“Why don’t you write down a list of the times that something feels too unlikely to just be coincidence?” she suggested. “We call them ‘God shots’ down south.”
It seemed like an easy enough assignment. And so I began to take notes. Sometimes I’d catch the God shots as they happened and sometimes memories would bubble up and beg to be written down.
It didn’t take long for the little notebook I carry around with me to get heavy with what appeared to be proof that there was something bigger out there than me, even though it had been a very long time since I had felt any sort of connection.
As my list grew longer, it began to feel like there could be no denying that there was something bigger than me at work in the world. The God shots became dots that, when connected, built a web. And I started to remember what it was like to believe.
I had come into the exercise pretty spiritually bankrupt — completely disconnected from both the ritual and faith of my youth. Worse yet, it had been a long time since I had made any attempt at keeping up a spiritual practice. I had been lost — and seemingly alone — for too long, but the dots started to bring me back.
It’s been almost a year since I started jotting down the God shots. I don’t journal them with the daily frequency as I did at the start. But I’ve found that I can always come back to the practice easily enough. It only takes a few minutes now for the “proof” to flow out onto the page and for the dots to start connecting themselves again.