Effects,prayer, wishes

You wonder whether you have an effect. Whether anything you say has an effect. Two weeks ago I filled in one of those surveys having bought something from Shoppers Drug Mart. I noted that I couldn’t find my favourite toasted coconut marshmallows snacks and I also said something about looking for special sale items.

Guess what last week there they were on sale, a rack full of them by the cash desks. Did my comment have an effect? Difficult to say. Lin Yutang, a Chinese philosopher who studied and published in the US has a number of books I read the most well known being the Importance of Living. In it is a chapter called if my memory is correct "Why I am not a Christian." Although from a strongly Christian family the death of his mother had a depe effect on him. While an aunt prayed that it would not rain at the funeral for his mother and it didn't, he could not believe that a God would be interested enought to do such a thing.

Yet Edwrad Lorenz, a weather modeller and father of chaos theory, formulated that complex systems behaviour can be modelled with very simple equations and minor variations can produce wildly varying results. Philip Merilees later concocted Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? I wonder if we can say that an individual's prayer can be paralleled here. Perhaps it is less a matter of ciritical mass and more about timing and being part of the same connected system?