From Jim McGuiggan... Randomness and good luck

Randomness and good luck

The dictionary says that "luck" is loss or benefit brought about by chance. We say "bad" luck when we see the result as loss or disappointment and "good" when we judge it to be benefit. There’s no mystery there—that makes sense.

Ask serious believers if they believe in "good luck" and you’d only find a handful in a million that’d say they do. Why is that? Because they’re used to attributing all the good things in their lives to God. They thank him for everything and they seem to remember something like "every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights."

In their tens of thousands they’ll tell you interesting stories about "remarkable coincidences" that they know aren’t really "coincidences". Food and money arrives from unexpected places in the nick of time, strangers that were heading elsewhere got lost and turned up precisely where they were needed to be, to save a life and a job turned up the very day the family was going to be evicted. It doesn’t matter that we say to them that these could be explained as chance events so that there’s no way to prove God brought it about. They know that but they insist that it was God that worked it out. They pray "give us this day our daily bread," go out and work for it and still say that God provided their food or rent or clothes or whatever money was needed to take care of these things. Try telling them that these things happen to others that don’t pray and the believers will still thank God for providing. A church gathers and prays for needed rain for their threatened crops and it arrives, a good crop is harvested and the people gather to thank God. Try telling them that it was all chance, that prayers in no way affect the atmosphere, that the wind and sun and other things just happened to combine at the right place at the right time. Tell them that and they’ll quote you texts and go back to thanking God for the rain he sent when they needed it.

There are as many random elements involved in the production of what believers will call a "blessing" from God as in the production of a tragedy.

Ask serious believers if they believe in "bad" luck and they may hem and haw a bit, unsure of themselves. Why is that? Well, part of the reason is that they don’t want to attribute pain, loss and tragedy to God because some of them think that God only has a hand in bringing about "good" things. They’re afraid that if they say God brings tragedy as well as blessing they lead people to hate God (and some preachers muzzle them by telling them that’s exactly what they’ll do). And, besides, there are all those difficult questions that poor hurting souls ask and that they can’t answer for them. Questions like, "Why my little girl?" or "How could God be good and do such a thing to my Grandmother?" or "How can you make sense of a tidal wave?"

They can’t answer these questions and it bothers them tremendously. But they can’t answer the difficult questions about "good luck" (answered prayer) either. It’s just that questions about the tragic have a different emotional content and it’s almost always the case that they have profoundly deeper passion connected with them.

God answers prayer! Jesus said he did and urged us to pray. And he himself prayed believing that prayer avails. It’s important to recognise that "request" prayers are only one of a score of different kinds of prayers that include confession, praise, communion and others. But we are called to bring petitions and requests to God. The Lord’s Prayer demonstrates that, so we aren’t to apologise for making requests.

Fundamentally we insist that God answers prayer not because we think we can prove it by our personal experiences—experiences that people not unreasonably attempt to explain as good luck or natural law or an occasional remarkable coincidence—but because he says he does. We insist that God answers prayer because we have come to believe in the God of the Hebrew-Christian scriptures and in Jesus Christ. In that light we understandably and gladly interpret events in our lives as blessings provided by God and we thank him.

We’re well aware of natural laws and the fixed sequences in nature but we still believe that God provides blessings to us. We’re not committed to the view that every answer to every prayer has to be a self-evidencing miracle. We believe that God is the Lord of harmony and chaos, of nature’s laws and choosing beings. We believe that as sure as a sailor can use the wind to gain his ends without obliterating or warping nature so God can use his mindless forces and free-willed creatures to gain his ends.

If our prayers of need, uttered only today, are met through a network of truth and kindness and generosity that God established in the world years before we came along, we’ll thank him for his answer to today’s prayers. We won’t call it good luck. If our prayers for rain this very day are met by showers that are driven in by winds that none of us can control or predict we’ll still thank God for giving us the rain in answer to that prayer. And if we can’t find or demonstrate the links by which he brought about the response we needed from him, if we can’t catch a glimpse of his hand just before it goes behind the veil again we’ll still thank him for it. And if today our heart is desperately hungry for the uplifting and sustaining word and it comes by way of some old utterance we won’t say, "It wasn’t God that lifted me up."

One of these days, perhaps, we’re going to believe that the calamities that befall the human family are the work of the God that adores the human family and that they are just as surely the grace of God as his blessings. Maybe one of these days we’ll offer poor souls more than, "Terribly bad luck!" Maybe one of these days we’ll see that to celebrate the wrath of God is to celebrate his presence in the form of his righteousness and lovingkindness.

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.