I used to know a minister (well I still do, but they are no longer a colleague) who would sometimes say, "if you were religious you might think that God had something to do with it."  It always made us chuckle and we knew exactly what we meant.  We didn't "do" a kind of cheap theology that glibly attributes good or bad to God or satan, we didn't expect God to be surprising us at every turn, rather we trusted that God was there even when we felt God to be silent or absent.

Today a message was forwarded to me that had been sent via our church website... it was from a former school friend who I last saw in 1971, when she and her family moved to Australia, just a year before we moved to another part of Northamptonshire.  As is so often the way, our letters, sent surface mail and taking months to arrive, petered out over a few years.  Over the past few years, I've tried several times to track her down, wondering where she was and how life had worked out for her.

The email came out of the blue - turns out she is visiting relatives in the UK, and the wife of her cousion is the big sister of one of my classmates, who knew I was in Glasgow (via the now defunct "Friends Reunited").  It was a lovely email, full of encouragement and a shared faith, and its arrival really "blessed" me.  If I was religious, I might think that God had something to do with it!

That's grace - not something anyone can predict or manufacture.

That's God - prompting or preciptating unexpected blessings in the ordinariness of life.