Chance. Or mystery?

Almost everyone knows the name John Wilkes Booth, hardly a soul has heard of his brother, Edwin Booth.

A Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth married in 1860. His wife died three years later. She was twenty-three. He was twenty-six.

A year later standing on a train platform, waiting to board a train, the crowd surged forward wedging a young man standing beside Booth against the train car – the train lurched forward leaving the young man trapped, feet dangling in the air in the gap between the platform and the car.

Grabbing his coat collar, pulling him back up onto the platform, Booth saved him.

Staring at Booth’s face, recognizing him, the young man thanked him.

Booth didn’t know the young man’s name until he got a letter from a friend, working with the young man on Ulysses Grant’s staff, thanking him for saving Robert Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s son.

A year later Booth’s younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Fleeing, John Wilkes Booth was killed by Union soldiers, buried in a secret grave.

In 1869 Edwin Booth asked President Andrew Johnson for his brother’s remains, buried him in a graveyard in Maryland where they’d grown up.

Booth remarried. His second wife died twelve years later.

In 1909 the editor of The Century Magazine asked Robert Lincoln if the story about Edwin Booth saving his life was true – Lincoln wrote back, Yes. Told him what had happened.

History is full of strange stories.

One Booth brother killed Abraham Lincoln while another saved Lincoln’s son.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were friends, then fought against each other for years, then burying the hatchet became friends again – both died on the same day, July 4, 1826.

Some people, hearing stories like that, seeing coincidences, chance at work, shrug, move on.

But others, faith whispering gifts of kindness – like Edwin Booth saving Lincoln’s son’s life – don’t happen by chance, see profound mysteries.