Do It Your Way, Lord

Good morning after one more hot day this summer. News reports continue to shed light on a terrible accident on I-80 this weekend. Kind of difficult to understand exactly what happened there, but the results are only too plain. The inevitable question is how God can allow this to happen. Is it like the time when Jesus slept in the boat on the Sea of Galilee while the disciples feared for their lives? We know better than that. God is not asleep, and why would we think that He does not know the pain such events cause in this world? Somehow, and I cannot explain how all of this will work out, God is carrying out His plan for His glory and all that seems random to us is in fact in God's control. Faith tells me that one day I will stand in Heaven and hear tale after tale of how, if a certain tragedy had not occurred and caused great pain and grief, this person or that would not be with us in eternity. I look forward to hearing those stories in a place where no anxiety rises up within me when I hear of these accidents.

When we cannot understand the plan behind an event, or perhaps the events all over the planet right now, we must make the choice: evolution has brought the top species on the planet to the point of destroying itself, or, the curse of sin has brought death and destruction into every life and Jesus is our only hope. What kind of choice is that? On the one hand we have no hope except to make it through life and leave this world to eat itself in an orgy of competitive self-destruction, or we get no explanation for what may be the loss of a family in a sudden tragedy. Often I cannot make sense of events in my own life, much less what seems yet another senseless tragedy on the highway. Part of it may be that I cannot see all that needs to be seen in order to understand the plan behind events in this world.

That God has a plan in all of this is a great comfort to me. For the other way is to believe that we have evolved to a point of, well, pointless tragedies. Five people die in two related auto accidents; does that mean that cars are now the dominant life form on the planet? I think I would rather believe in God's way. The curse of sin lies heavy on this world and we are witnesses to it. However, we have a better witness. A witness of hope and joy in Christ. A story of great tragedies before the return of our Savior and Lord, but a story of how this short, painful tragedy that we call life is not God's final word.

Bucky