I have pondered this question for many years and a few years ago I realized that not everything that happens is a coincidence. A few years ago my house caught on fire and a part of it had to be demolished and rebuilt. After you have a fire, your insurance company sends out several companies to help you in rebuilding your house. One of them is the restoration company that comes to clean and rebuild your house. Another company is a restoration dry-cleaning company that takes all your clothes, sheets and soft items to be cleaned. These two companies that have the biggest jobs in the restoration process.

Come to find out that the owners of both of those companies had links to my family. For the dry-cleaning company, my daughter was currently in acting class with the owner’s daughter. And my husband went to school and played baseball with one of the owner’s of the company that was going to rebuild our house. Out of all the companies that the insurance company could have selected, those were the two that they picked? Coincidence? I think not! After finding out that these companies had links to my family, I felt safe and protected and that all would work out.

In the 3 years that have followed, I have found many “coincidences” that I believe were not coincidences at all and were orchestrated to happen for a reason. The last one happened last week with my daughter. She is studying abroad in Italy for the semester and the apartment that the school picked for her to live in is literally right around the corner from the hotel we stayed in 2 years ago. Seriously, out of all the places in the city, this is where she ended up? I believe the reason was to help her feel more comfortable with her new temporary home because she had stayed in the same neighborhood before.

And the flight I talked about in my “Grateful for the Kindness of Strangers” post, there were 2 guys sitting behind me and they struck up a conversation with each other and after a few minutes they realized that they knew each others name because they are in the same business, though they never met. Out of all the places they could have sat on the plane, they sat across from each other. Coincidence?

Open yourself up to the messages from the universe and you may just find out that all of us are on a great adventure of this journey we call life!