c. 1999 Religion News Service

UNDATED _”We need more boxes!”says my wife.

The first three dozen boxes are filled. My son goes out for another stack. My parents, visiting from Indiana, wrap our wedding china in paper towels. My wife clears shelves.

I help pack, but mostly I continue my preparations for an upcoming business trip to Italy. The clock ticks on both fronts.

If I had had foresight _ any glimpse of the future _ I would never have scheduled our lives this way. This is too much. But who among us can see around the bend and into tomorrow?

On a recent walk I tried to give my middle son a glimpse of overseas travel. In a month, he will make his first trip to Europe. I described navigating Newark International, managing time on an 8-hour flight, changing planes overseas, obtaining local currency, how to call me if he runs into trouble.

He listened intently, because the first time at anything produces stress and stirs curiosity. But I knew these glimpses were merely a record of what I had experienced and no predictor of what will befall him. My main messages: send me e-mail daily, here is my mobile number, and remember your passport.

We live in the gap between passive and aggressive, between submission and control, between taking what comes and shaping the future, between responding and planning, between the piece of road we stand on and the journey that extends beyond sight.

The more history we study, the more we think we comprehend historical forces. The more technology we obtain, the more control we think we have over history. In fact, we have little control at all.

People’s behavior defies reason; events are largely unexpected; schedules change and collide. Life is like those hand-games with little silver balls one is supposed to steer into slots. One time we can do it; next time the flow of gravity is too chaotic.

Over the years, many Christians have wanted faith to be about control. They want prayer to shape future events. They want righteous behavior to guarantee successful outcomes. They want the ancient stories of Scripture to do more than describe what God did once, but to say, definitively, what God will do next.

They want to see a direct line of causation, as if the piling of stone upon stone, or good work upon good work, could be more than a faithful response to today, but the pattern of tomorrow.

I suppose that is why flood, famine and folly are so surprising to us: we thought we had written such foolishness out of the script. That’s also why we fall away: if God can’t make tomorrow happen the way I want, or the way he wants, then what good is he?

When Jesus breathed on his disciples and gave them his Holy Spirit, he didn’t confer control over the future. He gave them what he himself had: strength for the journey, a number to call, as it were, when they got into trouble.

He taught them how to walk the road, not how to see around the bend. He taught them how to greet fellow travelers, not how to screen out surprise. The”power”he gave them wasn’t control, but the capacity to be faithful. Faith isn’t a way to escape the essential chaos of reality, but to walk boldly into it.

The power to think theologically isn’t a way to define reality, to set boundaries, or to fit God into a straight-line projection. Theology can do little more than document the past and make guesses about the future _ guesses, like ancient estimations of the Mediterranean’s flat shape and terrifying edge, that need to be tested and, as often as not, disproved.

The power to act out our theological thinking isn’t a guarantor of tomorrow.

At their best, our faith institutions express gratitude for the day’s journey safely made and offer daily bread for tomorrow’s unknown path. At their worst, they try to limit the number of pilgrims who will walk forward tomorrow, as if God required selectivity.

In neither case does even the finest institution shape the future.

DEA END RNS