Luck?

Jeopardy and the last five minutes of Wheel of Fortune are the only television game shows that Avis and I watch. We are still surprised when one of our doctors' appointments in Indianapolis takes most of the day. Many times we have been driving up I65 and one of us will say, “At least we’ll be back home for Final Jeopardy.” We drive into the garage and rush into our Maine Room just in time to hear Alex Trebeck read the final answer and tell the contestants, “Good Luck.”

Luck is a word that has bothered me lately. Avis and I were eating with Barry and Jan Callen last Monday night. I was a little down because of the chemo I had taken last week and had been thinking about “luck.” I said: “I don’t think I can believe in luck.” We began talking about luck and predestination and if God really knows the future. When we were born did God know that both Avis and I would be diagnosed with cancer in 2007? Do we really have choices in life and is it just luck if one never has an incurable disease? Barry helped to clear up part of my question when he said to us “God gave humans free choice. God took a risk that creation might choose against him and love—but it was a risk God chose to take for the sake of love. Therefore, God knows everything that exists to be known; but what free humans have not decided cannot be known by God because the decision does not yet exist.”

I have prayed the prayer that “God loves me and has a plan for my life.” The really hard question is this: If God’s plan for my life is not to heal me, will all the people who are praying for me have an impact on His plan? This scripture in Jeremiah (29:11-12 The Message) gives me some hope: I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I’ll listen.

I’m still working on some of these hard questions but they are not based on luck.