Fate or coincidence?
Every person has his own unique set of circumstances in life. From the outset, there are things that are preordained.
I refer to one’s starting position in life when a person is born, and the many things that happen and will happen in the future beyond his or her control.
For example, you may have been born Caucasian, rich, handsome, athletic with a whole set of great genes that give you an edge over most everyone you know.
Or you could have been born a woman in a domineering, harsh, male chauvinistic culture, and you are small, frail, handicapped, plain, and living in some godforsaken place where to have a life that you want is nearly impossible.
In both situations, you hardly had a choice. You were simply born into your situation.
It is painful to see and read about persecuted people, or those who are very sick, handicapped, helpless and extremely poor. I remember the lyrics of a song I learned as a boy that goes, “There but fortune go you or I, you or I,” and I ask why others have circumstances that are so difficult and so different from mine.
Was it simply luck, or what they call “the roll of the dice”? Could it be fate? Karma? Destiny? Are there really such things? I will never know.
I may not understand God’s will and why He allows many people to suffer through lives of want and others to live in abundance. No one can be certain how and why each person’s life is somewhat preordained with his own unique set of circumstances.
More than knowing the answers to how and why, I prefer to think that each person has a mission to fulfill. And the circumstances we find ourselves in play a part in that mission.
Think of the parents, family, community, nationality, social class we were born into. Is it possible that God chose the parents who would give us the set of genes we need to physically meet the challenges of our mission? And think of the place, time and our social standing in society. Could they be crucial or strategic to the mission? Could the moral upbringing, psychological nurturing, and the
