What's a Godwink?

1. An event seemingly coincidental, but coming from divine origin.
2. Another word for answered prayer.

A few years ago, a word came into my consciousness … Godwink. It was friendly, like “Godspeed” or “Godsend.”

But, was that the word my wife Louise and I were looking for?

[split]

We had spent six months talking to friends and others, searching for an answer to the question, “What do you call a coincidence that isn’t a coincidence?”

That question had kept coming up as I interviewed people for a book about those amazing little things that happen to all of us… like the phone ringing and it’s the very person you were just talking about, calling for the first time in years.

So... was “Godwink” that word? 

The dictionary defines a “coincidence” as “a remarkable concurrence of events without an apparent cause.” Yet, that definition certainly didn't describe the circumstances that we were encountering. A concurrence of events… yes … but the word we were seeking DOES have a cause … and that cause is divine.

The moment I sat down with my manuscript and began replacing every reference to “coincidence” with “Godwink” we knew it fit … next, it went quickly into the language, and, to our surprise, a new word was born, filling a vacancy in English.  

Later we learned that, because there’s no word in our language for “answered prayer”, our readers began saying, “I just had a Godwink.” next we discovered that in Hebrew the word “coincidence” doesn’t even exist. “God is sovereign… so the term is useless,” a rabbi told us.