A Little Magic in the Air

Have you ever noticed how life can almost seem to know exactly what it’s doing? Like someone you haven’t thought about in years crosses your mind, and before you’ve made much of the thought, their name passes you on a license plate. It’s hard not to love the precision of that, the tiny thrill of wondering whether life has somehow let you in on something for a second. It’s like magic has been sprinkled in the air.

Or maybe it happens through someone else. A friend writes about the Divine Mercy prayer and how much it helped him through a difficult time. Five minutes later, a photograph comes back through email. There it is, the same prayer, hanging behind the recipient’s desk. It has been there the entire time.

We’ve found all sorts of names for experiences like these: synchronicity, God winks, signs, divine intervention, and coincidence still gets a seat at the table. Maybe the name depends on what we already believe or what we’re willing to believe after something like this happens. Either way, there’s something wonderfully magical and difficult to pin down about it. You can tell the story and jot down every detail, even remembering exactly where you were standing, and still never quite capture that little rush of how did that happen?

Years ago, two girlfriends were sitting in an apartment reading the Bible together. They were eighteen or nineteen and had decided to open it without choosing where, trusting that whatever they landed on might be what they needed to read that night. One of them opened to Philippians 4:6–9, the passage that begins with anxiety and prayer and ends with the peace of God guarding the heart and mind. She liked it enough to think about it again the following morning while sitting behind the reception desk at the hair salon where she worked. She started copying the passage onto the notepad beside her, and when the salon owner noticed and asked what she was writing, she said the calendar on her desk had a different prayer or passage for every day of the week and told her to go see what that day’s was. So she walked over to the desk, and Philippians 4:6–9, the exact passage she had opened to the night before, was looking right back at her.

Another story comes to mind: a couple who walked into a crystal shop. Somewhere between the stones, sound bowls, and conversation about an upcoming meditation night, the woman became convinced the person working there was flirting with her boyfriend. By the time they left, the whole exchange had taken on a life of its own. He thought she had completely misread it, and she went home unable to shake the feeling and eventually prayed about it.

The following day, the couple headed down to the water for a walk and passed one of those elaborate beach picnics, a low table under an umbrella, cushions on the sand, dinner laid out beside the ocean, the whole beautiful production. And sitting there was the woman from the crystal shop, of all people and of all places. She recognized them immediately and introduced the man beside her, her husband. They had just gotten married, and the picnic was a wedding gift.

You almost have to smile at the timing of that. The woman she had been so sure was flirting with her boyfriend was sitting on the beach the very next day, having dinner with the man she had just married. And as they stood there talking, a huge gust of wind came through. It rushed over her hands and between her fingers, and for a second she had the strangest feeling that the wings of God had passed right through them. She could feel it, almost catch it, and then it was gone.

Maybe that is part of what makes these experiences so hard to put into words. The facts are easy enough to tell: the woman from the crystal shop was at the beach with her husband. The verse was waiting on the calendar. The prayer was hanging on the wall. The name was on the license plate. What stays with us is everything around the facts, the timing of it, the feeling of it, and that brief sense that life has opened a magical door we didn’t know was there.

And perhaps that is why we keep these stories. Years later, we can still pull them out and tell them with the same amazement, still feel that little rush of how did that happen? Because every once in a while, life seems to let us see behind the curtain, and for however long it lasts, there it is: that little sprinkle of magic in the air.