Recently, I saw the movie Heaven Can Wait.  This movie has appeared in two versions, an old black and white one, and the one that most of us know about, the full color depiction starring Warren Beatty.  For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, it concerns a certain athlete who is taken out of the earth before his time (an angel jumped the gun) but who when it appears that the error cannot be repaired, chooses to take another body.  And the fun commences.
     The point I am making has to do with divine intervention.  Most of us struggle with whether and how God intervenes in our reality, and why and when some people die and not others.  It's hard not to.  So what if, as the movie suggests, the wheels of heaven make a mistake?  What if, as the movie presents, what was planned did not happen as it was supposed to?  Is life really out of control, even for those whom we might think oversee it?
     One would hope not.  If there is a God, one would hope that he is in control.  Why otherwise call him a god?  Yet if God is in control, who are we?
     Even if God is not in control, however, in no way can we fill the void.  Heaven Can Wait depicts a world governed by the simple maxim that, "Everything happens as it is supposed to."  Yet if there is no governance, God, determinism, natural forces and consequences, or not, what does anything really mean?  We're at the mercy of everything we are--and will never understand.
    Yet we remain teleological beings, through and through, purposed to find purpose.  It's a paradox, yet it's true.  Like a personal and living divine:  paradoxical yet the only reasonable way to explain who we are--and why we live.