Providence

It's easy for me to forget that God is all-powerful. Well, not the fact, so much as all that it entails. It's easy to forget that He sometimes allows, and other times ordains things to happen the way that they do. Whichever the case, as He is both omnipotent and omniscient, nothing happens without His permission. And yet I still forget.

With that in mind, it's also easy to dismiss things as chance or coincidence. Now, let me just say that for a long time now I haven't believed in either. There aren't actually any odds, nor chance or luck involved in anything. They're only a justification most people give themselves as an explanation for things happening when they don't know all the variables. Since there are thousands, perhaps millions of unknown variables in every real-life situation, things like chance are used to account for a lot.

It's fine, really, that we don't know all the variables. We're not meant to, and our minds likely couldn't comprehend the magnitude if we did. But attributing things to odds, luck, chance, coincidence, or anything in that general vein is simply illogical. And that's just from a non-spiritual, non-Biblical perspective.

On the other hand, being both all-knowing and all-powerful, God not only understands each minute inner working of the universe (let that sink in for a moment) since He's the one that handcrafted it, but He's also able to freely interact with it according to His will (in fact, I have had personally instructive instances that were far too specific and well-timed to be coincidence). And although our free will often causes our paths to diverge from those of God's will, He uses all of it to His purpose, creating a testimony to be shared with others. Therefore, no one is beyond hope. No one is out of His reach.

It should be reassuring to know all this. That's the mindset I'm trying to develop, of being comforted by my belief and faith in Him. Easy to say, but practicality is a far cry from being simple. Suffice it to say that my trust in Him has yet a lot of room to mature (as if this blog itself wasn't a testament to that fact).

What I can say is a comfort even now is that He remains endlessly merciful, He actually wants a relationship with me, and He still pursues me, even though I fail constantly. It's times like that I'm trying to remember that it can't be on my strength that I rely, but on His providence.