Mixed Moss

Everybody likes freedom. Or if not, then the US was founded by some pretty confused people (which I suppose, considering that slavery was still extant some eighty or ninety years later, is arguable).

My buddy Steve posted on the “Uncharted” section of his blog a simple question: “Do you think there is one person we are “meant” to spend the rest of our lives with, or do you think there are many people, and we just have to eventually choose one?”

Blog threads being what they are, this inevitably wound up on the grounds of the free-will vs. predestination debate. A debate on which I have enough to say that I thought it deserved its own post, instead of just commenting on Steve’s blog. So here it is. Seminary-educated people, feel free to weigh in, here! I know some people who get so hung up on this issue that they are paralyzed, and can’t seem to decide whether they want to believe all of this Christian stuff or not. That’s no good. That’s why I’ve thought about it so much, and that’s why I have so much to say. My answer to this question might initially seem like a cop-out, but really I don’t think it is, so stay with me here.

Is it free-will? Is it predestination? I think it’s a combination of the two. It’s just something so mysterious that we’ll never be able to fully get it. In physics and chemistry, they say that electrons are both a particle and a wave. They have atributes of both, and sometimes behave like one, sometimes behave like another. The term for this is “particle-wave duality.” There is a big fancy kind of math that scientists use to try to describe this, called “wave mechanics.” I think that is what life is like for us. It’s a duality, of sorts. And like wave mechanics, I will probably never understand how it works. But, I’m ok with that. I can still live my life out, in all its day-to-day details and decisions, without understanding. I take particle-wave duality on faith. I can take free-will vs. predestination on faith, too, and not knowing the answer to which it is doesn’t stop me from living out my life and making Godly decisions.

Besides, what is the point of asking if God knows what’s going to happen before it happens, when God started time to begin with and will end it at some point? God is outside time.

Look, what we know of as scientific laws, things like gravity and entropy, aren’t actually laws at all; they are just a series of observed events. There’s nothing except probability and statistics to say that things won’t change next time. The real laws, the ones God set in place before time began (deep magic from the dawn of time?) haven’t all been revealed to us. We’re trying to look at the clock and figure out what makes its hands turn by looking at things from the outside. Ain’t never gonna happen. We’re finite. We don’t get it yet. It could be cogs and wheels and gears, or it could be fairy magic. And when you think about it, it doesn’t make a great difference to you or me which it is. 

So, what do those “real” laws look like? I don’t know. But I can tell you what one of them is: when there is sin, there will be death. Yep, God was pretty clear about that one. He created the law, and he’s bound to obey it just as much as we are.

I think that to God, time truly is the fourth dimension. And just as we can move through, manipulate objects in, and transcend the three dimensions in which we live, I’m willing to bet that God is not bound by that fourth dimension. So these questions we’re asking make sense to us, but if only we could understand the real laws of the universe, see the whole picture, I bet we’d see that we’re asking the wrong questions based on an incomplete understanding of the universe. The questions are pretty unsophisticated and meaningless.

This kind of understanding of things is the only thing that has gotten me through the real faith-testers in life; the tough questions like, why did my Mom get cancer? Why did a friend of mine develop muscular dystrophy as a child, before she had really had any opportunity to even do anything wrong, and pass away before her eighteenth birthday? Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s ok not to know the answer to these questions. Life is a journey that each soul is on, to fully develop and fully become the beautiful thing God has created it to become. Sometimes pain is a part of that journey. I don’t understand that. But I know three things: God is at work. God is good. And God is bigger and grander than we could possibly imagine; bigger than the biggest mountain range could ever indicate; grander than the most exquisite cathedral could ever put us in mind of.

Someday, we’ll have all our questions answered…until then, faith like a child, baby! Faith like a child.