Chance or Happenstance
After over 31,000 days on this earth, I’ve found, to my satisfaction, answers to some of life’s deeper questions, though many remain just beyond reach. Chief among them: Do all things happen for a reason—predetermined by God’s will—or are we shaped by chance, fate, and the choices we make?
If I lean entirely on faith and attribute everything to God’s will, then I must accept that He orchestrates both joy and suffering, triumph, and tragedy. Yet that doesn’t sit right with me. I cannot credit Him with life’s blessings while absolving Him of its pain. Instead, I believe His promise is simpler and more profound: He doesn’t prevent every hardship, but He stands with us through each one, offering strength when we need it most.
The Weight of Our Choices
I believe we control roughly three-quarters of what happens in our lives through the choices we make—our lifestyle. Drive recklessly, and accidents become likely. Eat without restraint, and health problems will follow. Abuse our bodies with harmful habits, and our years grow shorter, shadowed by suffering. This is fate in its truest sense: the predictable consequence of our actions. Jump into an alligator-infested lake, and your fate is sealed.
The Role of Chance
The remaining quarter is where uncertainty enters. I have dear friends battling Alzheimer’s, a disease likely inherited from family. This, I call chance—because inheritance offers only possibility, not certainty. Not every child of an afflicted parent receives the same burden. There’s a roll of the dice in our very DNA.
When Life Defies Logic
Then there’s happenstance—outcomes that seem random, unearned, inexplicable. I have a friend facing pancreatic cancer, and some might assume lifestyle choices led to this. But they’d be wrong. She lived well, avoided harmful habits, and treated her body with care. Yet here she is, confronting a brutal disease that arrived without invitation or explanation.
Playing the Hand We’re Dealt
Fate may set the stage, and chance may shuffle the deck, but lifestyle is how we play our hand—with grace, intention, and trust in the journey. We honor the life we’ve been given by choosing wisely where we can, accepting humbly what we cannot control, and leaning on something greater than ourselves when the road grows dark.