Sometimes, the commonplace objects of life provide useful analogies or descriptors for more complex, abstract concepts. Consider the following examples:
- Using physical coins, pebbles, blocks, etc. to teach children addition and subtraction.
- Comparing electrons and their movements to that of the planets in the solar system.
- Calling a person “like a cat” and bringing to mind connotations of fastidiousness, aloofness, pickiness, wiliness, etc. in far less time than it would take to explain all of those descriptors.
In a like manner, imagine, now, a worn but beautiful, well-beloved rope. Think perhaps of Samwise Gamgee’s elven rope in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
The rope has many strands all twisted together into something considerably more durable and pleasing than the individual parts. It is rugged and rough in some areas up close; from afar, it looks far sleeker.
The world and life are like the entire rope, woven together into a magnificent story by God. We get to be the strands or threads. We make independent decisions, to an extent, insofar as they are part of the larger rope and larger plan.
God does not force us to do anything. We choose. It happens within a partnership though. In 1 Corinthians 3:9, the Apostle Paul writes that we are “laborers together with God.” The fact that we work with and co-labor with God, the omnipotent designer of the universe, while holding a sort of freedom, makes so little sense to us finite mortals (or at least, to me), but that does not mean it is false. Some things are mysteries.
As we travel through the “rope”–through life–we take part in and form the rope itself, even as the rope itself winds along. We choose as He chooses and plans. Thus we are free and determined, in a paradox unthinkable, but nevertheless marvelous.
It is easy to despair at life or throw up our hands while life swirls around us, seemingly (and truthfully, to an extent) out of our control. It is easy to blame God for every evil thing that happens or declare that we are powerless, “so why even try?” I know that I have swung on such a pendulum before, throbbing between a “seize the day” mentality eager to accomplish what I can under the blessings of God, and–in almost the same breath–a resentful disdain of the world, the Creator, and the unmanageable roadblocks besetting me that I believe are God’s fault, for who else has as much power as He does?
When life turns difficult or chaotic, when we do not know how life can work out–when we run into a particularly jagged and ragged strand or fiber of existence–we often say that we have “reached the end of the rope.” At that point, we have no idea how to continue, left to our own devices, plans, and resources, and would argue that there is no escape and no plan at work.
That may all seem to be so, “at the end of the rope.”
But, I would argue that reaching the ends of ourselves and the end of the rope are not reasons to despair utterly. I would ask you to consider, as I now have, what the end of the rope means if we, in our humble human lives, make up the strands and God’s overarching Providence is the complete rope.
All ropes have ends, to be sure, but ours need not be an unhappy one. In fact, we can be sure that the ultimate end of our rope is good. For, at the end of our rope, the Rope, is God.
All of our lives fit within God’s plan, as do all our trials. We have the privilege that all of our choices are real choices; they simply are not the only choices and the only factors affecting the way things turn out.
God will weave all things together and make all things new, and we will see Him at the end of time.