A bookie from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, ends up in Heaven. It’s nice and all, he thinks, but the slots pay off on every single pull of the handle, and the Amboy Oddsmaker, as he was known down below, dreadfully misses real action. One day while idly looking down onto the Earth, where it’s 1957, he spots an 18-year-old boy shooting pool in a bowling alley in Compton, California. Then he sees a 13-year-old girl milking her cow on a small farm near Bellingham, Washington, up near the Canadian border. He suddenly gets an idea that may get him back in the game.

So he approaches God with a deal. “Uh, Supreme Being, creator of all that is and ever was, wanna make some easy money?”

God looks down at this lowly angel and replies, “Sure.” (God is a Catholic, of course, and gambling, especially Bingo, is one of His guilty pleasures.)

The oddsmaker angel says, “OK, God, I’ve got 1,000 shekels (the unit of currency in Heaven, of course) that says those two young people you see below, who are now almost three states apart, will never meet and marry. I’m giving a million-to-one odds against it happening.”

The Amboy Oddsmaker knows that fair odds should actually be ten million to one, but the Universal Watchmaker immediately replies, “You’re on.”

As they’re shaking hands to seal the deal, the Oddsmaker begins to worry: “Whoa! God jumped on that deal way too fast. Does He know something I don’t? Perhaps there was something to all that talk down below about God knowing the future. I may have cooked my own goose.“

“Nah!,” the oddsmaker concludes. “If God knows what’s going to happen, that would mean that things are predestined to happen. And if events are predestined, his coddled bipedal creatures would lack free will. I know for certain that God loves Him some Free Will. He has apparently baked it into the very nature of his creatures—or so C.S. Lewis told me the other day over a game of five-card stud. So God can’t know what these two youngsters will do. I’ve got a sure thing.”

One year later, the kid from Compton, we’ll call him Kent, is working for Ma Bell as a telephone installer. The cow-milking girl from Bellingham, we’ll call her Marie, has her life upended when Stokely’s, the company Marie’s father works for, closes up its plant in Bellingham and moves the company, along with Marie and her parents, to Albany, Oregon. That puts Marie 225 miles closer to Kent in Compton, and God’s chances improve slightly. The Amboy Oddsmaker is not worried.

Fast forward to 1961. Kent is still in Compton, but Marie has graduated from high school and moves from Albany down the freeway to the University of Oregon in Eugene. Marie is now a college student and fifty miles closer to Kent, and God’s chances improve slightly again. The Amboy Oddsmaker is getting a bit worried. “But really,” he thinks. “Marie is in Eugene, Oregon, and Kent is in Compton, California. What are the odds? Fugettaboutit!”

Kent is looking for a college to attend when one of his bowling buddies, Red, goes on a bowling/gambling trip up the Coast. On a whim, Red drops by the bowling alley in the basement of the Student Union of the University of Oregon. When Red gets back to Compton, he tells Kent that the UO has a bowling team.

“Hmm,” Kent thinks. “Sounds interesting.” So Kent writes the team’s coach, Lou Bellissimo, and promises that he will bowl on the UO bowling team if Bellissimo will guarantee him a job at the bowling alley. Kent is a hotshot bowler in LA, so Bellissimo says, “Sure. Come on up.”

Kent hops in his car and drives up the Coast to Eugene, where he rents an old lady’s unfinished basement for fifteen bucks a month. Kent and Marie are now within one mile of one another, and God’s chances, though still slim, have improved a great deal. “There are 8,000 students on campus,” the angel from Perth Amboy thinks. “What are the odds?”

On a whim, Kent attends the Hello dance at the student union building. He’s holding up the wall (only feet from where Belushi, 17 years later, got into a food fight in “Animal House”) when he looks across the room and spots a cluster of four girls, one of whom is Marie. Kent approaches the group. The Amboy Oddsmaker, looking down on the scene, is beginning to sweat. The odds are one in four that Kent will choose Marie to dance. Then who knows what will happen?

Kent stands awkwardly outside the group until finally one girl looks up. It’s Marie! The odds are still much against these two marrying, but the angel from Perth Amboy is definitely worried now.

Kent and Marie dance and talk that night and twelve months later, after a few hitches in their courtship (Kent is called back into the Army because of the Berlin Crisis), they are married in a small ceremony in Marie’s parents’ living room in Albany, Oregon.

“You’re one unbelievably lucky Divine Being,” the oddsmaker says as he dumps 20 wheelbarrows full of shekels in front of God, who plans to use the money to build off-leash playgrounds for the dogs that make it to Heaven—which is all of them, of course.

Endnote: You probably suspected that the human story I told above actually happened. Of course, you’re right. At one point, the odds were astronomical that Kent and Marie would meet and marry.

Thus, it’s not surprising that many lovers look back at the train of events that led to their meeting and conclude that the invisible hand of Fate led them to one another.

Similarly, Christians sometimes attribute a providential chain of events as evidence of God’s influence. God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, so the aphorism goes.

I suspect the answer is something more mundane. Let’s take one fork in the road that led to Marie and Kent finding one another. Around 1940 or so (Kent was two, Marie wasn’t born yet), the oil fields in Oklahoma began to dry up. As a result, a roughneck, George Forrester, had to uproot his wife and kid (that was me) and move to Los Angeles, where the Signal Hill oil fields were booming. Thus, one fork in the path that led to the marriage of Kent and Marie depended upon the state of the oil deposits in Oklahoma. What a world.

Roll a pebble down a mountainside. At the top, it’s virtually impossible to predict the path of the pebble. How it glances off each pebble on its way down is dependent on speed, humidity, temperature, wind velocity, and so on. And each ricochet influences how the pebble ricochets off the next pebble. And so on down the mountain. I read somewhere that a computer would have to be the size of the Earth to be able to predict the path of that pebble. Of course, it has to land somewhere. But where it lands, like the marriage of Marie and Kent, looks miraculous when you look back at the path it took. Kent and Marie, unlike the pebble, may have had free will, but they didn’t know what they were moving toward (a marriage in Marie’s living room), so each choice along the way was blind to the marriage that awaited them.

When I told my granddaughter that Marie and I wouldn’t have met if I had chosen a non-Marie from the four girls at the dance, she said, “That means I would go, poof! and disappear.”