how much more grand is the work of our Heavenly Father as he pulls together all the varied strands of life to reveal his grand design?

In his play "Long Day's Journey into Night, " Eugene O'Neill has one of his characters utter a powerful statement toward the end of her life: "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They are done before you realize it and once they are done, they make you do other things, until at

Our lives are shaped by others literally from birth, and even the best of intentions can result in the most unexpected of hurts.

Even though we did not author creation, we wish to author morality and take the reins of life.

All walls are not barriers. They may be there for a purpose.

But it was not to be.

As much as that retrospective look troubles us, however, it makes for a fascinating confirmation that without God, the thing never would have happened.

He found Luciana sitting alone at a table in the Allied officers' night club, where the drunken Anzac major who had brought her there had been stupid enough to desert her for the ribald company of some singing comrades at the bar. All right, I'll dance with you, she said, before Yossarian could even speak. But I won't let you sleep with me. Who asked you? Yossarian asked her. You don't want to sleep with me? she exclaimed with surprise. I don't want to dance with you.

Kraft was a skinny, harmless kid from Pennsylvania who wanted only to be liked, and was destined to be disappointed in even so humble and degrading an ambition. Instead, of being liked, he was dead, a bleeding cinder on the barbarous pile whom nobody had heard in those last precious moments while the plane with one wing plummeted.

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

That men would die was a matter of necessity; which men would die, though, was a matter of circumstance, and Yossarian was willing to be the victim of anything but circumstance.

Major Major's father had a Calvinist's faith in predestination and could perceive distinctly how everyone's misfortunes but his own were expressions of God's will.