September 24: Day 86

STEP THIRTEEN CONTINUED: We follow the principle that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. The witness of our lives is the only message we need to carry to others.
 
Instruction: Watch for synchronicity.

The word “synchronicity” is defined as “the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related but have no discernible causal connection.”[1] I like to think of it as Divine connections. When we look for these Divine connections, we will begin to see them with more regularity. In the beginning of the program, I had the idea for a group that would meet to help people overcome religious abuse. I created a Craigslist posting and slowly received a few responses. Then, I noticed someone was also posting on Craigslist who was trying to do the same thing. I contacted him, suggested that we meet to talk about our ideas of how to help, and see if it might be beneficial to work together. We had never met before, and we came from very diverse backgrounds, but our goals were the same—to help people heal who had been hurt in the same or similar manner to the way we had been hurt. As time went on, we discovered that although we didn’t know each other personally, I was familiar with his wife’s family and had even attended the same church as her parents. Some would call that a coincidence, and I wouldn’t disagree. At the same time, I see that coincidence as being a divinely orchestrated meeting.

In much the same manner, the coincidences mount up over time, and people are discovering our program and the help we have to offer. This concept of “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear” takes the pressure off the student and the teacher. The teacher doesn’t have to go door-to-door peddling their message, and the student doesn’t have to worry about another “crazy” religious or semi-religious individual ringing their door bell with literature to hand out and “good news” to pander. Step Thirteen is perhaps one reason our program has had a slow start, but it is also the reason our start needed to be slow. Implied in Step Thirteen is that not only when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, but also the concept that when the teacher is ready, the students will appear. Both teacher and student need to be ready for each other, and this often takes a divine connection. That is why it is important to be on the lookout for the synchronicities of life.
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Today’s assignment is to open to the synchronicities in your life. By ignoring something as merely a coincident and discounting the fact that the coincident might have been divinely orchestrated sets us up for missed opportunities. The Universe brings people — teachers — into our lives to guide us. Those teachers would probably not be presented to us unless we were ready to be their student.


[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=synchronicity