Random Faith

Fate seems to always be in the way. I've had my printer for more than a year and never had a problem with it until last night. I went to print the first ten chapters of the Novel and after a half hour I'd only managed to print four pages. Suddenly my printer developed the most remarkable excuses for not working - some things I'd never even seen before. I don't know the rhyme and I can't fathom the reason, but I turned off the computer and called it a night.

How long would you wait at a stop light? If the light didn't turn green in like a minute or two, would you assume that it was broken? Would you try to drive ahead or just keep waiting? I was pondering this the other day and thinking how fast our world has become that suddenly two minutes seems a lifetime. We have faith in the outcome of an electronic switch changing the light color for us, but even that faith is shallow. How much more patient are we for the Word of the Lord? If we don't understand our path, how long will we stay on it? God has been trying to teach me patience for thirty six years and I have yet to learn it. Fortunately for us all, God is outside time.

My sci-fi theory of time is that time and space were created at the same moment. Just as we don't know the far edge of the universe, we don't know the far edge of time. But if time zero (Greenwich Mean Time for the entire universe) is out at the edge of the universe because that material was created in the very first moment of the universe, then we are somewhere in the middle. Someone standing outside of the universe could see the entire universe as a giant map with concentric circles of time - oldest on the edge to youngest in the middle. Time travel, as we know it, wouldn't really need to exist. In each place, in each locale, time would be local - today. But looking in any direction away from the local you would see yesterday. And if you could somehow jump ahead of the natural movement of space, you would blast yourself into tomorrow (you'd be local time whereever you stopped, but where you just left would be in the future). So, there is no movement in time. Time already exists. Its past is there. Its present is there. Its future is there. We just move through it. But standing outside of it, you could see it all unfold without it having any effect on you.

The problem with this theory, of course, is that it smacks of fate and lack of free will. So it creates the paradox. How can we be free to do whatever we want and yet still be subject to God's will? God grants us salvation by grace and yet, technically, we've already received grace or haven't received grace no matter what we do or don't do in our lifetimes. We're free to do what we want, but what we've done has already been seen. To put it another way, we're all free to make our own choices and yet God somehow arranges for us to meet our soul mates. How does He do this if He can't directly manipulate any of us?

As an author I know how complicated it is to set up a plot point hundreds of pages in advance. Seemingly random bits of conversation or actions that a character does, that is perfectly in keeping with their character, suddenly comes back to have a huge impact 20 chapters later. But I've manipulated the action. I've set the plan in motion. How, then, does The Author do this, not just for my story, but for the stories of all 6 billion of us on this planet? You know how complicated it is to keep track of everyone in the movie Crash or any of Altman's multi-character films? Imagine trying to keep track of that on a planetary scale. Now imagine trying to be the author of it all, and not just for one day, but for eternity.

Some say that not seeing God act on a daily basis is evidence that He doesn't exist. There are no modern equivalents of burning bushes or parting seas, they say, therefore those stories must be just that - stories. But look around you at the complexity of modern life and tell me how this whole crazy thing doesn't just fly apart or implode?

And remember, God doesn't just know how the universe works and what each one of us ate for breakfast and who is going to win the World Series next year, God also knows the number of hairs on your head - the names of all the fish in the sea - the amount of grains of sand in the Sahara desert (though I imagine He might have to call up His accounting department for that last one and get the latest figure ;) We can't begin to fathom God.