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Berserk
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Matthew,
Like you, I live in New York state and had a deer leap on to my hood while I was driving about 45 mph. This happened 3 years ago and caused 3 thousand dollars of damage. I thought I must have killed it, but, like you, I found no trace of it afterwards. What is almost amusing is that I was on my way to an ecumenical Thanksgiving service I had helped organize. (Incidentally, the service was held at the Catholic church where Oklahoma bomber, Tim McVeigh, had served as an altar boy.) When my car limped in to the church, I was in an inappropriately grumpy mood!
As for your main topic, from a biblical perspective, the forces of chaos and divine lifescript interact in a mysterious way that does not permit a clear line to be drawn between "accidents" and predestined events. But let me share an apparently unplanned and cruel chain of events that infuse your question with poignancy. I've shared these incidents once before but will put a slightly different spin on them this time.
A couple of years ago I ran a prayer meeting that Eleanor usually attended faithfully. She was a deeply caring woman whose husband Nick had died suddenly of a heart attack as a young man, leaving her to raise 3 children alone. She would call and send comfort cards to everyone she knew was sick or otherwise in bad shape.
Two years ago, I left her church and the prayer meetings ended. Last year, while she was attending a friend's funeral, her son, Nick, Jr., hung himself in her home. Nick, Jr. was distraught over a failed marriage. Eleanor came home sad at her friend's death only to find her son at the end of a rope!
Several months later, I finished a long walk and saw a note taped to my car's windshield. It informed me that Eleanor had just been killed in a fiery car wreck. Her burned-out car contained the remains of comfort cards she had recently purchased to send out to hurting people.
I was angry at God for allowing her final year to be so horrid and could see no divine providence operating here at all.
A few months later, I ran into her sister in a local restaurant and joined her for lunch. She shared some remarkable incidents that made me rethink my perspective on Eleanor's fate. (1) A week before Eleanor died, she had a dream in which her house was filled with deceased relatives. Her husband came down the stairs and asked, "Honey, do you want to dance?" Eleanor loved to dance and would ordinarily never turn down such an offer from her husband. But she seemed to sense that this was an invitation to cross to the afterlife. So she replied, "Oh no, I'm not ready for that."
(2) Remarkably, the clock in her living room had stopped at the time of her own death as well as at the time of her husband's and son's deaths. Stopped clocks are a common phenomenon at the time of death. Most notable is a famous incident involving astral adept Emanuel Swedenborg. When ES was attending a party, some of the visitors decided to make sport of his reputation as a mystic by derisively challenging him: "Which one at this party will die first?" Without hesitation, ES declared that Olaf would die at 4:45 A.M. the next morning. Needless to say, this prediction removed the smirks from some of the faces present. Olaf's servant contacted ES the next morning and reported Olaf's death just as ES had predicted. As in the case of Eleanor, her husband, and her son, the clock had stopped at the moment of Olaf's death--4:45 AM just as ES had predicted.
In my view, Eleanor's precognitive dream and ES's prediction indicate that the deaths in question were is some sense predestined after all. The stopped clocks indicate that their time was simply up. But I would add this qualification.
A year or two before the suicide of Eleanor's son, I felt a need to ask her and the other members of our prayer group to pray for the physical protection of all present. My impulse to do this was powerful, though it seemed a bit paranoid after the prayer meeting. In retrospect, I feel that I was divinely prompted to do this to protect her and perhaps others present from an ongoing threat to life.
I'm upset that the prayer meeting was cancelled after I left the church. I'm convinced that if it had continued and if prayer was periodically offered for the protection of the group's members and their families, Nick's suicide and Eleanor's fatal crash could have been averted or postponed! In other words, I'm convinced that certain predestined events can be changed by prayer, faith, and love.
Of course, this raises the difficult question of how long the warrantee lasts on our prayers. But an important mistranslation in many versions of Matthew 7:7 needs to be recognized. Most versions quote Jesus' admonition thus "Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find." The more accurate translation is: "Keep on asking and you will receive; keep on seeking and you will find." The New Living Translation, one of the best, has it right.
Don
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