Faces on Faith: Do things happen for a reason?
What do you make of coincidences? Are they random or is there a reason behind them?
I urgently needed a hair cut last week. When my hair gets long my wife says I look like a 1970s actor. And as usual, I hadn’t planned ahead for an appointment. So dreading my wife’s imminent mockery, I Googled barbers on island, picked one at random and got an appointment that same day — all of which further reinforced my strategy of procrastination.
Upon arrival I discovered one barber who was a church member cutting another church member’s hair, neither of whom I had met in person yet thanks to Covid. Furthermore, the woman who cut my hair had been thinking about making an appointment to talk with me at my office, and incredibly I had made an appointment with her and we were talking in her “office.” Everyone there shared a sense of delight and amazement at the confluence of events.
You can probably look back on your life and identify important, hard-to-explain “accidents.” Whether a chance conversation that set the trajectory for your career or a near miss that spared your life, you can probably find pivotal coincidences in your own story.
How do you interpret such events? Are they mere correlation or is there causality? Is the universe a closed system, a whirlwind of molecules meaninglessly bouncing off one another? Or do things happen for a reason?
If you do believe things happen for a reason, certain assumptions follow. Objectively meaningful events require an intelligence with great power that meant for them to happen. If things happen for reason, there must be a reasoner with the ability to bring those intentions to fruition. If your life is part of a plan, there must be a master planner who implements that plan.
Knowing that really matters when you’re suffering. When confronted with grief, cancer or pandemic, it changes everything to know that suffering has significance.
The Bible reveals that there is a God who created, sustains and guides all things — even our suffering — in a manner beyond our comprehension. And God ultimately demonstrated that power at the cross where he used the greatest evil ever — the crucifixion of the Son of God — for the greatest good ever, namely the forgiveness of sins.
What if those strange coincidences are really taps on the shoulder from the Lord, saying “I planned that”?
Pastor Jeramie Rinne is the senior pastor at the Sanibel Community Church.