Earlier in the week a patient told me the following true story. A lady called to see the vicar, a friend of hers, who asked her to help him empty a large bookcase. They grabbed armfuls of books and carried them into the next room but suddenly - disaster. The bookcase, no longer weighted down by its contents, toppled down on top of the woman. In trying to brace herself against it she rather spectacularly fractured a wrist, which then needed complex surgery. She banged her head as well, so the hospital took what they thought was just a precautionary X-ray.
In fact it showed - nothing to do with the accident - two small tumours of the brain, which at that point were operable. Surgery was a complete success; but had she not been injured by the falling bookcase, the tumours would have remained undetected until too late. This was a clear sign of divine providence, in the patient's eyes; God used the relatively minor accident to forestall a much greater calamity. Was it her reward for helping the vicar? I said she had been very fortunate, by which he understood me to agree with him.
I didn't, for what I hope are obvious reasons. For every tale of apparent providence, one can readily quote another hard-luck story where a split second meant the difference between life and death. I think of the child whose funeral I attended, who chased a football onto to the road and straight into the path of a car. A providential God would have made sure the driver had time to slam his brakes on, but not on this occasion. Splat. That there was no question of liability will not, I am sure, have stopped the driver's recurring nightmares.
At least it was instantaneous. Why am I saying that? Trying to find some glimmer in the darkness maybe, but sometimes there isn't any. People can die for stupid reasons and "too early", like we think we've the right to our threescore and ten plus a few more for good conduct, but the reality is: stuff happens. Chance plays a huge part in how long we live, in how and for what reason we eventually kick the bucket.
How about this for providence: on Christmas Day in 1944 my dad's battalion walked straight into a Japanese ambush. No-one survived. Dad wasn't there, he was in a hospital in India, recovering from dysentery. If he'd been a well man ... well, for a start, I wouldn't be here. I bet my mum thanked the Lord for dysentery many a time. And then there was the little girl - I met her as an old lady - who stayed off school one day during WWII with an upset stomach. She'd been scrimping apples and eating them before they were ripe. All her schoolfriends turned up as usual, and then an American transporter plane landed on their classroom, having overshot the runway at the nearby airbase. So she survived not because she'd been helping the vicar, but because she'd been naughty, and had to live with that knowledge - as well as the loss of most of her age cohort - for the rest of her days. How providential is that?
My dad has dementia, partly because he's lived long enough to contract it. His lifestyle has been a healthy one and he has earned his reward. I'm not going to pray for the disease to be reversed because I know that doesn't happen. It's going to get worse. We'll see what I might be praying for as he progresses, but for now it's that he gets the best and most appropriate care package that can be put in place, so ensure his safety, dignity and quality of life for as long as he is capable of enjoying it. That doesn't seem an unreasonable wish. I'm not asking for a miracle because the sense in which I believe in miracles at all is more specialised and not for this post. I categorically do not believe in a God who supernaturally intervenes in our affairs. All the evidence is against it. Mum did believe, and at the end that faith let her down; God did not prevent her suffering.
At least Dad's in no physical pain, which many old people are, and one might call that providential - though only in a figurative sense.
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