As you can imagine, I don't believe in signs. I mean, I believe in street signs. They help. I don't believe in signs as intended as some sort of message from a higher authority, like God or the Universe, that is trying to tell us something.
What people call signs are nothing more than coincidences. And when you think about it, coincidences are nothing more than our own interpretation to random and unrelated events. The exact same sequence of events would mean something completely different (or nothing at all) to another person. In other words, it's all in our head.
I remember, years ago, I used to work at Sainsbury's. I didn't like that job very much. One cold winter morning I got off the bus in the city centre and I was feeling a bit down. Walking towards the store, an advertisement caught my eye. It was an ad for an investment company called Scottish Widows. It said "Look at the future with confidence", and it did cheer me up.
Some people might've seen that ad as some sort of sign, but I wonder, if instead of going to work I had a fun morning ahead of me, like coffee and muffin at Pret a Manger first, and then a couple of hours of book browsing at Waterstones (yes, that's my idea of a fun morning), would I have noticed that Scottish Widows ad in the first place? Probably not.
We are surrounded by images and events, lots of them, all the time, and our subconscious selects certain ones at particular times for particular reasons. It's a bit like that famous Rorschach test. When exposed to meaningless inkblots on a piece of paper, different people see different things. In a way, the whole world around us is a Rorschach test.
So actually, what some people call signs, you can say that they are messages. It's just that instead of coming from an omniscient, supernatural being, they come from our own subconscious, that is trying to tell us something.
(Our conscious and our subconscious don't really talk much to each other, do they? They must've had a falling out in the past. If they were still friends, our lives would be so much easier. Although that would make shrinks unemployed.)
I'll give you another example. Years ago I was chatting with a Protestant minister. He told me he was in touch with another minister who was doing missionary work in a small village in Romania, and he said he wanted to send this guy a present.
At first he didn't know what to get him, but then he said that a few days earlier God had told him to buy that guy a cow. (His own words.) I let it slide. I usually don't challenge religious people. Live and let live. (Unless they're being really argumentative, in which case I'm more than happy to give them an argument.)
Anyway, when he said that, I don't think he meant that he heard a voice in his head (although I wouldn't rule it out completely). Most likely he saw or heard something on tv or somewhere else, and something clicked in his brain.
But my point is, if he had come across an ad for a sex toy (I'm not sure they run that sort of ads in evangelical literature, though), would he have seen that as a sign from God that that was the appropriate gift? I doubt it. Although I bet the minister's wife would've enjoyed that gift much better than a stupid cow. (Where do you buy a cow, btw? Do they sell them on Amazon?)
Like I said, it's all in our head. So (and I'm speaking from personal experience here), next time you're food shopping and a box of doughnuts seems to stand out and it almost seems to be calling out your name, that's not a sign. You're just a greedy bastard.
