I

Where you will go every day, what you will do,

who or what you will encounter,

what you will say, what will happen to you—

can any of this be predicted?

People cannot foresee all these occurrences,

much less control how these situations develop.

In life, these unforeseeable events happen all the time;

they’re an everyday occurrence.

These daily vicissitudes and the ways they unfold,

or the patterns they follow,

are constant reminders to humanity

that nothing happens at random,

that the process of each event’s occurrence,

each event’s ineluctable nature,

cannot be shifted by human will,

cannot be shifted by human will.

II

Every occurrence conveys an admonition from the Creator to mankind,

and it also sends the message that human beings cannot control their own fates.

Every event is a rebuttal to humanity’s wild, futile ambition

and humanity’s desire to take its fate into its own hands.

They’re like powerful slaps about humanity’s face, one after another,

forcing people to reconsider who,

in the end, holds sovereignty over and controls their fate.

And as their ambitions and desires are repeatedly thwarted and shattered,

humans naturally arrive at an unconscious acceptance of what fate has in store—

an acceptance of reality, of the will of Heaven and the Creator’s sovereignty.

III

From these daily vicissitudes to the fates of entire human lives,

there is nothing that does not reveal

the Creator’s sovereignty and arrangements;

there is nothing that does not send the message

that “the Creator’s authority cannot be exceeded,”

there is nothing that does not convey this eternal truth

that “the Creator’s authority is supreme.”

from The Word, Vol. 2. On Knowing God. God Himself, the Unique III