“At the end of every hard-earned day / people find some reason to believe.”  — Bruce Springsteen

In “Reason to Believe,” Bruce Springsteen tells it like it is.

By many people’s standards, my days are not “hard-earned.” I have a good life, not without its problems and sorrows, but easy compared to most, I suppose.

My dad’s days, on the other hand, were different. He came up poor, and after high school, he went to live with and work for my uncle, who had a car dealership in a nearby town. When my uncle decided to move back to Pontotoc, the tiny town in the hills of north Mississippi where they had grown up, my dad moved with him. In those days, Daddy followed the big bands that traveled the South. He was handsome, and I have old photographs of the pretty girls he knew. But my mother put an end to what seemed to be his confirmed bachelorhood. When they married, she was eighteen and he was thirty-two. The love affair that was their marriage continued until his death forty-five years later.

Do I believe in providence?

I suppose I do. I’m not certain how my parents met. I know my mother’s best friend lived across the street from the little service station my dad ran. I imagine her walking past the station, never looking his way. Did she and her best friend watch him from the porch across the street? Did they giggle? Did Mother write her name as his—“Mrs. G______”?

I wish I knew the answers. What a shame I didn’t ask.

I can only speculate, just like I can speculate about the coincidence of meeting my first husband at a college party. We were both there with other people, but he cut in and danced with me. Later, I ran into him on campus and he offered me a ride back to the dorm. Still later, he called and asked me out. And that was the beginning.

Or much later, twenty-seven years ago, a phone call came from a college professor I didn’t know. He had seen the high school literary magazine I sponsored, he said, and he needed a judge for a writing contest; would I do it? When I said yes, he offered to bring the materials to my house. And soon, there he stood, on my doorstep, this man I would eventually marry. He says I served him iced tea (it was July, maybe August). What if I’d offered him coffee? Or lemonade? Or nothing? What if I’d said no on the phone? I so easily could have, but I didn’t.

Today or tomorrow, noon or evening. This restaurant or that one.

Why are we in particular places at particular times? Five minutes, or less, even seconds, and the turns our lives take could be so very different. Call it providence. Call it fate. Call it God-ordained. Our lives unfold in mysterious ways.

I’ve lived long enough to look back on the days of my life—some of which were indeed hard-earned, heartbreaking days that I thought at the time would break me—and see how they didn’t. They shaped and matured me and made me a different person from the one I might have been. Is that evidence enough to believe? I can’t prove there’s a force larger than us at work. But the thought sustains me, and that’s what matters.

Have you experienced a particular moment in your life when you felt something larger than yourself at work? Tell me about it in the comments.

This piece first appeared November 18, 2023, on Substack. Want to read more? Go to “Stories I’m Old Enough to Tell.”