Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Miracle at the Temple Gate

While our tour group enters and learns all about the temple in Edfu, Egypt, I sit at the temple gate drinking water, watching people come and go, and quietly praying and singing.

In comes a lovely young couple, she wearing the most beautiful combination of colours and patterns I’ve seen a Muslim woman wear. I watch as he takes pictures of her, then he asks if I could take one of the two of them. I comment on her beautiful outfit; we all agree the whole black get-out many married Muslim wear is sad, hot and ugly. I ask if I can also take a picture of her, and we then get into a long conversation.

Turns out the young man lives a few streets away from our Toronto house! Traveled from Egypt to get his PhD in electrical engineering at University of Toronto (which I also briefly sorta studied at nearby Waterloo University)! He now works for a consulting company my brother has also consulted for, and which my husband's former employer had hired consultants from.

They got married January 6 that year in Egypt, and were awaiting the paperwork for her to join him in Toronto—where she had never been. He took his cellphone/camera back out and in the flash of an eye we were Facebook friends.

Touring the huge Valley of the Kings at various stops on our Nile Cruise, we King’s kids ran into each other FOUR more times. Increasingly astonished, I had my husband snap the photo below for evidence of this encounter number three, taken a day or two after our first.

By our sixth or seventh meeting I simply exclaimed: "Maybe we're all supposed to live together!" And that, my friends, is the gospel truth.


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