The corollary of action

Today, I am parting from my customary comment on the reading of the day and instead, going back one day. That's because I had to think about this one overnight.

Yesterday's OT reading described God's interaction during the initial meeting between Samuel and Saul. As a quick refresher, God told Saul that he would meet the person who would be the future king of Israel as a man wandering from the tribe of Benjamin the next day.

Saul, in his effort to find a pair of donkeys that had strayed from his father's farm, just happened to be the man from the tribe of Benjamin the next day. Samuel meets Saul and the rest, as is so often tritely said, was history.

This is a quickly encapsulated vignette that is not so rare in itself but does raise, as other stories do, implications for our understanding of a moral God.

Obviously, God is described in this story as having His hand in the meeting between Samuel and Saul, as we assume He has His hands in all our lives. But did He cause the donkeys to wander off, so that Saul would happen to be the man from Benjamin that Samuel meets? Did Saul have a date with someone that he had to cancel so he could go find the irksome donkeys? What an aggravation! How many aggravations do we suffer daily that we don't see, initially, God's hands in? If we get into a car wreck, and happen to meet someone who radically changes our lives, does God cause that car wreck? Or does God pick and choose when to interfere in human destiny?

And if He picks when to interfere (causing the donkeys to stray), does He also pick when *not* to interfere (allowing mechanical failure to cause a plane to crash, and refusing to intercede when it may be your relative who is killed in the crash)?

Or did He just know that the donkeys were going to stray, and on that day choose to tell Samuel about it? Wouldn't that still be an action? Because if God acts in our lives, then the corollary of all His actions are His "inactions" to prevent the tragedies around us that are seemingly, seemingly, random.

Or are we supposed to interpret this section as a metaphor for Samuel's desire to choose a tall good-looking hillbilly as his pawn for the King of Israel? And if so, do we then go back to the non-legalistic, deconstructionist view of the bible, following that course of logic back to the destruction of moral authority espoused by the Bible? If we lose the moral authority of the bible, then what text will fill the vacuum that loss leaves behind as the text most closely representing the fundamental moral truth of the universe?

So, thinking about all this overnight, I was left again with the desire to pray and ask God for guidance. It was the fact that I had that desire to seek Him that made me wonder, is that what all this is about, leaving us with the hunger for Him, a hunger we always have but never can fully appease? Isn't that enough for us?

A story about a random set of coincidences reminds us that we are not on a linear path of our lives, but are meandering about instead, and we always need to be on high moral alert for those whom God places in that path.