We’ll be having a “special report” soon on miracles, but before we do, it’s interesting to note some of the subtler ways in which the supernatural intervenes.

One manner: having you and those around you in the right place at the right time. How many times has help or comfort come to you in that fashion?

Call them the “subtly miraculous.”

A five-year-old kid falls into a creek, unable to swim, but fishermen happen to have just thrown in lines across the way and were able to point to where the boy sank out of view in murky water, allowing a car with passerby who just happened to know the kid to stop and  jump in and find the boy underwater while a woman passing arond the same time happened to know CPR. The boy is saved.

This was an actual case in Decatur, Illinois.

Or the nefarious is exposed in surprising fashion.

Case in point: in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a woman named Colleen Jacobsen, who was a roving bank teller, filling in at branches where she was needed.

Colleen had just found a permanent position and was in her last week of roving, heading off for a branch.

It was March 30, 2000. A woman came in, asking her to cash a check.

When Coleen glanced at it, she noticed that it has the same design as her own personal checks.

A split second later, Coleen saw that her name and that of her husband were on it.

The stranger was trying to cash one of their checks!

The odds of this occurring are not what you would call high: A roving bank teller who just happens to be substituting in at a branch where the second or third customer she waits on that day (the line was long) turns out to be a thief who had robbed her!

Come to learn, the Jacobsens’ mailman had not been able to fit a box of new checks in the slot of their front door and so had left them at the doorstep, with the thief apparently happening by and spotting it.

“I was somewhat flustered,” recounted Colleen –who was trying to buy time–to stall–so she could summon help. She told the woman there was “a little trouble with the computer” and meanwhile summoned security.

The woman left, suspecting something was up, and the guard ran after her.

The thief (after a struggle) was arrested. Justice serbed. Checls returned.

Odds?

Pretty hard to calculate.

Jimmy the Greek would have loved it.

From what we can tell, there are at least 53 branches in Lancaster and 18 different banks.