Life is More Random and More Ordered Than We Think

At the risk of offending both people who believe in an all-knowing and all-powerful God AND those who don’t, let me say this: life is both more random and more ordered than most of us think.

What do I mean?  As humans, we’re wired to look for patterns and make generalizations about the messy world around us.  We think things happen in threes because we remember when they do and conveniently ignore when they don’t.  We have a spidey sense about when someone is looking at us because we catch them when they do, not realizing that we don’t catch so many more times when they don’t.  We label people, and pat ourselves on the back when they do something consistent with that label or explain away when they do something inconsistent, because we crave over-generalizations to make sense of an otherwise complex and scary world. 

And we create narratives to explain our good fortune or bad luck.  And it’s that last category where we invoke God or whatever you want to call your higher power.  “God is blessing me” or “God is punishing me” can be true statements, to be sure.  But often they are evidence of our desire to attach a logical story to the randomness of life, or a self-centered and small-minded (and, for many of us, an obliviously privileged) take on our small slice of the world. 

In my opinion, this is wrong not because there is no God and all the world’s just a total crap shoot, although I understand that this is where many of you are in your world view.  But before I get spiritual on you, I want to sit in the messiness and panic of a world that is not nicely ordered around me and my cleanly constructed stories about why things happen to me.  It can be terrifying, even debilitating, to think that there is no order to the universe and to my little slice of it: my good behavior isn’t always rewarded, there’s no such thing as me being “due” for a run of good luck, and daily there are things that clash violently into our carefully crafted sense of how the world works.  

I mentioned “obliviously privileged” above and want to come back to that.  Because for some of you, you’re completely used to randomness and messiness, because you have not had the privilege of the buffer of resources and support networks and personal agency, because of abuse or poverty or injustice.  Whereas for some of you, you’re completely unused to randomness and messiness, because your privilege has afforded you a protective bubble within which you are able to order your existence, pat yourself on the back, and complain the few times things don’t go your way.  

Returning to my spiritual take on these matters, my read of the Bible leaves me with a sense of the world that is far messier and tragic than my relatively sheltered experience of it.  In the Good Book, in which God is presented as all-loving, all-knowing, and all-powerful, you have good people suffer greatly, injustice is allowed to reign for uncomfortably long, and earnest believers cry out with no immediate sense of relief.  

In light of this, how dare I get bent out of shape when I have been given every liberty and privilege and have to endure some light affliction?  How dare I with my small pea brain construct some huge narrative to explain my way towards a simple-minded take on how my world works?  I believe God has an incredible arc to our collective lives, but very often the pacing and direction of that arc is utterly inscrutable to us.  There is nothing that escapes His grand plan.  But much of that plan falls well outside what we would’ve done if we were in His seat.  

It is weird to say that life simultaneously feels more random and is more ordered than we think.  But it’s what I think.  Even if I more often than not betray that thought by either freaking out when I’m thrown a curveball or fall into despair that there’s no deeper or lasting meaning to it all.