Mine Son.
As I’ve said before, I felt the re-election of Donald Trump represented an epoch-making change in the cultural landscape, the breaking of the left’s iron monopoly on the news, entertainment and academic apparatus that have helped mis-shape our national imagination. In the moment, I thanked God that the culture war, to which I had devoted some energy over the past twenty years, had produced such a victory.
But almost immediately afterward, sorrowful events began to occur. Dennis Prager, a man as estimable as he is lovable, slipped in the shower and has been largely paralyzed since. Pastor and theologian John MacArthur completed a long and productive life. Charlie Kirk was cut down in youth by an assassin. Voddie Baucham was felled at 56.
Recently, Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila made public what I had known for weeks. Jordan has been suffering from a dangerous disease of uncertain nature. On top of this, Mikhaila’s infant daughter has been struck by terrifying health emergencies.
“To be perfectly honest, I think a lot of this is spiritual,” Mikhaila wrote. “It’s been one thing after another in an otherworldly type of way.”
Bad things happen, of course, and the mind organizes events into meaning, sometimes a meaning they don’t really have. But I was moved to remark on X that I too had wondered whether these events were part of some spiritual pattern. X being X, I was immediately greeted with snide comments like, “No. It’s just coincidence. Sorry.” A perfectly respectable opinion in itself, but rendered clownish by its certainty.
“God does not play dice with the world,” said Albert Einstein. He was rejecting the emerging science of quantum physics because of its seemingly irrational assertions. Personally, I think he was right in his premise but wrong in his conclusion. That is, the world really does make sense to the human mind — a fact miraculous in itself. But therefore, when we discover things that don’t make sense, it simply becomes incumbent on us to search for the sense of them.
God certainly does not play dice with the world, but he might play chess. I have often reflected on the youthful deaths of the second generation of Romantic poets — Keats, Shelley and Byron, all gone before forty. If such revolutionary geniuses had lived, would it have skewed or delayed the onset of the Victorian retrenchment? Did God remove those pieces from the board to allow history to unfold as he desired?
There is, as you know, an inlet outside my house. I watch it from my windows. I see turtles gather meditatively on half a log, while ducks politely cluster on the other half. I see snow-white egrets drop from heaven like angels, and herons stalk the shallows like fisherman kings. I cannot help but feel that I am watching an imagination express its nature in a language I can appreciate but cannot understand.
It makes me wonder if all creation is merely the dreams of God.
Love, Dad
Of course the recent events are spiritual. That does not necessarily mean attack. God may just be stacking His deck with the recalling of MacArthur, Dobson, Kirk, & Baucham. Though they leave giant holes in the fabric of social issues, even Christianity, that is our thing and not necessarily God's thing. I strongly suspect that the things those men are doing for the kingdom far and away exceed what they were doing here. And now there is room for others to step out. God was not surprised by these events; there was no "rats! Kirk is dead. Did not see that coming." Everything fits seamlessly into his chess game. We have a part to play sure. It may be small. Most of us are the guy with 2 bags of talents and not 5. And yet God was equally pleased with both of their efforts. Instead of woe is me we need to see opportunities to step up into our faith.
This convergence of tragic events has been on my mind much lately. Such moral giants of the world dimming or going out. It sure seems like Satan is having a field day. Although maybe it makes it more incumbent for us little people to step up in our own God-given ways to bring more light into the world.