I believe in fate. I believe all people have certain events in their lives that are supposed to happen, thereby defining each individual person. These events can be small and counted only on one hand or they can be large altering situations and can be numerous. Either way, every person has a few in their lives that are supposed to happen.


I once heard of a couple finding out on their wedding day, that the bride’s grandmother and the groom’s grandfather were married a few months before being taken away to a concentration camp during the holocaust. The two were then separated and thought their spouse had died. After being freed after the war, each remarried. Many decades later their (non-related) grandchildren were getting married.


This tells me there is more out there than just coincidence or funny quirks in life but rather a map for what each person is meant to do in order to change someone else’s life. Really how much could chance really have played in bringing together two families that were separated more than half a century ago? These families were brought together by something bigger. A plan, maybe, or a set out map that was destroyed before, and fixed now.


Believing in fate also makes be believe that people meet for a reason. A specific child is born to a specific family for a reason, whether to teach that family acceptance and tolerance, or to make the people in the family stronger. Many times you hear of a sick child, with cancer or something of the sort, bringing a family closer than it ever had been without that sick child. Or a family being given a child who is blessed with some sort of gift. It then becomes up to the families to figure out how to live with such children, and how to grow from their child’s youthful knowledge.


I was once on an airplane flying across the country alone, and I was sitting next to a woman who I struck up a conversation with. She told me that she never had kids and for most of her early adult life lived alone. She started noticing a boy who would sit across the street from her apartment in the lesser wealthy parts on Los Angeles. She eventually started talking to the boy and found out that he had turned 18 and was instantly kicked out of his foster families home. He didn’t really have any place to go and would hang out by the bench looking for someone to give him work. Almost thirty years later, this woman was now flying to California to visit the only person who ever called her “mom”, and the only children that ever called her “grandma”. This woman was blessed with a son, though not biologically hers, she still learned more from him than anyone else she had ever encountered.


Unfortunately not all people can follow the paths that fate has set out for them. Sometimes bigger stronger things get in their way such as the holocaust or smaller less significant things such as ignorance and lack of appreciation stunt the paths people are meant to follow. But as I learned from the story of the wedding, fate eventually triumphs, paving the path it was meant to have paved sooner or later.