There's No Such Thing As Coincidence

I really believe this.

I don't believe there exists some giant male figure in the clouds (insert flowing white robes and beard here) who decides how justice will be handed down, or what rewards to give out.
I similarly don't believe in a little red man with a forked tail and a pitch fork stoking the fires of his domain (hell:  something else I don't believe in) and cackling viciously every time we make mistakes.
There are a lot of other things I don't believe in (like the Bogeyman) and many things I do (like miracles), but the universal law I believe in more than anything is that everything happens for a reason, which means, consequently, that there's no such thing as a coincidence.

I began this blog several months ago with the title "Life Can Be Trying" in an effort to let go of the stress that I was feeling about trying to accomplish so many things that are so important to me but that felt so out of reach.
The blog, among other things, helped me let go of pushing and struggling to reach these goals and just work hard and believe that if what I wanted was truly good for me, it would come.
Lo and behold, I sit here now with a firm deadline to graduate, confirmed by my advisor just today, with a baby in my belly, with the ability to stay at home and work on the things that are most important to me because my husband has a good job that supports us, with a solid lead on my application to the one graduate school which I aim to attend, and with a clarity to see the people around me as I never have before.  The minute I stopped pushing and started accepting, took off the blinders and began utilizing my vision in its entirety, everything changed.

I know that life will continue to be trying.  I also know that I will continue to face the challenges before me because I know that I have placed them there for some reason.
It is science, not religion, that teaches us Chaos Theory (that there is an underlying order to apparently random data), and Newton's Law of Motion (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction).
How then, do we not apply this to our everyday lives?
We should.
The sooner we believe that everything we do means something, the sooner we become more conscious of each action we take.  And the sooner we begin to take more and better action.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt