A lot of my favorite novels feature providence as a theme.

Inserting providence as a noticeable theme in your work can be dicey, because if it’s done poorly, or overdone, it’ll just look like a poorly written piece of slop where unrealistic coincidences abound.

It could also come across as preachy and saccharine and unengaging.

When providence is used well, though, it’s amazing. I’ll use two of my all time favorite classics as examples: The Lord of the Rings and Les Miserables

Les Miserables

If you ever read the unabridged version of Les Miserables, you will be treated, if I’m not mistaken in my memory to a good 50-100 pages worth featuring the Battle of Waterloo (which anniversary, coincidentally, is June 20, the day I’m writing this).

That Battle is entirely unneeded for the plot, apart from two paragraphs or so at the very end, when Thenardier saves the life of George Pontmercy, Marius’s father.

However, the ENTIRE point of the tangent is providence. It’s an amazing piece of writing.

In terms of the novel’s actual plot, my favorite bit of providence, unmarked explicitly as such, is when Jean Valjean and Cosette, running from Javert, take cover in the garden of a convent.

The gardener happens to be a man whose life Jean Valjean saved years before, when he fell beneath the weight of a loaded cart and was being crushed.

Hugo has established what he is doing in the story so masterfully that you know this is not a coincidence. This is providence at work, God leading and protecting Valjean, who is doing his best to live a godly, honest life and is becoming, truly, a fictional saint.

The Lord of the Rings

When I reread The Lord of the Rings in 2016, for the first time in some 12 years, I was astounded by the prominence of providence as a theme, and how beautiful it was. Allow me to paraphrase, pretty closely but maybe not exactly, Gandalf:

“Yet I cannot help but think, Frodo, but that Bilbo was meant somehow to find the Ring, and not by its maker. That means that you, also, were meant to have it, and that is an encouraging thought.”

Gandalf also talks about his belief that (implicitly, through providence) Gollum will have a role to play before the fate of Middle Earth is decided.

Tolkien said, rightly, that The Lord of the Rings is in every sense a Catholic story, and yet, his genius is that the focus is NOT on converting anyone or making a religious point.

You in no way, shape, or form have to be religious in any sense to love Tolkien. He is just telling a story, a wonderful story, that anyone can enjoy, that happens to come from his personal understanding of what the universe is, how it is designed, and how it functions.