John Tharp, Coincidentalist

After closing my Pinehurst, Idaho, office medical practice in 1993, I spent the next eleven years as a part-time locum tenens ("rent-a-doc"), traveling to fill temporary vacancies in doctors' offices or hospital emergency rooms. In 1999, I worked several weeks in St. Francis, Kansas, a small town far in the northwest corner of the state.

 

It's a pleasant little town in semi-desert; the hospital took good care of me, providing free lodging in a home whose owner was on vacation. But the house badly needed cleaning and I later moved to a motel out on highway 36. I was up early next morning, and searching for some place to eat. I could see a gas station a quarter-mile down the highway, and figured I could at least find coffee there, so I started walking toward it. 

 

Midway, I met a man of about 50 coming toward me with a cup of coffee. He stopped and said in amazement, "I know you! We were at board meetings together in Philadelphia!" He was staying at the motel, traveling by bicycle from Utah to Illinois. We had served together on the American Baptist Foreign Mission board several years before, but had not met since then.

I know that New Yorkers boast that if you stand at Times Square long enough, you will see someone from back home. But in a town of 1,300 on a two-lane road where Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado meet? What are the chances that one day two acquaintances, one from Idaho and one from Illinois, will walk into each other along the shoulder of the highway?

John Tharp and I had breakfast together, and later that morning he rode his bicycle into town to see the hospital where I was working, before continuing his journey eastward.

I have occasionally wondered, in the ensuing fifteen years, whether God had had a purpose in that meeting. I have not perceived any reason in my own life, and finally, I wrote John to see if he was aware of any in his.

In his reply, he said he, too, remembered the incident and also wondered about a reason. He had not detected any, but said that, after a number of such coincidences in his life, it has often entered his mind that "God loves to show off." [I myself prefer to think of it as God's sense of humor, but anyway . . .] he went on to say that this may be a way that God alerts us to what He can do, to keep us ready for the occasional time when He does indeed want action from us.

John's observation brought to mind an incident in Mae Sariang, Thailand in 1965, when the new hospital was ready to open except that we lacked nurses. The following report is from my journal of that year:

"We had a bit of drama in the three mission families’ weekly get-together two weeks ago. We were praying that the hospital would soon have some nurses, only to be interrupted by a man at the door asking where he should put some girls' luggage. One of the girls, our friend Orawan who spent some time with us last month, was only visiting, but the other, Yawalak, is now our first full-time graduate nurse-midwife. This afternoon (nearly two weeks after that prayer, for the scientifically minded) a motorcycle pulled up with another nurse riding on the back. Gaysala is just looking the place over today, but will be back permanently on Saturday. Later in the afternoon, two others appeared entirely unexpectedly. They said they were graduate nurses working in Mae Hongson [the provincial capital, about a hundred miles north] and were interested in transferring to MaeSariang where their homes are. The upshot is, one will probably come and work; perhaps the other will come later. With one or two others we expect in the next several months, we will soon have a full nursing staff (and an empty hospital bank account.) As for unskilled workers, two or three new ones apply every day and we can afford to be a little choosy for that group."

My dad sometimes would remark, "When people pray, coincidences happen more often." I'm inclined to agree.