Now for some random thoughts. I had a deep conversation with someone this week, where they were looking for hope in their current life by reaching for the “Things happen for a reason” rationale. This is the “this must be good for me, it will all make sense in the long run” rationale. “God has this in His [sic] plan” is often the unspoken root phrase, coming to us from multiple sources over generations/eons. I gently lead you to the title of this blog. No they don’t. Things don’t happen for a reason, they simply happen.
We can see that sometimes there is a line of agency, like a domino set up where if one pushes, the others fall in perfect time. I’ve seen amazing live sculptures of coloured domino-like blocks and it is incredible to watch. The reason they work is that each block is the same shape in a carefully placed relationship to the other blocks, the same room and conditions, and more. That’s not life. Our lives are not neatly shaped blocks in a carefully designed context, 99% the same as the life next to us. Not only did God not design us that way, God has no time for such seamless conformity in our world. Justice and love demand moment by moment interpretation and a behaviour right now which might be different than yesterday and might not be the same as tomorrow.
We can, when we look back, see that the consequence of a Thing Happening was that we learned something momentous. We can see that we changed to be more hopeful or more confident or more aware from that Thing. That’s fabulous. But the Thing wasn’t designed for us for that particular learning. It simply happened. We could have been the agent or the victim in the situation. A Thing caused an action, a response happened, a difficult thought happened, hard words were said, laughter had. Whatever. God’s plan is not a day to day agenda which we are simply actors on God’s strings. We’re created for wisdom and love and analysis and relationship. We’re made to look deeply at or into the Thing, to see what is happening and to use our gut to decide what to do – this time. We may have experience to bear on it and help us to move in it and celebrate the learning.
Mostly, the Things which happen to us are beyond our control. Some other person decided something rational or not, some institution has become unworkable, some situation blew out of all proportion and gathered us in. Knowing this, we can refine how we respond to the Thing by focussing on only that which we can do. I’ve written about not feeling in control before.
But what about tomorrow? Can we hope? Will life ever be simple? No, life will never be simple. That’s just how it is. We humans are complex, the life around us is not simple, the systems around us are not neat. We can hope that everything will be kind and more loving and we can behave as if it already is. We can chose to see Things as simply things, not things brought to teach us some divine lesson. They happen. Our reaction to them is where we gain our lives and our hope and our courage.
Things don’t happen for a reason. They happen. We respond in hope and courage.
The picture below is a sermon preparation, with drawings interpreting the scripture readings. My summary was that we are held in love to be as angry or loving as we like. We are not operated like robots; we are held, lovingly, as we are intensely, complexly and randomly human.
