Zhimbo and I recently moved all of our stuff, and two cats over 700 miles to live in a new town.
We moved ourselves, so that meant packing for a couple of months, loading up a truck (with the help of two very dear friends) the day before the first leg of the trip, driving the truck and our car for many hours over two days, and staying in a motel overnight with two cats, then unpacking the truck, then driving for over an hour over a two lane, twisty mountain highway a couple of days after arrival to return the truck.
What I haven't mentioned is that we were driving from SE Michigan to New England in the middle of February. You know, all along I90, just south and east of the Great Lakes, and right smack in the middle of the snow belt. Not to mention the difficulty of doing all of this in the bitter cold and wind that is typical for this time of year.
"Crazy" is what everybody thought we were.
Well, it turned out to be an
incredibly smooth operation.
We were able to pack almost everything into the boxes that I brought home from work over a couple of months, so it wasn't so much last minute drudgery, and sold or purged a great deal of stuff too.
We got tranquilizers for the cats, so they basically slept the entire trip.
During the loading phase, it was chilly but dry, and our friends were extremely helpful.
During the two days of driving along one of the snowiest routes in the country, during February, we had beautiful mostly sunny skies, calm winds, and high temperatures in the
lower forties! In February! In New England!
The two days we spent unloading the truck were also very unseasonably warm and dry, and it didn't get cold, windy, or offer to snow until the day we had dropped off the truck, and even then it was just a little dusting overnight which was salted and gone by noon.
Remember, we picked the dates of this move over a month before it actually took place. We had no way at all of knowing what the weather was going to be.
The reason I relate this story is because I have heard theists relate similar stories of seamless travel, or of fortuitous unusual events happening to them and they tend to attribute their good fortune to their prayers having been answered to or faith in a higher power watching out for them because they are a faithful believer.
Well, neither Zhimbo nor I are believers, and we didn't pray at all for great weather. We hoped of course, for safe conditions, and I was dreading having to drive for 15 hours in ice and snow with two yowling cats in the back seat. Not only did we get safe weather, we got
extremely comfortable, unseasonably balmy, ideal weather.
What I find fascinating is that, if a believer had been in our shoes and had the same experience of this unseasonably balmy weather and quite seamless moving experience, I am quite positive that they would have attributed it to God, even though the experiences would have been exactly the same.
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Faith and Belief?
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