I got a call from my mother this afternoon.  Everyone else in the house was asleep and I was laying down browsing around on the computer.  I’ve been using a freeware bible study program called eSword for a time and I just upgraded to a new version release which completely revamped the process.  It required a reinstall of all the other free addons and I was having trouble with a few of them until I finally figured it out yesterday.  In the process, I found a users’ group web site for the program.  So today while everyone else was sleeping, I went back to the user group and created an account.  I was just looking around and stumbled upon some amateur videos giving instruction on using eSword.  I was in the middle of the second video when the phone rang.

Mom told me that a cousin of mine, who was a few months younger than me, hadn’t shown up for work this morning and was later found dead in his home. It is still too early to know the cause, but he just commented on Facebook last night that he had been out for a 20 mile run that day when he was stung by a bee.  He was an avid runner, but I wonder if he had a bee allergy that he wasn’t aware of.  I suppose we will find out eventually.

Joe and I were baptized together at the same Mass as young babies.  I just kept thinking to myself that he made it home first.

After getting my bearings back after the shock of the news and talking the situation over with my wife, I eventually settled back down to what I was doing before mom called.  However, at that point I felt much more reserved and contemplative. I thought about the prayer journal portion of the eSword program and decided that I could make good use of it and do some additional prayer and bible review in the process.

I then went back to the video I was watching.  It wasn’t until I started the second video again and tried to find where I had left off that I experienced a powerful God Incidence.  The exact moment when my mom called with the sad news, the instructor in the video was demonstrating the search feature of eSword.  His ‘randomly selected’ search term = Heaven.  Due to the shock of the news, I didn’t immediately recognize the connection until after I went back to it.  Could it just have been coincidence that the user in the video ‘found’ heaven in his electronic bible search at the exact moment I heard the news of my cousin’s passing?

I don’t believe it to be coincidence.  I believe it may have been a message from Joe that he was finally home and had found heaven.  Congratulations on finishing that last marathon, Joe!  I hope to reach the same finish line myself and be with you again one day.

Praise God!!!