Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Relationship Assessment Day
I am thankful, in light of the date, that I do not have an ex-, and that I am free to come, and go, and live and work, following only the will of God, and not having to have every plan altered by the calculation of it's effect on my significant other. I do realize thet that extra planning would be a joy, but I rejoice in the uncomplexity of my current life. When the rich, young ruler came to Jesus, He didn't say "One thing you lack, go sell your possessions and buy an engagement ring and some chocolate..."
Monday, February 05, 2007
Luck
When people use the word "Luck" they mean lots of different things. One use is an arbitrary, chance-based idea of randomness. "You just got lucky!" they say, as you sink a three-pointer blindfolded. This is one way of saying, "Brownian movement and undefinable chaotic processes caused your results to fall several standard deviations from the center of the maxwell curve!" Another way that the word is used is to mean a points system that gets used up by preferred things happening--or is just measured by happy things happening. "Today is my lucky day! I think I'll go buy some lottery tickets!" Maybe it's based on what you do--like karma. "See a penny, pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck." People also refer to luck as the reasoning behind some complex set of cause-and-effect circumstances. "It's bad luck to break a mirror, spill salt, juggle chainsaws, etc."
Most of the time that Luck is invoked, it is in a way that totally ignores God's role in our everyday lives. Now, granted, there is a lot that happens that doesn't seem to have God's direct, obvious input. It seems that God has set up the world to operate in certain non-deterministic ways. Your Statistics teacher would get annoyed if his sample of random coin tosses wasn't a normal distribution of heads and tails, but God could intervene in the world that way if He wanted to. And He does intervene sometimes, and we call that a miracle---sometimes what we see is as simple as something other than the most likely thing happening.
Sometimes we think of a system of points, where you rack up luck, and then good things happen to you, or you don't have luck, and then bad things happen to you. This is an abdication of personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions (we blame it on some undefinable "bad luck") but it also forgets that God can rework how what we do effects what happens to us. Often God does this by changing something bad in a short-term, temporal sense, into a blessing in a more long-lasting sense. When you seem to be "down on your luck", take a moment to ask God to make something pleasing to Him come of it---and then stop digging, look around and see how you got yourself into this hole. Stop blaming others for things that are your fault---and don't go for the fatalistic cop-out of "I just have such bad luck!"
When it is some sort of cause-and-effect thing---where there is a valid reason that one thing would bring another---don't call it luck. Walking under a ladder isn't bad luck, but it may be a safety hazard, since a slight bump could send the ladder tumbling, and the bundle of shingles could land on you. Most of this category is all nonsense--superstitions and old wives tales. Often it would have to be enforced by some supernatural, but non-God and arbitrary entity. What natural properties of a black cat would bring unhappy circumstances to anyone walking perpendicular to it?
So, luck has no place, but it is often more handy to wish someone luck, than to affirm your feelings that because you care about them, you would be happier if the random, stochastic, un-calculable, complex processes would effect the outcomes of the events in question in a way that was beneficial to them.
On that note, I'm going to bed. I pray that God would give you true, lasting joy.
Most of the time that Luck is invoked, it is in a way that totally ignores God's role in our everyday lives. Now, granted, there is a lot that happens that doesn't seem to have God's direct, obvious input. It seems that God has set up the world to operate in certain non-deterministic ways. Your Statistics teacher would get annoyed if his sample of random coin tosses wasn't a normal distribution of heads and tails, but God could intervene in the world that way if He wanted to. And He does intervene sometimes, and we call that a miracle---sometimes what we see is as simple as something other than the most likely thing happening.
Sometimes we think of a system of points, where you rack up luck, and then good things happen to you, or you don't have luck, and then bad things happen to you. This is an abdication of personal responsibility for the consequences of our actions (we blame it on some undefinable "bad luck") but it also forgets that God can rework how what we do effects what happens to us. Often God does this by changing something bad in a short-term, temporal sense, into a blessing in a more long-lasting sense. When you seem to be "down on your luck", take a moment to ask God to make something pleasing to Him come of it---and then stop digging, look around and see how you got yourself into this hole. Stop blaming others for things that are your fault---and don't go for the fatalistic cop-out of "I just have such bad luck!"
When it is some sort of cause-and-effect thing---where there is a valid reason that one thing would bring another---don't call it luck. Walking under a ladder isn't bad luck, but it may be a safety hazard, since a slight bump could send the ladder tumbling, and the bundle of shingles could land on you. Most of this category is all nonsense--superstitions and old wives tales. Often it would have to be enforced by some supernatural, but non-God and arbitrary entity. What natural properties of a black cat would bring unhappy circumstances to anyone walking perpendicular to it?
So, luck has no place, but it is often more handy to wish someone luck, than to affirm your feelings that because you care about them, you would be happier if the random, stochastic, un-calculable, complex processes would effect the outcomes of the events in question in a way that was beneficial to them.
On that note, I'm going to bed. I pray that God would give you true, lasting joy.
