Something Greater than Luck! Gandalf tells the dwarves that he has chosen Bilbo to be the fourteenth member of their company so they can avoid the unlucky number of thirteen, but we are not really meant to think this was the reason Bilbo was selected. Tolkien fills The Hobbit with many so-called lucky occurrences. Perhaps the “luckiest” is when Bilbo is crawling about in pitch black tunnels under the Misty Mountains and just happens to put his hand down on the ring. “A magic ring!” the narrator exclaims. “It was hard to believe he really had found one by accident.” Of course, what may have seemed like an accident at the time was something far more than mere luck. Christians have similar experiences in their own lives, where some highly unlikely coincidence may seem at the time like just that – a coincidence. But later, we see it was not a coincidence at all.