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What Are the Odds?
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.”
Published in General
Mrs. Rodin and I were born in the same hospital 1236 days apart. Her family stayed on the West Coast while my family moved to the East Coast. Mine was a journey north and east and then south and west. But eventually I made it back to the West Coast. So we could have been the object of the bet, as well.
And that’s how you ended up in Oregon in retirement.
What kind of business was Stokley’s? I don’t remember the name.
My pre-wife and I lived about 6 miles apart in Maryland after my family moved to about 5 other cities. Our mothers met through a common friend and were members of the same Flower club. Eventually, I met her older brother and we worked together mowing lawns in the summer. I had a car that we used to carry the mowers around. After work, we would go to get ice cream and if she was good, Gail could come along in the back seat. Pretty quickly, her brother moved to the back seat and eventually out. That was the start, and we have been dating, engaged or married since she was 15.
Delightful story Kent.
Al, it’s actually Stokely Van Camp. Sorry. They now produce Gatorade. At the time, they bought produce from farmers and canned it.
Kent
Great story. I often wonder at the many chance things that happened to bring my wife and I together. There is a blessing in there somewhere.
I have four inflection points in my life where things would been very different if I’d chosen a different option.
1: Transferring colleges after my freshman year from a small private college in Ohio to a largish public school in Wisconsin. If I’d stayed at the small school I would have had a very different employment path that would never have led to where I am now.
2: Moving to Alaska after graduation instead of the typical “get a job” path. (and then moving back again 6 months later when things didn’t work out so great).
3: Leaving my State of Wisconsin government job for the private sector after 7 years instead of remaining a government employee my whole life.
4: There’s a far too long story behind this, but buying full-season tickets to the Milwaukee Brewers: if I’d only bought partial season tickets, or bought seats in a different section, I never would have met and become friends with the people who sat next to me and eventually introduced me to my wife. And there is *no way* our paths (the friends, or the wife) would ever have crossed otherwise.
It actually goes slightly beyond that.
I had full season tickets, not partial season. Since I was young and single with not a lot else to do, I went to (virtually) every game. I was going to 75-80 games/year back then. That included April night games when it was about 30 degrees out and the “crowd” consisted of about 1500 people huddled under blankets (this was all pre-Miller Park). So I learned to bring stuff along and be prepared. If I’d had the partial season ticket, I’d have been much more inclined to skip games when the weather was cold.
One particular night, the weather started out pleasantly enough, then the wind shifted off the lake around 7:30 or so. And the temperature dropped fast. The couple sitting across the aisle from me was in shorts. I had my duffle bag with a blanket in it, so I lent it to them. We got to talking. A week or so later (They had a twenty game ticket package) they were there again, and we talked some more. We became friends (I even spent one Christmas Eve at their house when all of my family was out of town). About four years later they set me up on two different dates. The first one didn’t go well. They second became my wife.
If I had skipped that game, or hadn’t been prepped enough to have the blanket with me, I probably never would have started talking to those people.
Pure dumb luck.
A very sweet and creative story, Kent. The only trouble you create for yourself when G-d is involved is that you seem to always want to be able to figure out exactly when and how G-d intervenes or simply influences. When you figure out how to read G-d’s mind, let me know!
My life hinged on a hornet bite. I was bit the summer before I was to start kindergarten. The hornet went down the back of my shirt and bit me repeatedly as l ran home. That fall my dad took me to kindergarten and in a tree near the entrance to the school was a hornet nest. The bugs would dive bomb us as we entered. Every day I would cry. After several weeks the teacher told my dad that I was too immature and to come back in a year. My mother was 9 months pregnant with my brother and needed the time off from dealing with me. She told my dad to take me to the Catholic School which he did. The problem was they didn’t have kindergarten so he enrolled in first grade. That may not seem like much but it had many consequences for the future. I will not go into them but I am sure you can imagine them.
Uh-oh. You probably should’ve stopped before you got to this part. Stick with Fate or Providence in any circumstance Marie could read it or hear it. /-:
My Dad was transferred to Oklahoma the summer before my High school Jr year by the Rock Island railroad. So I was in town in time to attend a Junior Republicans meeting at the home of our family doctor. I have no memory of who might have invited me. Actually I don’t remember much of that day except being dazzled by the future Mrs. OS. And that her very Democrat mother was not happy about her being there OR dating a Republican! We will celebrate 50 years of marriage August 3rd.
BTW I believe that God knew all that would be done beforehand. I do not believe that foreknowledge equals predestination. They are very different things IMO.
