Connecting the Dots
A Hope-Inspired Life
by
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Chapter One
Hope: Trusting God to Connect the Dots
Life is like an elaborate, incomplete connect-the-dots picture. We cannot see how all the dots will connect. We have some bits and pieces of a picture, but there are lots of unconnected dots and still billions of dots we haven’t even seen yet. We can still worry about how the kids will turn out, if our loved ones will return from the war in one piece or at all, whether this rough patch in our marriage will end in divorce, and what the results of the medical test will be. We do not know with any reliable precision what will happen next. We believe that God wants children to be happy and well fed, and yet many of them are abused and starving. The dots are not connected. In fact, we can worry about whether they will be connected at all. But following Jesus means that we take the next step in life trusting that, somehow, God will connect the dots. Hope inspires us to keep moving forward, because we believe that God is connecting the dots through our faithful, obedient actions right now. He is not finished yet, but he is at work.
To put this another way, following Jesus means believing that God gets involved in our earthly lives in a decisive way. He is not just a distant spectator, even a passionate one. God is by our side and has our back. The Creator of fields and skies, the author of oceans and galaxies, the mover of tides and tectonic plates knows the number of hairs on your head and grieves when a sparrow falls. Even more astonishingly, we Christians say that God is out in front of us. He guards us and guides us. He has a vision for our lives. He will make that vision a reality when we rely upon him. Christians sometimes describe God’s involvement in our lives by saying that God has a plan and that his will governs the universe. I use the metaphor in this book of connecting the dots. God connects the dots of our lives—and of his whole creation—into a meaningful, beautiful picture. Theologians call this the Sovereignty of God.
God’s Sovereignty gives us hope. Even when life seems to be flying apart at the seams, our trust in God to connect the dots motivates us to take the next step. What puzzles many is the apparent contradiction between God’s Sovereignty and our freedom to choose. Some thinkers assume that if God connects the dots, we can have no freedom make choices about the shape of our lives. So before dwelling more fully God’s vision for our lives as the source of our hope, let’s turn first to a discussion of how God connects the dots for us and still leaves room for us to make choices and to take responsibility for our actions.
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About the Book
Your life matters, and it matters on an infinite and eternal scale. That may sound like a bold claim.
Maybe you spend most of your day behind a desk or chauffeuring children or repeating one of a thousand ordinary routines. Nothing about your daily life seems world-changing or history-making to you. A life-crushing loss or a humiliating setback may leave you feeling that your world is irreparably broken. Chronic illness or a stalled career may have you wondering whether you have anything truly significant to offer. You may have reached the pinnacle of success, and now you find yourself wondering, “Is this all that there is?”
Nevertheless, your life matters. That is the core message of Christian hope. This book is devoted to helping its readers not only to understand the concept of hope, but more importantly to draw upon hope as the powerful force that inspires our daily lives.
Christian hope is far more than wishful thinking or a positive attitude. Optimism in all its forms places its bets on what we humans can accomplish. By contrast, hope is rooted in what Christ has already achieved on the cross and what God promises to accomplish for us in the future.
God connects the dots of our lives.
About the Author
Jake Owensby is the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana. Previously, Jake served as the dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Shreveport, Louisiana, and led congregations in Florida, Alabama, and Missouri. Before answering the call to ordained ministry, Jake was a philosophy professor and taught classes in the history of philosophy and a variety of introductory and advanced topics. Jake has been married to his wife, Joy, for almost thirty years. They have a daughter in college, a son in the United States Marine Corps, a son in high school, and golden retriever who enjoys a comfortable retirement. Alexandria, Louisiana, is their home.