Complexity and difficulties are very challenging for some people to appreciate. Take the person who studies mechanical engineering in college, lands a great job, works at it for forty years, and then retires with a nice nest egg.
Now take the person who studies art history in college. Museum jobs are few and far between. Teaching jobs even less so. She makes ends meet by working in a restaurant and being a security guard at night. Our art historian can understand how some people are able to rather easily find employment, but our engineer has a tougher time understanding why the art historian can’t find gainful employment. All this leads to an interesting dynamic at play.
If your life has been a pretty simple A leads to B kind of existence, it is easy to assume that this is how life is suppose to work. When it does not happen for certain people like the art historian, we like our engineer friend may be tempted to conclude that some mistakes were made along the way. We might speculate that our art historian was not a good student or perhaps is not very good with people. It baffles those of us who have this A leads to B notion to find out our art historian made stellar grades, won various academic honors, and has many friends.
How do we process all that? How we do will tell us much about ourselves, but probably more about God.
”There is a huge difference between what people actually know and how much they think they know.” – Nassim Taleb
“Madeleine L’Engle keenly observes in her book, A Stone for a Pillow, that our English word ‘disaster’ comes from the roots dis- (meaning ‘separation’) and -aster (meaning ‘star’). Disaster is thus a separation from the stars, a fragmenting of creation, the shattering of what God formed as an interconnected whole.”
(As quoted in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison, p. 100)
By the way, Slow Church may be the best book I’ve ever read on the nature of the church.
