Most Christians will tell you that they don't believe in luck. Luck implies there is some chance to the world, and that contradicts the sense of security that Christians like to cling to with the belief that nothing happens that God doesn't say gets to happen. Job is certainly evidence that even bad things that happen pass through God's filter. Of course, the book of Job also provides evidence that there is a whole lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that we will never be privy to. Perhaps our limited vision and complete inability to understand the whys behind the whats is the reason we came up with the concept of luck, which for simplicity's sake is what I will refer to in the rest of this post.
Overall, both my life and John's has been quite blessed. I could write paragraph after paragraph about my day to day bad luck when things go wrong for no apparent reason and John's day to day good luck when things go right for him even when the odds are stacked against him. I could also write about how now that we are married our two differents kinds of "luck" seem to have collided. I won't bore you with those details or with the details of our early conflicts about the concept of good luck being at all connected to good living. What I will say, is that whether or not you consider it luck or you consider it Satan trying to screw us over, we have had a few pretty unfortunate adventures since we've been together starting with the freak early-July hurricane on what was supposed to be our wedding day. Fortunately, even when bad luck strikes, we have been able to see God working through the fire.
Between last night and this morning, we had two unlucky things happen in a 12-hour period. First, our dog started choking on a piece of rawhide last night. She panicked and started whining and then yelping when she couldn't figure out what was happening. John managed to grab her in her state of panic and hold her down. He was somehow able to maneuver her until the rawhide came loose, and in doing so he saved her life. Both Felicia and I were quite traumatized by her near-death experience, but God gave John the grace to remain calm. Then this morning we locked ourselves out of our new house. We went out to the garage and the door locked behind us. We had no keys, no cell phones, and no jackets. Lucky for us it's been an oddly warm December in Maryland! This time, John was more upset than I was. He wanted to break a window. I wanted to knock on a neighbor's door and call my mom with the spare key. He started hitting our door knob with a softball bat. Metal banging on metal at 6:30 in the morning. I can only imagine how much our neighbors love us. Then I noticed our neighbor from across the street getting into his car. This is someone who introduced himself to us when we were moving in, so I already knew him a little bit. I walked as fast as I could in my heels across the street to ask him if he had a phone we could use. He did, and he was happy to let me borrow it and even walked to our house to see if John needed him to help with anything. Right after I called my mom to come with the key, John managed to break our doorknob off and use a fire poker to trick the lock and get us inside. We will have to replace the door knob, but that will be cheaper than the door and certainly cheaper than a window if John had broken one. And we still managed to make it to work before first period began!
In our lives the good luck moments surely outweigh the bad, but usually the bad luck situations make for better stories. Especially when the bad works out. Even in the lives of people where the bad seems to outweigh the good, it is still true that we will all have seasons of suffering and seasons of rejoicing, and moments of suffering and moments of rejoicing in all seasons. The ratio of good to bad for each of us is for God to decide, and we should trust that He has His reasons. He holds all of eternity in His hand, and He can see the purpose behind what we see as chaos. God knows the whys behind the whats, even in a situation like this morning where I can see no why behind us being locked out. God is in control in both the blessings and the curses. Just as He gives, He can take away, and if we follow Him, we must be willing to accept both (Job 2:10). When we put God in the driver's seat, we soon learn that we're just along for the ride, wherever He may choose to take us. Maybe some days like this morning, all He wants is for us to look to our side and remember who's in charge.
Posted by Kim at December 14, 2006 08:03 AM