Did God? Or Did I?

Last weekend has left me pondering the supremacy of God in tension with the free will of humanity.

Two tragic deaths occurred within hours of each other. On Thursday night, friends lost their infant son. He was born with a rare heart condition but lived long enough for the natural familial love to grow stronger through enjoying daily interactions and reveling in his personality. On Friday morning, my husband and I were driving to a church event and came upon the detour caused by a crash which resulted in the death of a husband and father from our church. A semi-driver had failed to notice the intersection.

How does faith meet with real life when we desperately desire to discover that it has all been a bad dream?

I know that God allows choice. He started with Adam and Eve and hasn't changed since then. We know what they chose. Is that what God wanted? Or did He give them the choice in spite of what they would do with their freedom? Was their disobedience and His plan for buying humanity back His original plan, or was it some sort of beautiful patch-up job?

But I also know that God had every day of every life numbered before a person draws breath. That means that, should someone hold a gun to my head, I can rest easy because, if it is not in God's plan that I die that day, there is nothing that person could do to kill me; yet, if God's story for my present life
closes at that point, nothing anyone does can change it.

So which is it?

Did God's plan make allowance for disease and human error and plain evil, knowing all the while that He could still work beauty?

Or were these tragedies part of His will from the get-go since no one can change what He has done?

And what about moral failure? Surely this is another sort of death, as Adam and Eve discovered. Surely God's plan couldn't actually include sin in the life of His child!

I know that I am not the first to ask these question. I will certainly not be the last. Yet knowing that I am not alone in the confusion provides poor comfort.

These morose mental musings of mine received an abrupt shaking on Monday morning, when a text surprised me. Our fourth nephew had decided to make an early entrance, and the joy of a new life appeared as a beacon, as if this new development promised that a turn for the better had taken place.

His safe and unexpected arrival jolted me enough that I could grab some perspective: there's more going on in all of this.

Whatever combination of God's plan and human action occurred this past weekend, the result is that two are in heaven, and God is making their stories beautiful. They have life like never before, joy beyond our imaginings. They receive His rest as they await their bodily resurrection.

When God's child fails - and every one of us will until we are finally and fully freed from sin through the first death - there is another (sort of) resurrection that can occur. With the admission of guilt and the plea for forgiveness comes a continuing of the new life that breathes into us from the time of salvation to our physical death. We are not saved again, but we are reminded of our death to sin and our being raised to new life in Christ. We begin again, much like beginning a new life, continuing to trust in His plans for us.

And they are good plans.

I know that, whatever the God-ordained combination might be of my working and His planning, His eyes never widen in alarm over my decisions, and He works my decisions into His will. It doesn't matter that I can't understand it all. (That's why He is God and I am not!) What matters is my response: trust? or panic?

And much like the birth of our little nephew this Monday morning, hope is born in my heart with every reminder of God's overwhelming love for me, of His gift of more grace than I know what to do with, of my freedom from striving and guilt.
And it comes unexpectedly.
And it comes beautifully.