Wanting to learn a little more about the reasons for its popularity, I recently read the best selling novel Gone Girl.  While I will not spoil the plot for anyone who has not read the book or seen the movie, I will say that I quickly saw why the book has won so many admirers.  It's very compelling, almost effortlessly pulling the reader into a vortex of intrigue that, in the end, seems tangled--and unfathomable--beyond belief.  It's almost like a page from the Twilight Zone.  We read it, we see it, but we still can't grasp why it happens and why its protagonists do what they do.
     But that's us.  As most of us know, life is inherently unpredictable.  Many upon many people like to think, however, that they can make it thoroughly the opposite.  They believe they can control their destiny, that they can map and implement their life path and story without any dissent or opposition.
     Sometimes they can, at least for a while.  Usually, they cannot.  In a broken world, a bent but nonetheless functioning creation, we try in vain to direct everything.  It's impossible.  Though we can tap into the world's structures and patterns, though we can alter some parts of space and make inroads into time, we cannot eliminate them altogether.  We stumble over our reality.  We trip over ourselves.
     This is really good, actually.  If we mastered (whatever that means) our reality fully, we would have nothing else to be.  We would be in a state of permanent stasis, captives of the veil that falls constantly upon us all, the delicate veil that reminds us, if we listen, that we are more than controlling beings.
     We would miss the bigger truth:  life, and destiny, are much, much larger than what we think or see.  As Jesus told many a listener, "What does it profit a person if she gains the whole world, but loses her soul?"
     Regardless and no matter what, God won't go away.