Theological Issues meetings I found that in addition to their book study they mentioned that Bishop Spong would be leading a workshop on March 22, 2003 at All Saints' Episcopal Church in midtown Atlanta. This has enabled me to preregister for the workshop (when I called to pregister they said the response has been so good they are now asking people to bring their own lunches because they cannot serve so many people) so that I will have a chance to hear him in person.
Since finding out about this workshop I have tried to find out more about it. I cannot find any reference to it on the website for All Saints'. (How do you make a possessive out of a name which is itself a possessive? "All Saints''s website"? I guess I could just spell it out further "All Saints' Episcopal's website".) I haven't been able to find anything about it on any Spong related site. I haven't been able to find a mention of it doing various searches on Google (did anyone reading this really need a link to Google? but I guess it is proper blog-curtesy to link even if it is obvious). So I don't think I would have found out about this except that I stumbled into this website which I had bookmarked months ago and forgotten about.
Why did I save that bookmark originally? Why did I happen to find this link just in time to be able to attend this workshop? I guess I could just chalk it up to coincidence. I think that Spong likely would do so since he does not believe in an interventionist God. For myself, I think that there are enough "coincidences" and other unexplainable things which happen that I am not willing to discredit the possibility of an occasional gentle intervention by God.