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For God is not a God of disorder but of peace…
- I Corinthians 14:33

To roughly describe a chaotic system, one could say that it is predictable over a short period of time but unpredictable over a longer period of time. A good example from our everyday lives is traffic patterns. We can usually predict how long it will take us to get from our home to, say, the nearest grocery store because it is a short distance and we know what the traffic usually looks like around this time of day. Once we start looking further ahead or choosing more distant destinations, however, it becomes nearly impossible to make accurate predictions. The reason for this, put simply, is that we do not have the ability to measure all the little pieces of the system. We don’t know if someone is going to be driving on balding tires over nails, have a blowout, and hit a telephone pole right before we get on the road to the grocery store but we can loosely predict that somewhere on I-64 there will be at least one accident right before rush hour that will probably also cause a follow-up accident among rubber necking drivers.

Fortunately, God is a God of order, He is watching over the details, and He has a plan that accounts for everything in the grand chaotic system that is your life. It may look random or cruelly unfair at times but Jesus promised us that a loving God carefully watches over us (Matt. 10:29-31). From our limited perspective, we are surrounded by chaos but we serve a God that can measure and track every detail and is working all things for our ultimate good (Romans 8:28).