God doesn’t have a plan for you
“God has a plan for you.” Yuk. It’s a rebarbative statement, enough to make you want to throttle the person who says it—especially when they give a condescending smile afterwards. Yet consider a newly discovered spring that bubbles up on a rocky hillside; as the water makes its way down the hill it probes, it seeks, it moves in an iterative motion—that which it cannot run over, the larger stones, it goes round and eventually wears down. The way it “probes” is an illusion; it has no independent conscious action, it has a direction it must travel and what blocks it creates the illusion it has behaviour. If we took the new stream and lifted it up from the rock and examined its shape we would find it looked like forked lightning—or a family tree for a species…
The new stream could stand for evolution or vice versa—it’s blocked at certain points, and those are evolutionary dead ends; the general force goes round them or alters the restrictions as it by-passes them, it’s all about the forks (whether you are eaten or not)—and when it wears down a stone perhaps that is like the way man is shaped by his growth in a valley and yet eventually surmounts that valley to examine the next one over. Microcosm.
It’s not like “God has a plan for you” in the old Aristotelian sense—in the sense “this is what a penis does, it goes in the vagina—its purpose is reproduction”. If you look for a purpose like that in the world you’ll despair—because man doesn’t appear to have “a purpose” in that sense, much as people have searched for one. “What am I here for, it’s all so meaningless?”.
However, there is a “purpose” to the hill: the water has to go down due to gravity—it’s drawn towards a nullity, the nullity doesn’t give it a definite direction and purpose but it does give it an iterative shape as it is pulled downwards (it has to go there). This is what our relation to God is like—there’s no particular purpose, it’s just we’re pulled towards a force at the end of time; along the way we hit and by-pass certain obstacles—for some people that’s the end (of their line) and yet they were only one branch in the stream, and the stream goes on (you are it). The process is the point—there are no errors at the global level, and it will all turn out in the wash; so just do what you have to do, you can’t go wrong—it’s all being drawn…to nothing.