Like a 9-in-a-million chance

Ok, so it's starting to feel like every time we go out somewhere in the city of Chisinau, we see someone we know.  There are 700,000 people living here and we only know about 30 of them, but somehow we keep running into those 30!  For example, over the weekend, we went to a huge festival in the very center of town, and we saw Strider's guitar teacher there. This kind of encounter happens to us a lot.

The festival on Saturday.  See?  A LOT of people!

Today, as another example, I went to visit the tuberculosis kindergarten a few miles from here and Pete headed in the other direction to take Strider to the international school.  While we were out, we BOTH saw someone we knew!  Pete saw one of the Moldovan women we know walking her baby on the sidewalk, and I ran into Andre, one of the other Fulbright professors -- who actually normally lives a few hours away from here!

After talking to Pete and comparing stories, I decided to calculate the chances of this.  Assuming there at least 10,000 people that live in a few mile radius of our neighborhood, and, again, we only know 30 people in the whole city, the probability that I would run into one of the ones I know is conservatively 30/10,000.  And the chances that Pete would see someone else we know is 29/9,999, right?  To calculate the chances of BOTH of us having these encounters at the same time, we multiply those fractions (in probability, "and" means multiply, don't forget!), and we get something close to 9/1,000,000!

These odds make me smile.  Why does God choose to orchestrate our steps so that we would continue to have encounters like this (and not, say, let us win the lottery)?  As I was thinking about it today, I came to the following conclusions: 

 God knows I love 2 things:

1.)  I love the feeling of being "home."  Seeing people I know when I'm out and about certainly helps with that.

and

2.)  I love "small world" stories.

Therefore, I think He lets these things happen just 'cuz He loves me.  

Oh how He loves us!