SPEAKING OF GOD'S WILL ...

 James 4:13-14a - "Now listen, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.' Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow."

This was the second passage of Scripture I ever memorized. I had just finished my junior year in high school; it was June of 1985. With the encouragement of my sweet Sunday School teachers, Tom and Marcia Kuhn, I was reading through the New Testament a chapter at a time. It must have been June when I came to James because I remember it was a week or two after the car wreck on May 25th, the day my friend Phil died. 

I had seen him within the last hour of his life, but of course I had no way of knowing. It was a Saturday night and I was coming home from a bike ride. Phil was driving down my street - we happened to live on the local teenage "cruise loop" - and he pulled over to say hi. We made small talk and then he pulled away from the curb and continued down the loop.

Not long after our conversation, Phil was speeding home on Old Cemetery Road and hit a deep pothole. He overcorrected the wheel and sent the car into a tree. He was going fast enough that the impact tore the vehicle into three sections. When the wreck was later discovered, it was clear that Phil and his teenage neighbor in the passenger seat had both died instantly. 

4:14b - "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes."

When I came across this passage in James a few days after Phil's funeral, I thought about my final conversation with him and found that I could not for the life of me remember what exactly we had talked about for those couple of minutes at the curbside. The only thing I did remember was what I said as Phil drove away that night: "See you later."

Over 35 years later, I still catch myself on occasion ending a conversation with "See you later", and gulp a bit inside. 

"You do not even know what will happen tomorrow."

James finishes his thought on this particular topic with a command to those who say "Today or tomorrow we're going to ...", and his command is this: 

"Instead, you ought to say, 'If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.'" 

Believe me, I got James's point. Saying "If it is the Lord's will" is not some magic phrase to ward off sudden tragedy. Rather it is an acknowledgement that ultimately God is calling the shots and God's will may be very different from our own. Sometimes He even allows tragedy to come. We can't assume anything.