We are on an airplane headed for Palm Springs to spend a week with our daughter Hanna, her husband Kyle, and three grandkids. We will stay at Indio Springs, a resort with a very nice swimming pool and two golf courses near where We will be staying. I am anticipating that we will have a great time this next week.

Our plane was supposed to depart at 4:00 pm, but it is now 5:00 pm, and we have not yet taken off. The reason is that our plane landed here in Portland an hour late, so naturally, we were an hour late when we took off​. Was it God’s initial will that we took off at 4:00 pm? The flight before us affected our departure time, and we will impact the flight after us.

Let’s pretend that it was God’s primary will that I married Patty Buckner. But she went against God’s will and married Joe Jones. So I could no longer marry Patty Buckner, so I married Patty Burtner instead, who was supposed to marry Zeke Dude. So because one person messed up, the whole world had to slide over one place.

There is an event in the Book of Acts that is similar. Paul gets a message from God saying everyone on the ship will be saved, and then, as some of the men are trying to escape the ship in the storm, Paul says that if they leave the ship, the end of the story, as it were, gets changed.

Acts 27:22 Yet now I urge you to keep up your courage, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship.

Acts 27:30-31 But as the sailors were trying to escape from the ship and had let down the ship’s boat into the sea, on the pretense of intending to lay out anchors from the bow, Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, “Unless these men remain in the ship, you yourselves cannot be saved.”

God is sovereign, but it seems like God gives much freedom to us humans, and as a result, the story often gets messed up, and we also mess up the stories of others as we move over a spot.

Colossians 1:9 For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding.

Paul prays that those in the Colossian church will know God’s will. Obviously, he wouldn’t have prayed for something guaranteed to happen anyway.

All of that is to say that I can choose to live outside the will of God, but everything will go so much better if I know his will and I live it.