Act of God

Okay, today’s the day. This is one story in particular that I have been saving up and I figure now is about time to tell it. This story involves God. Once again I would like to mention that I am in no way promoting the belief in God, or religion or spirituality in any form. This story is a part of a much bigger and more complicated story in my life that I don’t think I am going to get into at the moment. I would just like to tell the sequence of events of this story as matter-of-fact as I can, and let the reader take from it what they will. But as I’m sure you can imagine it did have a profound affect on me and my thinking at the time.

To begin, my parents raised me as an atheist. They didn’t so much teach me that God doesn’t exist, but simply gave me no religious or spiritual teaching or exposure. Even today I feel somewhat uncomfortable attending religious services.

So by the time I was a young adult I was happily and consciously an atheist in my beliefs. However I couldn’t help noticing that my life seemed to be a long string of unlikely events. More to the point it seemed that the more I would strive to take my life in one direction other forces seemed to be pushing it in the other. I remember at the time also analysing the life of my very close friend Mark. It seemed too that the more he tried to chase his dreams the further away he was getting from them. Finally it dawned on me: our lives were controlled by fate.

This came as a eureka moment for me. I felt that I had come to a profound and important realization. Since this also involved my friend Mark I was excited to talk to him and tell him all about my realization. It was about a week or two later that the phone rang and it was Mark on the other end. We traded pleasantries and I was just about to tell him about my realization when all of a sudden Mark interrupted saying: “Hey, guess what? I’ve come to the conclusion that our lives are controlled by fate.” As the British would say, I was gob-smacked. I couldn’t believe he had come to the same conclusion at the exact same time as me, and on top of that taken away my thunder by saying it first. I jokingly cursed him for making this announcement before I did, but inside was actually overjoyed. It meant that I didn’t have to explain my reasoning to Mark or to have to try and convince him. He already knew and understood. This incredible coincidence also helped convince me of the certainty of my conclusions.

This period of my life was filled with highly unlikely coincidences that happened on a daily bases. Each time it happened it only further confirmed my notions about fate. However, after about a year I started wondering whether I was copping-out be calling this fate. I wondered whether because I had been raised an atheist whether I was afraid to admit that it was actually God controlling my life, and not some meaningless term such as ‘fate’. So from that period forward I started up a relationship, of sorts, with God, clearly understanding that all these unlikely events that were happening to me were due in fact to God.

So this was the situation for about another year until when I found myself studying in London, Ontario. At the time I was getting my Masters of Library Science degree at the University of Western Ontario. If you don’t know what London is like in the summer, then I will tell you: it is very hot and extremely humid. One day when I was bicycling it was so hazy in the morning that in some places the street lights were still on. As I bicycled the air would pass over my bicycle, causing it to cool, and in turn causing the moisture in the air to condense onto my bicycle so that it would rain as I drove – very weird. About a couple of times a week, just as my afternoon classes would be ending, huge thunder clouds would appear. I seemed to constantly be being chased home on my bicycle by thunder and lightening.

Any ways, one night I came home on a particularly hot, humid, and stagnant evening. Even though I had windows on three sides of my apartment, with all of them wide open, there wasn’t a bit of breeze blowing through. When I went to bed I had on just my briefs, with not even sheets on, and I struggled to fall asleep in the horrid heat. Still, sleep I did, and after an hour or so I had a dream.

It was a very short dream. In it I was in the library stacks at school. I was with someone and I was having an argument with them. I don’t know what I was arguing about, but in order for me to win the argument I had to say “because I believe in God.” Unfortunately, even though I believed in God, up until then I had never actually told a person that I believed in God, not even my friend Mark. So in the dream I struggled to say it, but no matter how much I wanted to win this argument I just couldn’t bring myself to say it. Then, at that moment, I woke up.

When I awoke I found myself to be shivering with cold. The air was like ice. And there was a racket in my apartment. I opened my eyes and saw a hurricane blowing in my bedroom. Wind was blowing so hard through my window that the curtains were spinning around in spirals with big violent flaps. There was a desk in my room that had been covered with loose-leaf paper, but now all of the paper was flying around my room like they were caught in a tornado. I jerked up in a sitting position and wondered “what the Hell is going on here?” Just then the wind immediately stopped, the hot humid air returned, and the papers slowly settled to the floor like snow flakes. Once again I was sweltering with the heat. I got up and went to my window and looked out. I could see no trees bending or rustling in the wind. I listened, but I couldn’t hear the slightest sound of wind, not even in the distance. It was as if the wind had only been in my room.

I slowly went back to sleep, contemplating what had just happened. When I woke up the next morning the loose-leaf paper was still all over the floor. It hadn’t been a dream. In fact I left the paper on the floor for a week or two to reaffirm what had happened that night. I wish I had actually taken a photograph of those papers, because now after all those years you begin to doubt your memories. Yet I know it happened.

Comments:
Well obviously I like this story. It happened to me so I am certain that it occurred. Once again it is an inexplicable event that happened late at night just after waking up. I also had evidence the next day that I wasn’t dreaming because I found all the papers on the floor that had been blown about in the night. Unfortunately there was no one else there to share the experience, so I have no corroboration. However my friend Mark did come to the same realization about fate at the same time as me. I have asked him about that since then and he does remember it, so it did happen. Unlike me Mark has remained an atheist and has even toned down his beliefs on fate.

I also think it is interesting that I looked out of the window. This is similar to Rat looking out the window when she woke up in the night, and my physics teacher’s friend who looked out the window at night to see the flying saucer. I can’t imagine what it means. Possibly it is just a natural thing to want to do when you wake up at night, although I think in my case I had justifiable reason.

One criticism of the story would be that in fact nothing truly inexplicable happened. I had a dream; the wind blew threw my window; some coincidences happened. So what? Coincidences happen all the time.