God's Favor Resting on his Followers

I heard an interesting teaching a while back, which isn't explicitly biblical, but that doesn't make it untrue.  It is difficult to prove, and may be self fulfilling at the anecdotal level, but still worth examining.  It relates to God's favor, and how it rests on his followers and is shared by them.  Traditionally certain aspects of God's favor and calling have been shared with others through prayer, and direct contact through the laying on of hands.  But can that favor be shared in other ways?

Someone proposed the idea that we can bring that favor to places we go to, or where we do certain things.  The basic claim was that choosing one option over another either led to, or was a result of, God's favor of that option.  If you are travelling, and stop to get something to eat, there are usually multiple fast food options in a given area.  Besides habitual preference, which one do you choose?  And then what happens?  Have you ever showed up at a business that was totally devoid of customers, and gotten served at once?  And then as you were receiving service looked behind you to find that a line had formed?  The intuitive and natural response to that is: "wow, I got here just in time, before it got busy."  But that assumes that you have no effect on the world around you.  Is it possible that your conscious choice to go their affected others and their decisions of timing?  You definitely didn't force them to, as that would violate free will, but what determines which options occur to us or feel favorable at any given moment?

Once you have been conscious of this possibility for a few months, you will observe all sorts of possible applications of it, but each individual one could easily have been a coincidence.  But being familiar with the principles of blind probability, I would be inclined to think not, even accounting for the fact that people usually ignore the number of examples that don't illustrate their point.  But the most extreme case happened to me last week.

I needed to get my car smogged, and had no idea where I should get it done.  I had coupons to two places, but was discouraged from one option by a former employee.  In the same conversation, another option was recommended to me, because the owners went to my church.  I think choosing it for that reason may have magnified the effect, if it exists at all.  The same place was recommended on a random FB feed from an unrelated friend the next day, so I figured that might be a good place to check out.

I showed up without an appointment, late in the afternoon, fully prepared to come back later if I needed a prior appointment, but hoping that I could get it taken care of all at once.  When I arrived there were no other customers there, and the employees were all sitting around waiting for something to do.  When I went inside I realized the owners were a couple who usually sit right next to me at church, but we had never really talked past basic introductions.  Within minutes people started arriving, and their cars were lining up.  By the time my car was finished 15 minutes later, at least eight other customers arrived, some of whom had to be deferred to future appointments since it was late in the afternoon.  I don't claim to have caused that to happen, but it seemed like a pretty solid illustration of that idea of God's favor resting on his followers, if there is any truth to it at all.