Dear Good Shepherd and friends, Let me begin with a statement that I've thought for years now, but am always a bit timid to confess. I just don't want to step on toes. But, here it is: too often our theologies and our ideas of God are too neat and too comfortable. Our natural human desire is for order and structure in life. We want life to make sense. We want our existence and this world to operate according to understandable and predictable laws. We want some degree of certainty that we are not at the mercy of randomness. Yet, at the same time, if we believe modern science, it tells us that our world and our existence is the result of a random occurrence. Things happened to shuffle together in just the right ways to result in the possibility of our existence. And it seems that most of our lives play out the ongoing trajectory of randomness. Yet, and ironically, we are always trying to provide some order and predictability to what we've deemed is random. We apply scient...
Forces outside of ourselves shape our lives. We are never independent writers of our own stories. But we can be attentive to what story writes us.