(Submitted by anonymous reader)
On November 2, 1963 I married my first husband. He turned out to be an abusive man and I finally divorced him in 1968. Having never been hit by my parents I never understood the abuse or how I fell into that type of relationship or why.
In 1988 I heard an ad on the local radio station seeking volunteers to counsel abused women. They offered free training and I decided to give it a try.
As it turned out I taught more than I was taught, having all the experience I had. After my training was completed they gave me my certificate of completion at one of our meetings. The date on the certificate was November 2, 1988, exactly 25 years from the day I had married this man.
I felt as if God was telling me, “Now you know why.” I spent years volunteering and helping other abused women to escape and to heal.
[EDITOR: If you haven’t yet read George Hrab’s thoughts on the subject of our site, I suggest you go do so. I think he perfectly sums up exactly this type of scenario. The vast majority of the coincidences we have on this site are just plain goofy. They don’t teach a lesson, they don’t send a message, they don’t impart knowledge; they’re people running into college buddies or squirrels falling on heads. And if so many meaningless coincidences happen to people every day, then occasionally one’s going to line up just right to make you feel like there’s more to it. I personally had this experience in Favorite Worlds Collide, leading me to feel like this amazing confluence of events meant something more. But at the end of the day the source of a life-changing event isn’t necessarily what’s important about it. It’s what you do with it. It’s hard to blame people for searching for and applying meaning to events, especially when they use that to foster a positive change in their life. We should all be so lucky as to pick out clues in the jungle of life around us and make something positive out of them. – Jarrett]
