Watching the universe

On a church marquee the other day, I saw this quip: "We trust God with the universe. Why not trust him with our lives?" Well and good, but to me it highlights the problem.

We don't trust God with the universe. The universe is so big and unknown and beyond us, that we largely ignore it. Have you ever lost sleep over the force of gravity possibly failing in the night? Have you ever fretted that the sun will not rise and made plans for what you intend to do about it? The universe is completely beyond us, so we do not have to actively turn it over to anyone's care. We ignore it, and it seems to plod along fine.

Similarly, I think many of us ignore our lives. Things happen that are beyond our control, and it frustrates us and we don't know what to do. So we get busy or we shut down or we talk louder or we take some action and then tell ourselves that we have control. It seems beyond us to actually fix the problems that hit us: a parent with cancer, a spouse that dies, a child that chooses badly. Just as we don't actively choose to trust God with the universe, we don't choose to trust him with our lives. We cry out as victims or we create the illusion of control.

Perhaps I am being too critical of the poor marquee. Looking at the universe does cause me to marvel. God, the creator, tilted our planet just so, placed us just so far from the sun, caused the earth to rotate, put just this amount of water and just this amount of oxygen--he seems pretty good at details. He also seems pretty good at cranking out a working design. And he notices all sorts of things, from subatomic forces to insects crucial to a food chain. I have observed that mankind is not as good at producing a working system (for example, our cars with their struggling infrastructure on one hand and their environmental impact on the other). We're not so good at handling details, like the chemo that destroys good and bad cells at once, or the insecticide that kills an essential element of an ecosystem while trying to fix a problem for our farmers.

If I look at the universe and conclude, hey, God's pretty good at the job of being in charge, and then look at man and think, hey, we're not so good at running things--maybe I would choose to trust him. Maybe I would choose to believe he notices all the details of my life, from the subatomic to the motion of large bodies. Maybe he left the universe as a message to me, that he is big enough and good enough to be trusted with my life.