For those who follow horse racing, you may know that in the Preakness Derby that was run this past Saturday, the heavily favored Orb, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby, lost to another horse.  Much ink was subsequently spilled about why this happened, and much commentary was made that, once again, horse racing will not see a Triple Crown winner this year.
     In the grand picture, such ruminations and speculations seem rather trivial.  But to those who are directly involved in them, they are everything:  horse racing is an international phenomenon, one which stirs up millions upon millions of dollars annually across the globe.  Such millions do of course enable those who race horses to create jobs, of some kind, for those who do not.  They also enable them to research the very best ways to raise a horse to perform to its maximum capacities.
     The central point here, however, is not such things, but that, as Orb's owners learned, what we think and hope will happen often does not.  Life is like that.  We live in a bent and fallen world, one full of unpredictability and caprice.  This is our wonder and motivation, yet it is also our tragedy:  never knowing, fully, what will come next.
     How good it is to know, though, that the world's unpredictability merely serves to reinforce its utter dependency on predictability, that we who deem it to be unpredictable do so because we, whether we know it or not, are beings who understand the world in predictable ways.  We would not know unpredictability unless we were predictable beings, beings who were made in an ordered way.  If we were random beings, we wouldn't know that we were.
     In other words, we must realize that when we insist that we are random or beings we only do so because we are, in the end, anything but random.  We are ordered beings who think in ordered ways. it.  We indeed live in unpredictability, but we only know this because we function with predictability.  Randomness will never be able to say that it is such unless it is rooted in order.
     In his failure to win again, Orb reminds us of how much we must accept that, in the end, we live in an unpredictability that is, oddly enough, predictable.  Chaos theory?  Not really:  we wouldn't know chaos unless we knew order.  And we will not know order unless order, a purposeful and intelligible order, existed before we did.
     Or put another way, God.