Growing up, my family and I would always watch the hit T.V. show MacGyver. It was a fun show for a kid, and we enjoyed how he would always get out of huge pickles. There would always be these moments in the show that I would turn around to face my parents and ask, “How did MacGyver know that he (the bad guy) was going to do that?! My brother, who probably got it from my dad, would say, “It’s in the script.” That statement would yank me out of the MacGyver universe and into reality. That statement would help me realize that normal people don’t react that quickly unless they are trained and know what is going to happen.

Who Needs Chemistry Anyway?

Darn, in life we need a script to know what’s going to happen. I draw great comfort in light of this next paragraph that Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver) probably didn’t know a lick of Chemistry either. Why? Because it was in the script. As an aside, I wanted to be like MacGyver so bad I took Chemistry thinking I would be ready to help, protect, and serve like MacGyver. Instead, I forgot that I stunk at Math, I had a lousy lab partner, and ended up with no help, my grade unprotected, and I got served for lunch. My teacher gave me a C- because “I tried hard”. The horrible thing is Chemistry was an elective! With my “elective” I had two math classes and I could have taken weight training or basketball during those same hours of the day.

Moving On

If you are a Chemistry teacher, I am sorry for the above. Let’s move on so we don’t lose you. My point in starting is none of us have a script in life or know what is going to happen in real time. We see what is happening and react according to what is right. The problem is, we don’t know how anyone else is going to react much less ourselves. What are we to do? As a kid I would run into all kinds of situations at school. Unpredictable kids do unpredictable things and I was never satisfied with my reactions. I wish the kids and I were operating with the same script.

We Need Help

Since we don’t have a laying around, we need to find a way to be faithful in all circumstances. Not perfect, but faithful. The heroes in the shows we watch have to be perfect to get out of those fixes, we do not. They live in a universe that is dependent upon their actions, we do not. If the script says they fail in order to mix it up they are hopeless, we don’t have to be. There’s no script for tomorrow, but there is a Writer. Faithfulness doesn’t mean I know my lines in advance — it means I trust the One who does.