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?
posted by CSW @ 6:54 AM
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C.S. Lewis suggested that "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."
Then maybe the future is not as ambiguously lost in its infinite possiblities coupled with our fear of misused choices.
What also comes to mind is an age old anonymous phrase that writes something like this; "education, therefore is, a process of living and not a preparation for the future." Perhaps the smartest thing we can do is live in those 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 minute or 30 second times.
Food for thought.
hugs and kisses,
DSW
I have often thought about how even the most trivial of events, when examined at close range are turned into massive moments in time.
I don't intend to be crude, but the image and resulting question that always comes to my mind is my own conceiving in my mothers womb. What if my father's climax was reached a split second later or earlier and a different "little soldier" reached the destination first? Would I still be me? How different would I be? Maybe I'd be a girl instead of a boy or a blonde instead of a brunette or fat instead of skinny.
Ultimately, I might be niave and oversimplifing the experience of missed oportunities and "wrong" decisions, but I tend to think of it this way: God is in control. He who holds the universe in His hand and "knit me in my mother's womb" knows what He's doing and He doesn't make mistakes.
Ultimately the choice is mine and being human I am thus doomed to a lifetime of mistakes, bad decisions and "what-ifs". But I try to look at these as "God lessons". God knew I was going to make the "wrong" decision and allowed me to make it because He knew the lesson I would need to learn from it.
He allowed me to forgot all about the police frequented "speed-trap" on my way home from work, knowing that I would get caught speeding. I don't see the point in wondering to myself "if only I had remembered that the speed limit drops to 50". Instead, I (in faith) believe that God is teaching me not to speed because 10 years from now, on a rainy night when my traction is not what I think it is, that good habit will save my life.
And as for the bigger "too bad I went curling" decisions that have outcomes that I will never really know or could know, again I put my faith in God that He is directing me. He subtly and ever-so-deftly, in a way only a God such as He could, is directing me to make the "right" seemingly insignifigant decisions.
I put my faith in a God who knows better. After all, only God sits on the hilltop, looking down at the valley to see all the possible paths and all their possible destinations with all their possible scenery.
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