I found this post by Kathy Carlton Willis at I’m Living Out Loud

Have you ever had a divine appointment, and knew 100% for sure that God’s hand was on the situation? I’ve had several of those in my lifetime, and each time, I am amazed by the power of God. This week, I asked a friend to add an e-mail link to my online blog, so that readers could contact me. During the same moments she was setting it up, an old friend of mine stumbled across my blog on the internet. Not knowing how to contact me, he left a comment on the site, from David R. I read the comment and my heart pounded with excitement. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a childhood friend of mine. Confirmation came in the form of an e-mail from David Rubemeyer, within minutes of when Carmen had placed the e-mail link on the site. I’m not sure what made me want to place the link on that day. We had been toying with the idea for a month or so. And who knows why Carmen found time at that exact moment to add the link. But the end result was the reunion of two childhood friends – a brother was found!

Read the rest of her post here.

Found at: http://www.recoverytimes.com/ginci.html by Bill A.

I came to it one Sunday morning twenty-four years ago, just like every other morning: hung-over. Sunlight streamed through the window, nudging me awake. “Ugh,” I grunted. Too sick to move, my head ached like a thumb hit by a hammer. As I tried to piece together the night before, and the day or two before that, the thought haunted me that the blackouts, which for the last few months had progressed from occasional to inevitable, were a symptom of – not alcoholism, no, never that – insanity. “That is it,” I said to myself out loud, “I’m nuts.” How else could it be explained? I never considered alcoholism. After all, I wasn’t a skid row bum. The power of that realization – that I was out of control, utterly unable to change my situation – overwhelmed me.

Soaked with sweat, I glanced from my bed through the window at the annoyingly beautiful spring day and mumbled to nothing in particular, “If there is a God, please help me”. I had absolutely no expectation that anything would come of that request. I just didn’t know what else to do. Without exaggeration, less than a minute later there was a loud knock on my door. I did what I usually do when confronted by something unpleasant: I ignored it. Too sick to move, I assumed silence would send whomever it was a message: Bill’s not here. A louder. more insistent knock soon followed. I winced. in my condition I could hear my eyelids move. Moments later another, even louder, knock. A voice said, “I know you are in there”. Then the voice started pounding on the door. I struggled to my feet and shuffled toward the voice. By the time I reached the door I knew it belonged to my landlady, Norma. As I inched open the door I could see that she was angry. “I been watching you, boy,” Norma said in a thick West Texas drawl. She stepped closer and lightly poked her finger in my chest. “I know what you’re up to, boy. You’re an alky-holic” she said with a deepening frown. “I know, I been watching you.” She narrowed her gaze as if watching a bug crawl across my face. “My son’s an alky-holic; so are you”.

My coming and going, my stumbling and slurred speech, were routine. Once reserved for weekends and after-work carousing, since I had lost my last job as a till-dipping bartender, my drinking had been constant. “My boy dont drink no more”, Norma said. “He goes to Alky-holics Anonymous”. I glanced down the hall to see if any neighbors had heard. “He goes to Alky-holics Anonymous, and he dont drink”, Norma repeated as if I hadn’t heard her. Then she looked at me as if I had told her water was wet and said, “You need to go to Alky-holics Anonymous, boy”. I began to protest with a contrived excuse about family illness. Surely she’s deluded, I thought. No way am I going to some Salvation Army soup kitchen. “You’d better go to one of them meetings, today”, she said. “Or I’m evicting you first thing come morning”. She paused. “And I want proof you went. Bring me one of them Big Books”. I wondered how big this book might be, and whether I’d need anyone to help me carry it.

After Norma had her say, she focused one of her most piercing, laser-like stares at me turned and walked away. I stood in my doorway relieved she had left, and shuddered. “Yeah, right”. I closed the door as Norma walked down the hall. By this time of day Dallas convenience stores were selling beer and wine – no hard liquor on Sunday. I knew if I had one beer there would be an eviction for sure, because my next move would be more beer. As usual, I put on my cleanest clothes, checked the phone book for the nearest AA address, and promised myself I would poke my head in the door so I could tell Norma what I saw and see about one of those Big Books she mentioned. I don’t remember much about my first AA meeting. But I clearly recall being handed a Big Book by a guy named Cecil, someone I couldn’t imagine would have anything in common with me. Me: a slick transplant from New York City; Cecil: a TV repairman from a rural Texas burg. But I couldn’t help staring at him as he spoke. It was as if he had been reading my mail. He described what happened to him, how he felt, and it was me. Cecil told my story – and except for minor changes of scenery and actors – his story was mine, and mine was Cecil’s. I’d like to tell you I’ve been sober since my first AA meeting years ago. But the fact is that I wasn’t “ready to be ready”. Yet Cecil made such an impression that I kept coming back until I eventually got it, and began to enjoy the sober life that millions of desperate alcoholics have come to know. I’ve heard it said that God works through people. And that there are no coincidences, only “God-incidences”. I believe that. In fact, I suspect God just might have a bit of a west Texas drawl.

Author: Richard Burley

I had a most amazing encounter yesterday. I went to go get a hair cut… much overdo! I struck up a conversation with the Stylist (named Glenda) that was cutting my hair. She asked me about the book that was reading (i.e. The Emerging Churches by Gibbs and Bolger). This lead to her telling me all about the AG church that she goes to. She was very excited about it. I was moved by their missional heart and the fact that they have special services for the incoming numbers of immigrants from Nigeria, India, Somalia and a few others that I dont recall all in those languages! Very impressive. She told me how her brother is the Pastor.

I told her about Deb and my experience in Vineyard and how I”ll always be grateful for what I learned there. She said that she has a relative who is the Pastor of the Vineyard in King Wood Texas. Whoah! Hold the presses. A Vineyard in King Wood. There has got to only one Vineyard in Kingwood… and I happen to know the Pastor as well!! I started laughing and asked her “Is it Bob Towell?”. She said it was and we were both laughing. I told her that Bob and Joyce were and remain to be two of our favorite people in Church leadership and they were our Pastors in Austin! She said that her Brother the Pastor is married to Joyces sister. Amazing!

Glenda and I both agreed that this had to be a God’-incidence. Though I dont know yet what it might mean or lead to. I haven”t seen Bob in over 4 years. I sure would like to see he and Joyce again. And who knows… with this connection I might. ‘Course, now that I’m back in Texas… I could just drive down to Kingwood one of these days and visit.

Where might this lead??? Who knows. But God is good… and He seems to really love reunions. I am really hoping to see them again.

Author: Alissa

This is a story about an actual experience of mine. I have changed the names to protect people’s privacy, but the story is true. It was more than a coincidence – it was a God-incidence.

I was up late one night while in the hospital, and I was talking to Megan, one of the staff, about suicide. I was feeling very suicidal at the time. Anyway, Megan was telling me she had a half-brother who killed himself, and it had affected her deeply. She then proceeded to tell me a philosophy of hers: She believed that each person’s life was deeply important to someone. She used a chair as an analogy: “See that chair over there?” Megan said. “Well, that chair make not make a difference to you or me, neither of us may care about it, but I believe that it DOES make a difference to someone. Someone would miss that chair if it were gone.” I quickly dismissed this analogy as ridiculous, and went off to bed.

The next day, management came upstairs with new chairs. As they were removing the old chairs, Lindsey pointed to the EXACT SAME CHAIR and cried out, “NO, you can’t take that chair, that’s Freddy!!” Although she was just being silly, Lindsey’s statement really struck me. It was as if God was telling me, “See, the chair DID matter to someone. And so do you.” Remember, “you may not mean something to the world, but you mean the world to someone!”