Anyway. I am loving the Psalms. They are so raw and intense and full of honesty. There's celebration, tears, laughter and complaining, the whole spectrum of human emotion- sometimes even within the one Psalm. Read this a while ago (this whole thing has been stuck in a draft for ages- but at that point I was less than half the year in and The Plan had a far higher chance of going awry)...
Psalm 25
Show me your ways, Lord,
teach me your paths.
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Saviour,
and my hope is in you all day long.
Teach me your paths (vs 4)
Isn't that cool? God's plans are multiple and varied and there's almost always more than one way of doing things. And actually, even if we screw up, God remains God and can autocorrect as we go, making sense of chaos and tweaking a million different background details so the trajectory of our lives remains within the parameters of his will and the ultimate destination is still reached. We just get to where we're going a different way with a different assortment (or greater volume) of baggage. Like Gwytheth Paltrow in Sliding Doors - if we ignore the haircut and the minor detail that she ends up dead in one universe and not in the other and instead focus on the way that she ends up with John Hannah whichever train she catches.
So... if a cosmic-wide autocorrect is in progress, then one day life will make sense. If God's working through the mess and chaos of the planet, compensating for and redeeming bad choices (some made before we even got here) in a million seen and unseen ways- then this should relieve the burden on us a little bit.
• Perhaps the years between cradle and grave will ultimately be quantified in some other way, rather than the sum of our achievements
• Maybe it's more about how and why we do what we do rather than what
• More about our conduct within a situation rather than the situation itself
• More about motivation than action
• More about how we deal with success and loss rather than what we did to get the success in the first place - and what we would compromise on in order to keep it
• More about stewarding than owning
Either that or the Hokey Cokey really IS what it's all about.
In which case we are all screwed.
But I doubt this very much.
Just consider the lilies of the fields, the birds of the air or bacon.
