Pondering a Pendulum Provides Perception of God’s Providence

This video could be a homily. I love how everything starts out ordered and initially has a sort of understandable pattern. But there comes a point when you are sure that the order has fallen apart and there is only unintelligible random swinging. Except it’s not random. It just takes a bit. Things become intelligible again. All the balls line up and you realize that this was always going to happen even though you couldn’t see it at times. It’s really a nice demonstration of God’s providence in our lives.

Sometimes things may look like disordered chaos, but just hang on. It takes a bit. As surely as the laws of physics dictated that the balls would all have to come back together again, so too the law of God’s love and care for us means that God will bring good out of what looks bad in our lives. Chaos will become ordered. In fact, it turns out that what looked random, with balls going every which way, wasn’t really random at all. It was always ordered. So too with God. It might take until the end of time to get everything back together again, but when you see your life and all of time from the vantage of eternity, you’ll see how nothing in your life was really random. It was always ordered, ordered by God for your good.

Now watch the video again. When you know that the balls have not actually lost their order, you don’t give up. I notice myself looking for and even expecting new subtle patterns to emerge. Is that a new wave forming? Yes! Here it comes! Imagine if we saw our lives that way. If we know that there is order, an unseen law driving everything, then instead of giving up, we are almost excited to look for what new patterns might emerge. So if your life has fallen into what looks like disorder, don’t despair; look for the subtle patterns of God’s love emerging. It’s not random. It just takes a bit.