Editor’s Note: The following appears in Good Faith Magazine’s October-December 2026 issue. Good Faith Magazine is a free resource for all Good Faith Advocates. In addition to articles on various aspects of faith, our print publication includes Bible study curriculum for individuals and small groups.
Believing in Magic
I served a church in Kansas City for fifteen years and, as in many churches, we had several multigenerational families, most of which included three generations. But we also had an exceedingly rare five-generation family. Pastor Kathy, my long-serving colleague, was the “middler” in that extended family system. Her father and stepmother were active members, and her two daughters were active as well. But Julia, her father’s mother, was 95 years old and active. Additionally, Kathy’s two daughters each had children of their own.
The whole family was a delight, quick-witted and with a very sharp sense of humor. Julia, the family matriarch, asked Kathy one day a question about faith, since her granddaughter was a minister and theologically educated. (Who else do you go to when you need to ask a long-wondered question about God?)
“Do you have to believe in the hocus-pocus to be a Christian?”
Julia had been a Christian for nearly a century and came to the point where she felt free to ask her minister granddaughter a question of true depth. Being nearly a hundred years old is a vantage point of clarity, as the far horizon now looms as the near horizon. Why not ask your question while you’ve got time? There was no need to specify what the hocus-pocus was, as the question seemed to presume it was in the eye of the beholder. In many churches, the answer is very specific, and besides, such a question would be considered verboten where curious theological thinking is tightly controlled.
Explaining the Unexplainable
I’d like to nibble around the edges of a topic I’ve thought about in the discussion about how we think about what happens to us and our relationship with God when the unthinkable happens. The unthinkable includes all those events or occasions that occur when life happens. The unthinkable can be tragic, or it can be ecstatic. Most of us live meekly between the good and the bad, there in the middle ground, hoping nothing too bad or maybe even anything too good happens. We make our peace in a manageable middle.
If you’re like me, you’ve been raised on a diet of explanations we tell ourselves when such things happen to us. There are multiple words for the explanations we give — God’s will, fate, providence, determinism, or divine happenstance. All those words imply God is behind the scenes, pulling the strings of our lives, orchestrating this or that, throwing down in our path some unimaginable event we have to deal with, maybe on occasion even pulling our bacon out of the fire when we get in trouble. Think about all the prayers of desperation we’ve uttered to ask God to help us! (Some of you even pray for a parking spot near the church doors.) We have long held in our thinking that God is busy, constantly attending to us and monitoring what goes on in life.
Is that the only way we can describe what’s going on? What do we do with all those instances where these good terms don’t cut it? What do we do when those words aren’t anywhere close to being true?
Another Option
I think we need one more category. What about luck? (Most are smart or cynical enough to ask the qualifier, “Do you mean good luck or bad luck?”)
I read a fascinating story a while back that was told at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Jacqueline Novogratz, the CEO of the Acumen Fund, an international organization that raises funds for worldwide development causes, shared how she once sensed a deep, life-changing call to this important work.
When Jacqueline was twelve, her Uncle Ed gave her a blue ski sweater. She said it was made “of soft blue wool, with stripes on the sleeves and an African motif across the front — two zebras walking in front of a snow-capped mountain.” At the time, she had never even heard of Mount Kilimanjaro; she only knew the sweater made her dream of places far away. That beautiful sweater made her feel so wonderful she wore it often and everywhere. She even wrote her name on the tag to ensure it would be hers forever.
But when she turned fourteen, her young body was taking womanly form, and the scene on the sweater took a different form, too. One of the older high school boys made a lewd and cruel comment to her in a voice so loud everyone in the room heard him. She was so embarrassed she went home, immediately threw the sweater away, and demanded to know from her mother why she would ever allow her to wear it. They left the sweater at the Goodwill Store, and Novogratz buried this as one of those painful adolescent memories we try hard to forget.
One day, twelve years later and in her mid-20s, she was jogging in the hills of Kigali, a small village in Rwanda. About 20 feet in front of her was a little boy wearing her sweater, or at least a sweater identical to the one she gave away. She thought to herself, “This cannot be!” She ran up to him, grabbed the surprised child, and spun him around so she could look at the label inside the back collar. Sure enough, there was her name.
The world is small indeed when a teenage girl’s sweater can show up a dozen years later halfway around the globe in such an obscure African village. How does life make these kinds of bizarrely unique connections, as though life itself is beckoning us to get involved in a wider world?
Meaning-Making
In Christian circles, we are raised on a steady, unexamined line of thinking some call determinism. That’s the view that God “orders our steps,” and we believe God makes things happen or not happen according to God’s unquestioned and unsearchable will. Those events we see as good for us are not the problem. It’s those events that are against us that we question. That belief is fine as long as you don’t examine it too closely.
The Bible gives a version of this thinking, but even it is not as closely drawn as we assume, with God in control of all things and orchestrating the divine path we all follow.
But what happens when that idea doesn’t hold up? Think about Job, perhaps the oldest story in the Hebrew Bible, when his house collapsed and killed all his children. Then one tragedy after another hit him, as if the dominoes of life were all falling according to some divine design. (Of course, we remember Job’s reversal from a life of blessing to a life of cursing was the result of a divine wager between God and the Evil One. Read Job to see how all this took place.)
Are we pawns to the mysterious whims of the divine? Or are we living a life in which all kinds of experiences are ours to experience, and when they happen, is God there with us or not, no matter what?
We are a meaning-making people. Morris West, author of The Clowns of God, wrote, “… we are creatures who walk in two worlds and trace upon the walls of our cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of our spiritual pilgrimage.” We take life as it comes, good or bad, and make meaning of it all.
A Providential Incident of Luck
As an undergrad at Baylor University, I had a date with a young coed who was in the Baylor Religious Hour Choir. I asked this beautiful, talented young woman to go out on the same night the choir was having a party, so she invited me to go there with her. I knew a good number of the choir members, and it was fun. We were in the Activities Building of the First Baptist Church of Waco, and we all piled into a large room where we were watching a movie. I was sitting on the floor next to my date when a sock-footed young woman behind me began tickling me with her feet. I vaguely knew who she was because she was a widely known singer. She didn’t know me from Adam and didn’t care, except that I laughed at her tickles.
The next week I didn’t call my date from the week before, the beautiful, talented young singer; I called the sock-footed singer. She still did not know who I was, but she wanted to go out on a date, and so she agreed to go with me. Later I found out she only learned my name by hearing other students call it out. A year and a half later, I married this sock-footed woman, and we’ve been together for over 50 years. This is a story I vividly remember, and she only smiles at the memory, as she had no idea at the time about the dominoes she tipped over five decades ago when we were students.
Was it providence that brought us together? Absolutely.
Was it fate that we found one another? Was it God’s will? Oh, yes.
Was it luck? No doubt in my mind.
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Aauthor of Living a Narrative Life, Exploring the Power of Stories (Smyth & Helwys, 2019).