A friend and I were standing in line at a local burger hangout after our high school homecoming game. We found ourselves catching up with a former student who had graduated two years earlier.
We had read about the car crash from which he had just recovered. He filled us in on the rest of the story.
Hopping into a friend’s car, he and his buddy called “shotgun” at the same time. They laughed, flipped for it, and when our storyteller lost the coin toss, he reluctantly crawled into the back seat. When a drunk driver hit them a few minutes later, he was thrown from the car, but the shotgun rider died instantly. “Why him and not me?”
That story haunted me for weeks. How often we ask, “What if. . .?” What if I had gone to a different college? What if I had chosen a different profession? What if I had left a day earlier? What if I had married someone else, or not at all? The second guessing never ends.
As believers though, we know that a loving God assures us that all things are working together for our good, and that “all the days ordained for me were written in His book before one of them came to be.” Psalm 139:16
We also know (Proverbs 16:33) that while “the lot is cast into the lap, it’s every decision is from the Lord.” So what appears random to us is neither unknown nor random to God.
There is great comfort in this thought, and also great freedom. Our Father does not want us to be fearful, afraid to act, paralyzed by “What if’s.” He has taken everything into consideration before the foundation of the world, and now it is ours to choose, freely but wisely. He will handle the rest, even the coin tosses.
“Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias;
so he was added to the eleven apostles.”
Acts 1:26