What can you say? Can’t argue with providence.

When it comes to performance and feedback, the Amazon Marketplace customer is in a powerful position. You can seriously dent a seller’s credibility with withering feedback. So there’s an unwritten code of ethics that means you don’t rubbish someone else’s business unfairly. Now and again the human dimension of this shines through all the seller’s anxieties about having a good percentage rating. I got the following email from Mary (that’s all I know of her).

Dear Dr Gordon, Due to circumstances entirely beyond my control, I regret that this book is no longer in my possession.(Another Reverend has given it, unknown to me, to an elderly sick friend!)I am very sorry indeed to inconvenience you. Mary.

An email like that leaves me genuinely pleased I’d been disappointed. When I think the book I want has just come into my grasp, God sometimes has other ideas and somebody else needs it more than me!  This is God’s take on socialism, a more equitable distribution of resources, delivered at the point of need! Lesson learned.

What else could you leave on the feedback than excellent! The charm and gift of this email is that it allowed me to pray for folk I don’t know – Mary, bless her for her up front honesty and courtesy, the ‘other Reverend’ for his kindness, and the elderly sick friend that they’ll be blessed by the book God ensured went to the one who needed it most. Who says the internet  is an impersonal electronic web, huh? Or that a cyber-community is an artificially created alternative to real people – clearly not always.

One of my 1980’s culturally sad confessions is that I watched the A Team when our kids were growing up. Never want to see it again – but the cheesy end-line lives on in the memory, and occasionally describes an important theological truth and spiritual response. The theological truth is Providence – the spiritual response is gratitude. And the cheesy line was, ‘I love it when a plan comes together’. And Mary whoever you are, in that diverted book, Someone else’s plan came together – I love it when that happens.

By the way the book I didn’t get was The Spirit of Early Christian Thought – I’d rather live in the Spirit than read about it anyway.