Chance - by Sharon Flood Kasenberg

Saturday as my husband and I drove through our ordinarily quiet and seemingly safe neighborhood we were surprised to see police vans and cruisers completely lining a small street two very short blocks behind our home. When my son and I saw even more police vehicles on the street yesterday I searched the news online to see what was happening, and discovered that a full fledged police investigation (the kind I enjoy watching unfold on Castle) is underway practically in my backyard. A woman is missing (as well as her couch) and "foul play is suspected" because of forensic evidence uncovered in her apartment. It's scary stuff.

It's easy to become a bit rattled when something terrible happens. One friend commiserated in response to a posting I made on facebook, and I quickly assured her that my neighborhood is a nice place to live, but added "bad things can happen in nice places", because they do, and they happen to nice people too.

About thirty years ago I read a book that made me think seriously about my attitude toward chance. God, pointed out the Rabbi Harold Kushner, (in his book "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People") does not operate like some cosmic vending machine. Every good thing we do does not function like a coin put into a vending machine which yields the desired treat. Sometimes evil people see unjustified rewards while kind, long suffering people experience nothing but misery. The crux of the matter is that life is not fair. The positive message in the book is that we can manage to be joyful anyway.

Joy, it seems, doesn't always result from having everything in life go our way. Joy also doesn't ensue because we are "in control" or because we have "all of the answers". Reading Kushner's book helped me to understand that peace was attainable in a world filled with randomness, because God, in giving everyone free will accepted that sometimes He had to stand back and let our existence unfold. I'm not saying that miracles don't happen, because I genuinely believe that they do. I guess my point is just that sometimes it's our turn to be touched by the miraculous, and sometimes it isn't. Tragedy is most often not a punishment, just as good fortune is most often not a reward.

God is not a gamester who plays out our lives like pieces on a chess board. I also don't believe that our lives are some foreordained jigsaw puzzle - destined to turn out in one specific way. Had that been God's intention he would not have given us the ability to choose.

Sometimes people of faith have trouble reconciling the role of chance in our lives, seemingly wanting to believe that our maker had so little faith in us that he handed us the proverbial jigsaw puzzle with each piece a perfect representation of every event in our lives. I grew aware of how prevalent this kind of thinking is (especially among the young) when I filled in teaching a Sunday school class of teenagers several years ago. I was shocked to note that they were so incredibly fatalistic, believing that their lives had been entirely mapped out in advance and that every tragedy that occurs is "God's will".

I argued against that point of view vehemently.

"So if I step off the curb as I walk home from Church today and I'm hit by a drunk diver and killed it's because God wants me to die?" I asked.

"Absolutely!" they all answered. "If you died it would be because God needed you and if it wasn't your time to die He would have intervened."

At that point I begged them all to spare me the platitudes of that sort if Todd or my sons died before me. I told them that I believed that an almighty God doesn't need our help in the hereafter. If anything, he needs our help here, where we walk and talk for all to see, but His existence is not always so immediately evident. I believe that I need my husband and my sons more here on this earth than a Heavenly Father could ever need them "on the other side". I don't think that this way of thinking proves me to be faithless, but that it in fact demonstrates just how much faith I actually possess. I don't need to believe that I have all of the answers and that every bit of agony I feel is tied up in "reason" to feel hopeful. I actually find it quite comforting to know just how much I don't know, and sanity saving to not be constantly searching for rational explanations in a world that sometimes simply doesn't make sense.

I believe that God, in His wisdom, made our ability to choose a Star Trek-ish "prime directive" that He himself tries not to interfere with, which is why sometimes He stands back and allows tragedies to occur. Sometimes the negative choices that others make will impact our lives negatively too. God doesn't take the life of a person killed by a drunk driver - the driver himself bears the responsibility for taking that life through his choices - first to over-indulge, and then to hop behind the wheel in that state.

So perhaps life is a whole lot more like a super-sized box of K'nex (which every parent of sons knows is the best building system ever!) than a boringly precise jigsaw puzzle. God gives us this wonderful gift of agency and says, "Do with it what you will." We get all the pieces, the wheels that turn and the motors and rotors and bars and connectors, and we get a book of pictures suggesting what can be created. However, ultimately we choose what we'll build.

I've thought about all of these things the past few days as the police have canvassed my neighborhood and searched for clues to clarify what happened to this missing woman. I had a passing negative thought that maybe my safe and pleasant neighborhood wasn't the greatest place to be anymore, but then I turned my own thoughts around and saw the positive aspects of the situation. First of all, I find myself feeling fortunate to live in an area where I don't see lines of police cars on an everyday basis. Secondly, I feel secure in the knowledge that while the police couldn't prevent the crime, they are doing everything they can to unravel this mystery and catch those responsible. I can accept that my neighborhood is a good place to be while still acknowledging the possibility that there are bad people around here at times, and that bad things will sometimes happen as a result of that.

Life is still good, even though there is always a chance that something scary might happen. And being me, I had to write a poem that explains the way I see this whole possibility that we need to embrace a certain amount of chance in our lives. After all, in life every single new day is a fresh chance to build something wonderful.

Chance: (By Sharon Flood Kasenberg - March 23, 2013)

Within the steps of every dance
there has to be some room for chance.
The best trained feet can sometimes twist -
the chance for failure must exist.
Is this a reason not to try,
this chance that we will fall, not fly?

Within the purest, best lived life
there's bound to be a bit of strife -
and earnest am I in belief
that most of us don't earn our grief;
most hardships are but happenstance -
misfortunes that occur by chance.

Life sadly isn't very fair -
and yet this fact should not impair,
for when fate is the most unjust
is when we find the need to trust.
Some randomness must be embraced
as part of living life with grace.

Some things will happen without cause,
crimes will occur in spite of laws
and somehow I have always known
I'm shaped by choices not my own
when things that other people do
reverberate in my life too.

So though perhaps I had to fall
I will be glad I danced at all,
for through missed steps and muscles burned
I faltered, but my strength returned -
and with each fall, I must surmise
I had another chance to rise.