I found the following paragraph in a fantasy novel I read this week.  I love it, because I think it’s a pretty good illustration of the way God works – of the tension between our choice and His sovereign power.  (The bracketed phrases just keep the references to people consistent to avoid confusion, since there’s not much story context here.)

 

“[Wil] took a deep breath.  Yes, he had made the right decision in going, and he believed that he had made that decision for the right reasons, though they seemed jumbled and out of order to him now.  What bothered him most, he realized suddenly, had nothing to do with the decision itself or the reasons for that decision.  It had to do with Allanon.  Wil would have liked to believe that the decision to go with [Allanon] had been his own.  Yet the more he considered the matter, the more certain he became that the decision had not really been his at all.  It had been Allanon’s.  Oh, he had spoken the words as if they were his own, had spoken them bravely and despite his uncle’s warnings.  Yet he knew that [Allanon] had been able to foresee exactly what it would take to persuade Wil to speak those words, and he had directed the conversation accordingly.  Somehow he had known what [Wil’s] reactions would be, what [his uncle’s] would be, how the two would interact, and how his own comments would influence them.  He had known all this and had used that knowledge accordingly.  Shea Ohmsford had once told Wil that Allanon possessed the ability to see into the mind’s of other men, to know their thoughts.  Wil understood now exactly what his grandfather had been talking about.”

In our lives, it’s not a single conversation that’s under consideration, but the whole of our lives.  God knows exactly what is required to bring about every end He desires, and He shapes the circumstances of our lives in such a way that we will make the decisions He intends for us to make.  We make them.  But we make them because He intended that we would. 😉

(My husband uses the illustration of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. The Bible says that Jesus is the Author and Finisher of our faith, and that all the days ordained for us were written in His book before the first one came to pass, so the image of a book’s character and an author is a reasonable one.  At the end of the story, when Scrooge wakes up and sends the goose, who makes the decision for him to send the goose?  He – Scrooge – does, of course!  But didn’t Charles Dickens decide first?)