Have you seen "Man of Steel"?  I saw it for the first time last night and, despite being somewhat stunned by the immense amount of destruction that filled the final fight scenes (as did my wife, who wondered aloud, "Who's going to clean it up?"), found a couple of scenes worth thinking about.
     The first scene occurs toward the end of the movie.  Jor-El (Superman's father), tells the bad guy, General Zod, why he and his wife defied every social and political convention on Krypton to enable her to have a naturally born child (every other child is "developed" through a sophisticated and selective cloning process).  "We wanted," he said, "to invite chaos and confusion."
     Anyone who has raised a child knows full well that it frequently involves chaos and confusion (and many other things as well!).  Few parents, however, regret having their children, chaos, confusion, and all.
     So do most of us feel about existence.  Most of us would rather have life as it is, problems, difficulties, joys, and all, than a life in which nothing ever changes and everything is perfectly ordered.  Most of us would rather have the chaos.
      But chaos is hard.  Chaos means that we walk a tenuous line between ignorance and certainty, always trying to balance what we know with what we do not.  Chaos and not knowing can be frustrating, but knowing everything, at least in this life, takes living out of existence.  What would life be if we already knew, absolutely and fully, what it is?
     The other scene that struck me was when a young Clark, trying desperately to understand why he was so different from everyone else, asked his mother, "Did God do this to me?"  How many of us have asked this question, too?  How many of us have wondered about the activity or intentions of God in us?  Nearly everyone on this planet.  When we reach the end of our knowledge, we often want to ask the one whom we think sees beyond it.
     Yet as most of us know, when we ask, we do not always receive a reply.  But we ask anyway.  We're like the writer of Psalm 116, who told God, "I believe, therefore I spoke."  We believe even if we know we may not see.  We believe because we know that what we do see can only explain what it is, not necessarily what it means.
     As I close today, I say that because I will be backpacking for a while, trekking through the mountains of the American West, I will not be updating this blog for a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading--and keep thinking!