A Providence Perspective
Bob Gass, in The Best of the Word for Today (Volume 5), tells the story of George who dreamed of joining the Navy. However, his mother, who was a widow raising her children alone, didn’t like the idea.
The day he was due to sail he hugged her goodbye. In an uncharacteristic show of emotion, she started to cry. After enduring so much heartbreak she refused to endure any more. George must not board that ship; instead, he must stay and be strong for the rest of the family.
The boy in the midshipman’s uniform wanted a Navy career, but not if it meant adding to his mother’s grief. So reluctantly he returned his uniform and ordered his belongings ashore.
Of all the young men who might have left home in search of adventure and didn’t, he was just one more. Yet his decision had profound influence on the Revolutionary War.
A mother’s eleventh-hour anxiety prevented her fifteen-year-old from ascending the ranks of the British Navy and embarking on an adventure very different from the one for which he eventually became famous. That’s because the boy’s name was George Washington, first president of the United States of America.
Bob Gass then concludes his daily thought by simply quoting Proverbs 20:24:
‘We make…plans, but the Lord decides where we will go.’ ‘The…steps we take come from God; otherwise, how would we know where we’re going?’
Some people believe in coincidence, chance, and fate. But the Bible says otherwise.
In short, God is in complete control. Our times are in his hands. God rules and overrules. He has a purpose. It is called providence.
As we look back on our own lives, we see that every twist, turn, development and disappointment is His appointment. God has worked and woven, dovetailed and delivered all these things together for the greater good of his own people (Romans 8:28).
Many speak and sing of fate. Doris Day sang – Que Sera, Sera. Whatever will be, will be. The future's not ours to see. What will be, will be.
Philosophers believe that what’s for you won’t go by you. However, it is often said with a ‘touchwood’ philosophy - more superstition than a belief in God’s superintendence over our lives.
Still others are preoccupied with zodiac signs, horoscopes, and astrology, all of which is a world removed from the theology of Proverbs 20:24.
All that happens to us is not without a purpose. It is divinely planned, and each event (curveballs and boomerangs and all!) comes as a new summons to trust, obey, and rejoice, knowing that all is for one’s eternal good and God’s glory.
Through the mystic fabric, woven on the great historic loom
Runs the golden thread of purpose, not the iron thread of doom
True the hand Divine is hidden – moving secret and unseen
Through the acts of life’s long drama, managing each shifting scene
Man proposes, God disposes, all things his designs fulfil.
(AT Pierson)
