Collaboration for Sunday April 30

Too Bad You Went Curling...

How do we "manage" the complexity of the future?

Let's say you choose to take up curling for kicks and you form a deep friendship with someone you meet. They introduce you to the person that becomes your spouse, and your first born eventually develops a breakthrough technology in telecommunications. Wow. Good thing you decided to go curling.

Except that, had you only known, simply going parachuting just once, on the same day instead, would have put you in relationship with another lovely person who could have become your spouse and the third child from that marriage would end up stumbling on a breakthrough treatment for a whole group of cancers – saving tens of thousands of lives.

Too bad you went curling.

Now what are you doing this afternoon?

Now consider this. One of the most successful assassination plots against Adolf Hitler failed only because he cut a speech short for fear that the fog would make his return flight to Berlin impossible. The bomb exploded 13 minutes after he left the building.

If only the bomb builder had read the weather forecast and shortened the fuse. How many hundreds of thousands would have been spared?

How do we manage the complexity of the future?

Supplement to the post below RE April 16

I wonder what creates more “problems” for us as we view the past: what actually happened, or how we choose to think about it. Apart from the interpretive layer we place over top of the events of the past, there isn’t much energy in them. But when we add a sense of “injustice” or “ought not to be” or “I can’t believe this happened to me” or “where is God” or "how can my life continue", all of a sudden the issue is invested with great importance.

I wonder if we generate the means of emotional friction by the weight we attach to such things.

So maybe it’s not so much the stuff that’s happened to us as it is the way we’ve chosen to think about it. And maybe that’s true for a lot more than just pain. Even success is open to interpretation. Some look at it in a way that makes them grateful to God (they credit Him for some role in their success), while some look it as proof that they don’t need God (they see only that their success depended on themselves).

Two lives exactly the same could be cause for two very different conclusions about God, life and the lot we’ve been given.