Over 320 million people. One Google Search. And a Reunion I Still Can't Explain Away.
How a random internet search and a 20-year-old memory made my family question where coincidence ends and providence begins.
Originally published as “An Observation on Faith” on May 24, 2025.
“Do you have an apartment that you rent out on your ranch?”
I asked at the end of a fifteen-minute phone call from my South Nashville desk in the busy office at Groove Life. It was our fourth call in six weeks. We were planning our upcoming trip and video shoot in Colorado. He answered slowly as he processed the question, “Why do you ask?” That started a conversation I’ll remember for the rest of my days.
One Answer to a Crisis of Faith
About this time, my youngest son and I had been reading about the macro-mysteries of a universe with no end and the micro-mysteries of DNA's blueprint in living beings. He’d been having a bit of a struggle with his faith, and somehow, when we are completely overwhelmed with things that we can’t explain, our faith is reignited. So we talked about things we can’t explain.
Something about realizing how small, fragile, and infinitely complex we are awakens the reality that a Creator may be the only solution to our belief problem. It’s like we begin to grasp the truth of an infinite God because of our inability to understand the mysteries of that very Creator. Sometimes the very questions that threaten to destroy our faith may be the only things keeping it alive.
I Found a God Big Enough
The first time I stood below the 18,000-foot mountains of the Wrangell-St. Elias peaks in eastern Alaska, I was face-to-face with the realization that there was nothing I, nor any other human, could do to rival the beauty that stares back at us when we open our eyes to creation. A simple sunset or a newborn baby awakens curiosity and wonder. Creation really does reveal the glory of God, and as Romans Chapter 1 teaches, we are stopped dead in our tracks on our path to find another answer apart from an intelligent designer.
The Call
On the last call before the trip, something made me ask the question. I didn't plan it. The street address landed, and something shifted, something quiet and instinctive. It was the kind of familiarity you feel toward certain people without being able to name why. I'd had that feeling about Ty for a while. I just couldn't trace it back to anything. Until the moment he told me the address.
About eight weeks before the phone conversation, my boss had asked me to scour the internet to find a coach for an episode of an adventure show we were filming. “If possible, I’d like to use someone who works with the Lyle Sankey school.” That was his only request in my random Google search for a coach.
I found a bull-riding trainer who worked with Sankey. Ty Rinaldo of TZ Bucking Bulls in Larkspur, Colorado. Larkspur is a small, out-of-the-way town halfway between Denver and Colorado Springs. It’s one of those towns that seems like it’s just there to bridge the gap. Hardly anyone knows where it is. But “coincidentally,” I did. I actually lived there for a short time, about twenty years ago. “Of all places,” I thought. “Randomly searching for a bull riding trainer, and he happened to live just a few miles from where I started my adult life.”
It took me a couple of tries to get in touch with Ty, but I soon knew that he was the guy we were looking for. Respectful, excited, and animated, he would be perfect for filming this episode. I didn’t think much about going back to Larkspur; time was short, and we were busy. We just spent the next couple of weeks planning the shoot.
“Why do you ask?” Ty said. As soon as he said it, I knew it wasn’t the first time I’d been to TZ Ranch. My wife and I had lived in a temporary home for the first few months after we moved to Larkspur, just after we were married. When we had to find a new home, I came across a short classified ad describing a small studio apartment on a ranch. Julie and I headed out to see if this little apartment would be for us. After three miles of dusty dirt road with twenty-mile-per-hour winds, we arrived at the ranch. We both decided it was too much dust and wind to work for us, but we enjoyed a few minutes with a man named Ty and his wife. They told us about their two boys, and their cowboy-friendly, charismatic hospitality stuck with us.
Twenty years later, a random Google search that could have turned up a trainer anywhere in the 3.8 million square miles we call the United States of America, among the 327 million people who call it home, led us to a man and his 2 boys that we had stood face-to-face with approximately 7,300 days earlier.
“Why do you ask?”
“This is going to be hard to believe, but I’ve been to your house before.” I honestly couldn’t quite get the words out. I was in awe. You can believe what you want about chance, but that was too ridiculous to call anything other than “on purpose.” Two men meeting, with no obvious connection, no common friends or family, and nothing at all to make sense of the mystery. We met again after a chance, short-lived, inconsequential handshake twenty years earlier.
More to the Story
I can’t know God’s full intentions for the 2nd chance meeting. No one can see the full story God is writing of our lives. But I can tell you that probably both Ty and I needed a slap-in-the-face reminder that God hasn’t forgotten us. I needed to remember that the marriage relationship is one of the most sacred (and fragile) gifts on this side of a restored creation. Ty needed to feel the embrace of a heavenly father in the midst of one of the loneliest and most confusing seasons of his life. God still loves to make his care tangible to us with occasional surprises that can’t be written off as chance.
I’m sure there is much more to this story. Only God determines when we get to peer through the window of our finite time-bound barriers to His yet-to-be-seen reality. But it was an honor to glimpse the power of His authorship. Maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t just my youngest son who needed a rekindled faith. Maybe God knew that the boy’s struggle was so that his dad might see the unexplainable mysteries and once again…
BELIEVE.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope and love, abide these three, but the greatest of these is love.
-1 Cor. 13:12-13 (NASB)