Providence vs. Miracles: same difference?

Yeah, it has. It’s just into yours, John, is where the problem lies. :grin:
(I’ve been talking to people about God’s providence and the distinction for decades.)
 

Jesus walked on water. He fed five thousand men with a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish. Miracles. Supernatural. Supernatural miracles.

Paycheck electronic deposit the same day the rent was due. Coincidence. Providence. Five or six coincidences in the order that Maggie had needed, solving or mitigating her problems and relieving her desperation. Providence. Providential miracles.

Timing and placing were the only things that were unusual in the latter cases. Each event in itself was ‘merely’ a ‘coincidence’, But Maggie’s, collectively? Absolutely miraculous, ‘supernatural’ ordering of timing and placing. And that is not to denigrate @Jordan’s experience of ‘simple’ providence, either. (He is not as old as Maggie or I, both of us septuagenarians, not that all Christian seventy somethings have experienced God’s providence as she and I have.)

There is a difference between something physical or ‘natural’ being changed and the results being against the normal order of things – a man walking on water, or the spontaneous generation of food, and one where ‘only’ timing and placing are unusual, unexpected or surprising (or extremely unusual, unexpected, surprising or startling), Jordan’s bank account or the multiple in Maggie’s wonderful sequence (which was way beyond merely improbable).