@kentforrester – I forgot to say in my initial comment that I like your analogy of the pebble going down a hill. As far as needing a computer as large as the world to predict its path (mentioned in another comment), I suspect Gd has at least one.
Kent, this statement is what I was referring to. You assume that the steps you both took were only based on circumstances. I assumed from that you were saying that those circumstances are what determined your lives together. I’m saying that you really don’t know that, couldn’t know that, because you can’t read G-d’s mind. Although you present an overview of the steps that brought you together, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions that might have been influenced by outside forces that might have ultimately affected your decision. Maybe it’s a matter of faith.
For example, I frequently get ideas for posts when I meditate. (Yea,meditate, not mediate!) You could say that I’ve simply settled down enough for the idea to emerge; or it’s just intuition. There’s a certain quality to those ideas, though, that make me think I’ve been “inspired.” I can’t prove it. G-d doesn’t talk to me; I don’t hear voices. But I almost always find they are good ideas to write about.
There’s a lot about my finding Ricochet that I feel had more to do with guidance than only my own choices. But that’s another story. Sorry if what I said sounded like an accusation. I’d prefer that if I accuse you of something that there’d be no doubt! ;-)
I have no trouble believing that an Omniscient God could know everything past present and future but chooses not to determine everything, in other words gives us the ability to choose our own path. If He didn’t do that we would be unable to choose whether to worship Him or not and our worship would lose meaning.
What has given me pause is how He could have an overall plan that isn’t defeated by our free choice. But I’ve come to believe that He is also wise enough to work His plan to its eventual end regardless of whether we follow His will in every curve and turn of events, otherwise His plan would have been defeated long ago. So is the final outdone predestined? I believe so. But all the details? I believe not.
Scripture says that Believers are predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son but that doesn’t mean that every step we take must be predetermined, just that the eventual end, and that process, I believe, is finished at physical death. None of us reaches the end of that journey in this world though some get closer than others. If He is as far above me as I believe He is He is capable of more than I can even comprehend but it is interesting to make the attempt.
I do believe in serendipity and that the choices we make are important as they work together to largely determine our earthly path as well as much of our character composition. And (for this I have only my own opinion) I believe He enjoys watching us choose. You will say, How can he enjoy what He foreknows? For that I have no answer. My mind is not large enough to comprehend His ways, maybe a cop-out.
Kent that is a wonderful response, and I’m so glad that I was able to make myself understood! Yes, it is all a bit mind-boggling. I do love that we can have these discussions on Ricochet and do it in a sincere and caring way.
Psssst! Kent! Your quoting is messed up! You are trying to use dashes, but you just need to click the double-quote button in the editor toolbar. That toggles the quote mode for the paragraph your cursor is in.
The paragraphs you are typing are adding to the quoted section, still indented, as if they are part of the other person’s text. You are adding dashes to try to separate what you are typing from the material above, but you should be removing the indent on your text instead. Look at your comments after they’re posted, and compare to everyone else’s. Original text of your comment should be undented and full size, while quoted material is indented, has an extra left-hand vertical bar, and is in a smaller font. Use the toolbar button with the double-quote symbol to control this (four spots to the right of the button for bold).
Ah, I’m beginning to see the light. I was looking for incorrect quoting in my post, not in my comments. My bad. I’m curious to see if this works when I hit the Comment button. Thanks for your help.
Good job! And good coaching from @philturmel!
I have no problem believing two seemingly totally contradictory things at the same time. Maybe they only seem contradictory to me because I don’t have the mind of the Creator.
Free will? Predestination? I acknowledge His omnipotence, His omniscience, ergo foreordination of all things. Then I make my choices as best I can and don’t worry about it. Did He cause me to want to make that choice? It causes me no anxiety.
Romans 8:28 is a powerful comfort.
I remember the baked beans. Now apparently just Van Camp.
I probably have the name not quite right, @kentforrester, but there is a fantastic little film called “Everything Almost Didn’t Happen.”
The film opens on a gruesome crime scene–several teens slaughtered in a grocery store robbery in a small town. We go back a few hours as various local teens plan for their evening’s activities. Naturally, we see a couple of the victims deciding to go or not go to this or that place, and stop or not stop at the grocery store. Not the first film, obviously, to jump back in time to study the ironies of what led someone to be on the plane that down, or in the bank when it got robbed, and so on.
But wait! Suddenly we see someone who was a bloody victim in the opening scene going off in a different direction–definitely not heading towards the grocery store. What’s going on? So who did get murdered?
That’s the thing about ironies, eh? They’re so ironic as to be unpredictable.
Kent–if you track down the film, please give us your take.