A God-incidence.
Some three years ago, as I was sitting in the Charleston Civic center grand ballroom, waiting for a seminar to begin, a friend of mine, Mark Goldman, walked up and greeted me cheerfully and asked about the Benedictine cross hanging around my neck. "Are you still doing that Benedictine thing?" he wanted to know. Yes, I was. We fell into a conversation, and within minutes Mark announced his intention to become a Benedictine Oblate. Since then, both of us have discovered that our profession cross has been a wonderful conversation starter and witnessing tool - probably the best one we've ever found.

Well...Friday afternoon, I received a call from Br. Mark cheerfully announcing that while he was sitting in a meeting of addictions counselors that day, he had met someone else wearing a 'great big Benedictine cross'. Both cross-wearers eyed each other, beginning to put two and two together. After the meeting, Mark asked the other gentleman if he could talk to him a moment. He vows and declares that the first words out of the other mysterious person's mouth were, "I've already met Andy..."

With a laugh of recognition Mark met Ryan Connor, a young Church of Christ minister whom I have been talking to over the last year. Ryan had also heard me talk about Mark, and surmised that this other cross wearer must be he(he, he!). Mark and I and our spouses were to have our monthly dinner meeting at my house on Saturday, so an invitation was extended to Ryan and his lovely wife Shannon to join us for dinner and Compline. The six of us dined together pleasantly, laughed a lot and prayed Compline together. At this point Ryan is not quite ready to take the plunge and become a postulant - but we all had to agree that the whole thing was indeed a "God-incidence"!