FATE & DESTINY

One Powell at Market Street, Cable Car Turnaround

 En route to an enjoyable daytime gig this morning on Market Street, I ran into an old acquaintance I met while working on and off again at TNDC (Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation); he is a manager there, a hard-working little guy who always manages to blush every time we run into each other. 

We shook hands and, again, shared a lovely conversation of people we both knew at TNDC before we finally wished each other happy holidays and sauntered our separate ways.

As I continued down Market Street past the Cable Car Turnaround and Nordstrom's across the street I started thinking about recurrences and just exactly what is fate.

Pictured: Alta Plaza Park in Pacific Heights, San Francisco

Fate, being a noun, is the development of events beyond a person’s control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power “fate decided his course for him..”

Examples of FATE

1. They thought they would never see each other again, but fate brought them back together.
2. A surprising turn of fate
3. One company went bankrupt, and a similar fate befell the other.
4. Her fate was sealed by the marriage arrangement made in her youth.
5. "… the —fate of our species is bound up with those of countless others, with which we share a habitat that we cannot long dominate …" —John Gray, Times Literary Supplement, 11 Sept. 1992

Huntington Park, Nob Hill, San Francisco

Even what we would normally call “chance” or “fate”, I suppose, is always under God’s control more than our own; although, we are given free will.   “The lot is cast into the lap, / but its every decision is from the LORD” (Proverbs 16:33). In other words, God does not take a “hands-off” approach to running the world.

Everything that happens is made to work out according to God’s purpose.