I am a Christian myself and I, in fact, do believe that the method in which God “acts” is through the sort of thing that kanicbird describes in the OP. The problem is, however, that these sorts of things are only really meaningful to those directly involved, just as with any other personal anecdote. To those who believe it, it is clearly an act of God, and to those who don’t, they will see mere coincidence, subconscious action, confirmation bias, or some other phenomenon or, even if they can’t reasonably explain it, will resolve that there must be a naturalistic explanation. The thing is, these sorts of circumstances are inevitably filtered through our own experiences and our own beliefs and so can’t possibly act as any sort of meaningful proof for or against either view.
But here’s my question to you, kanicbird. If God has put these series of events before you, what do you feel is his purpose it so doing, not for someone else’s benefit, but specifically for you? By this, I mean, when we interpret these sorts of things as though there is no coincidence, then we have to consider other possibilities of how such things may be accomplished. If, for instance, God only wanted TOWP to read it that verse, we could probably come up with dozens of different ways he may have read it without your involvement. Thus, on these assumptions, there is as much a lesson for you to be learned, as for anyone else and, as such, there are lessons for everyone else involved too. Further, what you may believe the lessons may be for others may or may not be what they actually are.
However, for those who do believe certain things are coincidence, they may not even search for any particular lesson and may not find it, or the lesson may be a from a series of events, of which that particular event is only one. Or, if we decide there is no lesson for some individual involved, then we must accept that sometimes events simply are coincidence. Either way, I ask the question above because I think that though we should act on things as we believe we should, we can only ever actually effect those lessons into ourselves.
