Celebrating our 20th anniversary with a European river cruise down the Danube, Sue and I found ourselves one day in the city of Salzburg, Germany, where a scene in the “Sound of Music” movie was filmed. It was winter and our returning bus was late, so we ducked into the warmth of a coffee and hot chocolate shop. In the comfort of that atmosphere, I noticed a man who looked somewhat familiar and noted that he, too, was observing me. We spoke and agreed that the acknowledgment was mutual, but, despite the fact that both of us were Americans, it took about 30 minutes to discover our commonality. It was that we had met a couple of years before at a family reunion.
Johnny Phillips
He was from Virginia but had attended the family event at his brother’s home in North Carolina (where he had never been before) and I (not related to the family) had been invited simply to provide a ministerial prayer for the occasion. And there we were on completely different ships halfway around the world meeting again. What are the odds?
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One-in-a-million occurrences have preoccupied my thinking since I realized that on today’s date of Jan. 23, in 1795, one of the most fantastically improbable military victories took place at Den Helder in the Netherlands. Fourteen warships of the Dutch fleet who were at war with the French were captured (with no shots fired and no casualties) by the Hussar Regiment, which was a cavalry unit.
I repeat. A cavalry captured a navy!
(Let me add parenthetically I can only find one other occasion of cavalry and naval units battling one another and that was here in North Carolina during the American Civil War when a CSA horseback unit battled with a federal gunship at Fort Branch near Hamilton, N.C. Which also is a very extraordinary circumstance in that the present owner of the land where Fort Branch is located happened to be the brother of the man I met in Salzburg!)
Actually, there are people who study such matters. Littlewoods Law states that due to the vast number of events in any given persons life, he or she “can expect to experience events with the odds of one in a million at the rate of one per month.” For our purpose here, let us generally accept that life is filled with oddities of chance both rewarding and discontenting.
Believe it or not, this was often on the minds of people when they spoke to Jesus. In His day, the prevailing theological belief of the religious professionals fell under the guise of the retributive theology. Essentially it holds that God blesses good behavior with rewarding experiences and evil conduct with punishment. But many people felt that their experiences did not concur with this. Like Asaph of the 73rd Psalm, they complained to God about how evil people speak maliciously of others, live sumptuous lives, ignore the Lord and yet prosper materialistically.
Jesus, too, entered into the conversation, observing that the 18 construction laborers who died when the Tower of Siloam collapsed on them were no more evil than anyone else, or when the religious leaders questioned Him about the man born blind, asking the Lord if his condition was the consequence of his own sin or that of his parents. We must remind ourselves that both good and bad eccentricities occur to all of us. “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” Accidents will happen to everyone, both moral and immoral people will win the lottery, die of cancer and strike it rich by chance, but these happenings are not related to ethical integrity or lack of it.
However, how we react to fortune or calamity does reflect the nature of our souls. Paul says that “all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.” Whether life’s experiences bring us health and prosperity or not does not affect God’s designs for our lives, but, and this is all important for our living the spiritual life, we can prove our spiritual mettle by the way we live out our response to those events of life that will truly come to all.
The Rev. Johnny A. Phillips is a retired minister who lives in Burke County. Email him at phillips_sue@bellsouth.net.
