Some things in life get chosen for you.
When you’re a child you have very little say in decisions that are made about your life. Such as the food that gets put on your plate to eat at night. The school you attend. Or where you live.
The ramifications for such decisions are sometimes large, sometimes not.
The food you eat becomes what your palette then determines as ‘normal’. Where you go to school dictates the values you develop and the information and perspectives you take on board subconsciously.
Where you live determines a whole host of things, including which sport teams you feel obligated to support, regardless of how good they may or may not be.
Depending on where you lived, at whatever age like me you may have realised that your local football team – Parramatta for me – was destined for repeat failure. This is probably one of the reason why I never watch NRL.
Such realisations can lead to a range of responses. (In the case of Parramatta, probably time to move elsewhere)
In the case of schooling, it can help us to keep our eyes and ears more open to what information is placed in front of us as truth and think about the potential biases and angles from which ideas are being presented – or not presented, as the case may be.
Following this, we can choose to agree with these ideas or choose to challenge them.
Some things in life get chosen for you. But not everything does.
But what about with God?
How much choice do we have when it comes to the things of God and our spiritual lives? How much autonomy do I have and how much is dictated by an all-powerful God?
These questions have been wrestled with across the ages so I am hardly expecting to write anything new or earthshattering in a 500-word post. Still, the questions are worth asking.
If God has numbered my days, should I even bother to make plans? If God has determined the times and seasons for me, should I even bother praying for his guidance? Will not it just happen as he has planned?
Well, yes and no. Yes, because he’s a sovereign God. No, because he has given me, a human being, the ability to think and reason and act.
His sovereignty works in with my activity. How this operates is, in some senses, quite logical and simple. Yet, when one tries to understand how it is completely in lockstep, it’s a little more difficult. We have to accept our humble human limitations and declare God to be God and us, not.
We trust, we pray, we ask for guidance, and request that we’ll make choices that are in step with His plans. After that, we step out in faith.
And as we do, we find that miracles occur. God opens doors we never could. God guides us to places we’d never think of going. God allows possibilities to unfold that we could never imagine.
And who knows, God might even allow Parramatta to make it into a Grand Final again one day.
Well, He will, if it’s in His sovereign plan.
Yours asking for miracles,
Alison
