Random chance never produced anything but brokenhearted lottery players hoping that one day their ship will come in. Yeah, maybe one in a billion hits it big, but what about the rest who don’t.  It can be a hard pill to swallow if you think there should be more.  Especially if all your life you’ve been told, or you think, you’re somehow special.

It’s kind of ironic if you think about it, on one hand, we praise our kids and bring them up teaching them that they are special, and have value and meaning, while on the other hand all along the way implying that they are not.  What I mean by this is, that we teach them in our schools they are just a higher evolutionary being whose genes and molecules have somehow won the equivalent of the genetic lottery and placed them on top of the evolutionary food chain.  It’s no wonder kids are confused, and they are now exhibiting signs of anxiety and mental paralysis because of it.  How can you be special on one hand and have value and purpose, while on the other hand, be a random accident?

If you approach life with this view of the world and everything that goes along with it, it will never make sense to you.  Evil theoretically should not exist, abortion shouldn’t even raise an eyebrow, homosexuality should be shrinking and not growing because of their natural inability to reproduce, and compassion for strangers and the less fortunate should be non-existent.

Now I’m not advocating these positions, but if you’re going to be intellectually honest, these positions would be the norm in an evolutionary world where biology is the only determinate factor, however,  this is not what we see!  This strictly biological explanation of life we’ve been spoon fed for generations does not reflect the reality of what is actually going on in the world.

The needless violence and harsh treatment humans subject one another to on a daily basis offends most of us deeply.  We are troubled by it and yet we don’t merely write it off as survival of the fittest.  Why?  Why do we on one hand demand boundless and unlimited freedom for all to think an feel and do what we want, while on the other hand seek justice for supposed wrongs and perceived evils?

If you think about it, we at this very moment in time are the most comfortable and technically savvy humans have ever been, and with over 40,000 suicides annually according to the CDC’s latest statistics, we are also the most miserable.  Why?  Why hasn’t science and technology fixed these problems yet?

Because life is not merely a biological accident, or evolutionary mishap that randomly exploded onto the scene billions of years ago, but rather a well thought out plan of a creator and a designer.   Life is a celebration of purpose, but really more than that, it’s a struggle, by design, both of and for humanity.

You see, this Creator is smart, really really smart.  He could have created us like the dogs to enthusiastically wag our metaphorical tails every time he interacts with us.  He could of designed us to blindly follow him wherever he may go, but this Creator had a much grander plan for you and I that was going to take some risk.

That risk of course involves “free will.”  Our Creator knows that if you and I are ever going to truly experience love on it’s highest level, we cannot be programmed to do it, rather we must be allowed to choose it on our own.  The risk however is that the other side of that coin is that we can also choose to hate.  However, the greater the risk, the greater the reward.  This is a concept that we should all understand.

While it is satisfying for us to come home to Fido’s wagging tale, it doesn’t hold a candle to the love of a fellow human being who has chosen to love us because of their own free will.  This special love of someone who thinks your special too is the most satisfying of all human relationships.

The training ground for developing this free will is LIFE!

Life is the furnace that forges human character.  Our free will is being hammered out on the anvil of affliction to shape us into who we become.  God has given us an objective standard to follow and has instructed us that, if followed, it will go well with us,  if not…, not so well.  The choice is ours, “free will.”

Each day from then on throughout human history, we see this being played out.  When God told Adam and Eve that their disobedience would bring about death, they really had no idea what that even meant, but we however, have the benefit of all human history to see the consequences of man’s free will and deliberate disobedience to the standard God has set out.

God, in his infinite wisdom had a plan from the very beginning as to how this was all going to go.

We just don’t happen to like it, but as they say…..

“That’s life!”