{"id":1603,"date":"2022-04-29T08:11:12","date_gmt":"2022-04-29T12:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2022-04-29T08:11:12","modified_gmt":"2022-04-29T12:11:12","slug":"connecting-the-dots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2022\/04\/29\/connecting-the-dots\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting the Dots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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During the 1930s, the Soviet Union took aggressive steps to diminish the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
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As the dictator of a militantly atheistic regime, Josef Stalin ordered the execution of church leaders or their exile to Siberia. \u00a0Priests were considered enemies of the state.\u00a0 Church buildings were closed, then reopened as museums or propaganda centers for Marxism.\u00a0
\u00a0
Crosses disappeared.\u00a0 Religious icons were confiscated.\u00a0 Millions of Bibles were taken from the homes of believers and incinerated.\u00a0
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After 69 tumultuous years, the USSR imploded. \u00a0Shortly afterward an American mission team in Stavropol, Russia, heard a rumor that there was still a warehouse outside of town where confiscated Bibles had been stored since the days of the Great Depression.\u00a0 Members of the team approached local officials and asked permission to look inside.\u00a0
\u00a0
What they discovered was a mind-boggling mountain of Russian Scriptures.\u00a0 Having received the officials\u2019 consent to distribute as many as they could, the team returned with a truck and some hired hands.\u00a0 One of them was a Russian college student who made no secret of his cynical dismissal of all religious claims.\u00a0 The rubles he would earn, however, would come in handy.\u00a0 \u00a0
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As the workers loaded the Bibles, one of the mission team members noticed that the young man had disappeared.\u00a0 Ultimately they found him in a corner of the warehouse, weeping.\u00a0
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He had secretly put one of the Bibles into his pocket.\u00a0 Then he had slipped away, unnoticed, hoping to take a quick glance at its pages.\u00a0 He was shaken by what he had discovered.\u00a0 On the first page of the Bible he had randomly picked up, he saw the name and the distinctive handwriting of his own grandmother.\u00a0 Of the tens of thousands of Bibles in the warehouse, he had somehow pocketed the one that belonged to a family member who had never lost her faith.
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And who had never stopped praying for him<\/u><\/em>.\u00a0 \u00a0
\u00a0
Do things just happen?\u00a0 Or do things happen for a reason?\u00a0
\u00a0
The way we answer those questions depends on whether we think there is a god who rules the cosmos, and what kind of god that might be.\u00a0 \u00a0
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The New Atheists \u2013 Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris, among others \u2013 are convinced there\u2019s no rhyme or reason to human affairs.\u00a0 Our lives are a daily roll of the dice.\u00a0 Some people get lucky.\u00a0 Others do not.\u00a0
\u00a0
For Deists, God is an absentee landlord.\u00a0 He essentially built the universe, pressed Start, then walked away, taking no interest in day-to-day operations.\u00a0 That was the conviction of such 18th<\/sup> century luminaries as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Voltaire.\u00a0
\u00a0
Still others suggest we\u2019ll never find divine fingerprints on day-to-day human events because God is handcuffed.\u00a0 God cares deeply about what we\u2019re facing today, but he\u2019s powerless to intervene.\u00a0 That was Harold Kushner\u2019s solution to the problem of evil in When Bad Things Happen to Good People<\/em>.
\u00a0
Perhaps God is like a constitutional monarch.\u00a0 That is, he rules in name only.\u00a0 The Queen of England is free to express strong opinions \u2013 \u201cWe are not amused<\/em>\u201d \u2013 but she no longer makes or enforces the laws of her own land.\u00a0 Her \u201cauthority\u201d is chiefly ceremonial and sentimental.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
Then there\u2019s Shirley Maclaine.\u00a0 The actress and celebrity is convinced that whatever happens is happening because you\u2019re<\/em> making it happen.\u00a0 That\u2019s because you\u2019re divine, and this is your Show.\u00a0 How that can be true for all of us at the same time in the same place is something that Maclaine and like-minded New Agers have never satisfactorily explained.\u00a0
\u00a0
What do we find in the books of the Old and New Testament?
\u00a0
God is sovereign.\u00a0 That is, he personally and actively rules the cosmos.\u00a0
\u00a0
Nothing happens by chance, because there is no entity called Chance that has any power to make anything happen.
\u00a0
Jesus describes the degree of his Father\u2019s oversight of life\u2019s details as knowing the number of hairs on our heads (and whether we\u2019re in the midst of losing a few), and being fully aware when even one of life\u2019s humblest creatures, like a sparrow, falls to the ground (Matthew 10:29-30).\u00a0 According to Ephesians 1:4, \u201cHe chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.\u201d\u00a0 God\u2019s sovereignty over our lives, in other words, extends even before we came into the world \u2013 or before there even was a world.\u00a0
\u00a0
This is not to say that at any given moment we can say, \u201cOh, I know exactly what God is doing here.\u201d\u00a0 Far from it. \u00a0The significance of most of what happens on any given day will remain a mystery.
\u00a0
But every now and then we get to experience what traditional Celtic spirituality calls a \u201cthin place\u201d \u2013 a moment when the gap between heaven and earth seems to disappear, and we can trace the footprints of a sovereign God who cares enough to step into the lives of real people.\u00a0
\u00a0
Every conversation you have today, every meeting, every phone call, every \u201cchance encounter\u201d in the grocery, every time you randomly pick up a book or a magazine or channel surf for something worth watching on TV, God is at work connecting the dots in our lives.\u00a0\u00a0
\u00a0
May God give us eyes to see how he\u2019s in the middle of our stories even as we\u2019re living them.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the 1930s, the Soviet Union took aggressive steps to diminish the influence of the Russian Orthodox Church.\u00a0As the dictator of a militantly atheistic regime, Josef Stalin ordered the execution of church leaders or their exile to Siberia. \u00a0Priests were considered enemies of the state.\u00a0 Church buildings were closed, then reopened as museums or propaganda centers for Marxism.\u00a0\u00a0Crosses disappeared.\u00a0 Religious… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1604,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1605,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions\/1605"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}