Unpredicatable
Unpredicatable
When I was eleven years old, my family attended a local denominational church. I’ll concede that I was not the most attentive person in the building — partly because of my age and partly because I never identified with their doctrine — but I made the best of my time there.
The problem with church, or any other “family” setting, is that you have to figure out how to entertain all those pesky kids while the adults spend meaningful time in their own gathering. What they didn’t realize was that we kids were perfectly able of entertaining ourselves.
My friend, Jimmy, and I spent an incredibly boring hour every Sunday morning, sitting at the back of a large Sunday school class while well-meaning but clueless adults struggled to instill their worldview in us. Some Sundays, one of us would sneak in a comic book. Many Sundays, we would sit in the back of the room discretely shooting craps with a small pair of dice that Jimmy always carried.
We were just two normal kids with a lack of interest in what the adults wanted us to be interested in, so we made our own happiness. Then one beautiful Sunday morning, after a great game of dice where Jimmy took me for the entire thirty-five cents I was supposed to put in the Sunday School offering, a drunk driver crashed into Jimmy’s family on their way home from church.
Jimmy’s mom, dad, and sister were instantly killed. Jimmy, alone survived but he spent two months in the hospital after which, he was shipped off to St. Lous to live with an aunt and uncle. I never saw Jimmy again. Just like that, life changed.
I love considering all the milestones in life — those occurrences over which we have absolutely no control, but which literally determine the direction of our lives. For most of us, it’s enjoyable to consider the positive milestones, but we rarely allow our minds to dwell on the scary stuff — the unpredictable.
At this point in my life, I see a lot of friends struggling mightily to control circumstances in an effort to make life easier, but the unpredictable is always there. We put our hope in doctors, politicians, theologians, diets, and mind-altering substances but nobody or nothing seems capable of assuring predictability.
Light in the Dark
Lately, a small circle of close friends have begun a weekly group text where one of us shares what we’re thankful for that day. We’re all roughly the same age, give or take a few years. We’ve also all grown experienced at contemplating the unpredictability of life. We’ve each been through some dark times. Yet, there’s still an amazing inventory of stuff to be genuinely thankful about.
Thankfulness doesn’t insulate us from the house of cards we each sit atop but it does remind us that there’s an entity, far larger than our tiny circle of reference, that’s keeping total chaos from reigning and that a huge amount of good has come into each of our lives. If you’re reading this, I am truly thankful that you invested ten minutes of your life to consider my point of view, and I wonder what you’re thankful for right now.
I look forward to a time when you and I can sit down and discuss what we each have to be thankful for in the midst of an unpredictable world.
Let’s talk. I’d really like to hear what you have to say, and it might even give me something to write about. Email me at guy@lawsoncomm.com.
I’ll buy you coffee and we can compare notes. I promise not to steal your ideas without permission.
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.
— Charles Dickens
True Spirituality.
— Francis A. Schaeffer.
This is an old book. In fact, you might have a hard time finding it on Amazon. You will definitely not find it easily in a book store. But once you find it and read it, you will have discovered buried treasure. I first read this book in 1975 and it provided a perspective on life, philosophy, and religion that cut through all the BS and rescued me from the inner tug-of-war. It’s not a book of ideas. It’s a book of life experience.
A meeting of great minds who think alike
