Chance or not

Writing down my thoughts yesterday did actually bring a degree of clarity to what is going round in my head right now, so I felt I ought to put it down in words, to sort of explain yesterdays post.

I was just reading some posts on a friends blog, (www.fromthesamesky.blogspot.com), and one of them spoke about her thoughts on suffering and the providence of God. She used this quote to help her thoughts:

“When one person gets cancer and another does not, that is not because God wants one of them to get cancer, it is because the world is fallen and not as God wanted it and chance has been at work. When Christians deny that luck plays any part, they are often implicitly (though usually unintentionally) attributing all disaster, suffering and death to the hand of God. But God is good. We need, therefore, to accept that there is an element of chance in the way things turn out.” Michael Lloyd

I have to say that reading that summed up my confusion quite accurately. How much of what 'happens' in this world is attributable to God? Is God behind everything? Certainly he knows about everything, but how much of it happens because God made it so? Rather than looking at the situation of someone getting cancer, lets turn it round and say that there are two people already with cancer, (or whatever - put any situation you want in the place of cancer here!), both of whom have people around them praying for their healing. Say one person dies, and one recovers, well, the friends of the one who recovered would most likely thank God for answers to prayer, attributing the healing to God. But what about the one who died? Why did God not answer that prayer? Or rather, why was His answer to that one 'no'? Could it not just be that the treatment worked on one and not the other? How do we know that God was involved at all? Are we sure that this is not, in actual fact, attributable to chance rather than God? If so, how then can we know when it is God that does something in our lives and when is it chance? When do we pray for something, or say thankyou for something?

On the other hand, God could be absolutely in charge of everything - chance could be non-existant. Certainly there would be concerns here, (such as why is there suffering, why do some people suffer and not others etc), but surely a God who is in control of everything, (and also totally loving by the way), would have reasons for all these things. We may not know why now, but as long as God does, that's what matters.

Which one is it? Do we even need to know? I am toying with the thought that maybe, just maybe, this is supposed to be a bit ambiguous. Maybe we are supposed to not really know exactly how much control God chooses to exert over the world in which we live. Would us knowing actually make any difference to the way we live? Surely, even if God does leave some things to chance, we can still pray about it, and trust that God knows which situations to take control of and which not to? It would help to know, (and maybe some people think that they do know the answer to this - maybe I am just a bit thick!), but I guess that its part of our responsibility to just trust despite the fact that things seems confusing. Its a case of choosing to trust despite the ambiguity.

We are truly blessed to be able to have a God who is worthy of our trust. He is so good, so holy, so upright, so loving and so just that we can trust Him to know how to deal with our world. We can give all our situations to Him and know that by just putting faith in God, all things will work out for good, (whether it seems like it in this life or not). Thanks God for being so wonderful, so so totally trustworthy. I choose right now to trust you with this world - to trust that regardless of my uncertainties, and misunderstanding, You in fact know what You are doing. Thanks, and please help me to leave it there, knowing that it is in Your hands.