Rubik's Cube Reality

Over the years, I have had many conversations with people concerning God's Will. Usually, these conversations have been couched in terms of trying to discern what God's Will is for their lives, sometimes in broad general terms, but more often in terms of specific decisions or directions they should take.

I have always been able to relate to these questions, because for many years in my youth I wondered the same about my own life. What did God want me to do with my life? Should I become a biologist or an actor? Did God want me to go into the ministry instead? (That decision won out, but I have never been certain that it was God's absolute and immutable will for my life.) For years, I told people that I was waiting for God to drop a golden scroll at my feet that would lay out in clearly defined terms just what I was supposed to do. Until then, I perceived that I was stumbling around in the dark, following my own best guesses. 

Of course, the problem with that line of thinking that it presumes there is only one course of action for my life. It is the "God Has a Plan for Your Life" approach that you find in evangelical tracts or popular books. Don't get me wrong. I believe it is vitally important for everyone to find purpose and meaning in life. But I've come to question strongly that there is one purpose or one plan tailored to each person. 

Think of it this way: 

• One way to look at God’s Will is as if it was like flipping a coin: heads or tails, yes or no, do this or do that. This fits in well with extremely binary ways of thinking, black or white, good or bad, sin or righteousness, right or wrong, obedience or disobedience, on-track or off-track, Christian or non-Christian (or even anti-Christian), and so on. There is one path in life laid out for each person, and you discern it by various forms of augury or fortune-telling. Some people pray for a sign, and then go out to look for it. Maybe they open the Bible randomly and read. Or they look for some image or object or word to appear three times in close succession. Some practice "laying out a fleece before the Lord." They look for a sign that they define asking God to do something unusual or nearly miraculous to show them what to do. All these practices are not far-removed from looking at sheep entrails or tossing bones in a bowl.
• Another way to look at God's Will is to expand that idea a bit and look at God’s Will as if it was rolling a die or pair of dice: maybe this, maybe that, maybe something else. Several options are laid out and tested in various ways. You can list pros and cons for each, costs and benefits, obstacles and avenues. This is not a bad way to
  
  discern an appropriate direction in a situation of multiple options, but I'm not convinced it is a good way to describe what God's Will looks like or how it even operates.
• I have come to believe that the best description of God’s Will is to view as a Rubik’s Cube. You remember a Rubik’s cube, don’t you? It was invented in 1974 by a Hungarian professor, Rubik Ernő, who taught at the Budapest College of Applied Arts. It is a cube in which each face of the cube is a different color, and each face is made up of smaller cubes. It is constructed so that you can twist the cube into a large number of different combinations of smaller cubes on the faces of the large cube. People have calculated that the original 3x3x3 Rubik’s cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, or 43 quintillion. And if you get larger Rubik’s cubes with more cubes on each face, the number increases astronomically!

I believe that God is the Holder of All Possibilities and Potentialities. When we try to discern God’s Will, God comes to us holding a Rubik’s Cube of possibilities. We take the cube and twist it, and God looks at that and says, “Very interesting. Let’s see what happens with this.” God then comes along with each one of us to explore the results of our decisions, and how we creatively engage the world. We keep turning the face of the Rubik’s Cube, God keeps saying, “Very interesting. Let’s see what happens with this,” and so the universe, the earth, human civilizations, and our individual lives all arise out of the constant play of these Rubik’s Cube-like choices and possibilities. God's Will acts to establish this exponentially mind-boggling array of potentialities and possibilities that await our choosing and application.

Those are the parameters. Are there any perimeters to these choices? What comes to mind immediately are things such as the Ten Commandments for those in the Judaic-Christian traditions, the Golden Rule found in various forms in most of the World's religions, and so on. One of my favorite perimeters defining the field of God's Will is Micah 6:8: 

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; 

 and what does the Lord require of you 

but to do justice, and to love kindness, 

 and to walk humbly with your God?

Perhaps the most advanced field in which to play is this one described by Rumi:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
doesn’t make any sense. (English translation by Coleman Barks.)

Yes, come. I'll meet you there. And bring your Rubik's Cube.