Midweek Faith Lift
October 8, 2025
Divine Chaos/Divine Order-Organization
Rev. Deb Hill-Davis
Spiritual Passages
September 28, 2025
Tia Wimbush and Susan Ellis have been coworkers for years, but they had no idea that both of their husbands were suffering from kidney disease. Then they discovered they were a match to the other’s husband and the four friends underwent successful surgeries. "I'm forever changed. I'm hopeful for humanity and I hope other people will take that away from this story," Tia said. "You can be somebody else's hope."
This story feels like a perfect illustration of Divine Order unfolding, for sure, one of hope for all who need a kidney! And then there is this story, a bit less certain on the outcome of order….
As I was driving through my neighborhood one day, I stopped to watch a Little League baseball game that was being played in a park near my home. As I sat down behind the bench on the first-baseline, I asked one of the boys what the score was. "We're behind 14 to nothing," he said with a smile. "Really," I said. "I have to say you don't look very discouraged." "Discouraged?" the boy said with a puzzled look on his face. "Why should we be discouraged? We haven't been up to bat yet."
Affirmative Prayer for today: Living, loving Presence of God, may I connect to the Power and Presence within me that brings order from chaos and restores me to balance, harmony and hope each time I come up to bat. Amen.
It is so fitting, dear friends, that we are exploring the Power of Order during the month of October. It is the month of Libra in the astrological calendar and that is right on point for the power of Order. Libra is represented by the scales, which suggest balance, but the dynamic energy of Libra, just like the Power of Order is to always be seeking balance. We tend to think of Divine Order as a fixed, steady state, but it is actually an ongoing process, which is dynamic, always changing and unfolding. While the energy of Goodness, of “God-ness” is always present and constant, the universe is constantly unfolding. It is a “both/and” reality that is dynamic and changing just as it is certain and predictable.
It is a tricky one, this process of Order. In our human experience of Order, we like the predictable and we depend on it to bring order to our everyday lives. We want to affirm a kind of order that brings all things into the most preferred, desirable set of conditions and then have it stay that way, just the way we like it, right!? And on one level it does happen like that: the sun rises and sets each 24 hours, the seasons change, school starts and ends, holidays are on schedule, our children mature and we grow older and wiser and on and on. It is a lovely unfolding spiral of evolution and growth. Until it isn’t!
Because there is also the reality of chaos that happens when we experience tornadoes, derechoes, hurricanes, drought, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, which are part of the earth’s unfolding and changing. The earth is a dynamic, living organism, which is constantly unfolding and at times this profoundly disrupts what we call order. We forget that the earth also has free will and does what it does as part of its evolution, and no one controls those processes. We look at order from that perspective and it tells us that the power and process of Order is one of disorder and chaos as part of creating a new order.
Psychologists have long identified this as part of the learning process both for children and adults. Children learn addition and subtraction in math and they attain mastery of the order of operations. Addition is putting things together and subtraction is taking them away! Got it! Then as soon as they are confident of this, we introduce multiplication and division! Whoa, what is this?? I’m confused and this is stressful and I don’t like it. Piaget, a French child psychologist, observed this process and called it “disequilibration” or upset of equilibrium that is a necessary part of the learning process.
Then, as mastery at a higher level happens, there is assimilation of the new skills and a new equilibrium as kids now have a broader range of skills and understanding. Bring on Algebra!! If I want to have empathy and deep understanding of this process, all I need do is remember what it was like to learn how to use my “smart phone.” Then once mastered, they insist on upgrades, completely disrupting my sense of order and mastery of my world! All this just to make a phone call, for heaven’s sake!
Not only did psychology name this process, philosophy identified it as well. Hegel, a German philosopher writing in the early 1800’s identified this process in what has come to be known as the “Hegelian Dialectic.” This process is identified as “Thesis” or how things are right now; Antithesis or the undoing or unmaking of how things are as the opposite rises up and unfolds. Finally, there is a Synthesis or putting together in a new way as a new order emerges from the undoing of the old. This usually includes some of the old order and as well as the changes which bring about a new and better order. We are experiencing that right now in our country as we are going through constant challenges to the old order. What that presents to us is all possibilities for a new and better order so we can see what we truly value and want to keep. We are in the antithesis or unmaking part of this process, and it is never fun!
This order, disorder, reorder process is part of the spiritual Power of Order. Frequently we would like to skip the disorder but that is not really possible in our human lived experience because, after all, stuff happens! How we show up in the midst of the disorder is where we begin to truly engage the spiritual power of order. Divine order, which we like to affirm, is not a divine intervention that “fixes things” and rescues us. As Rev. Linda writes on p. 161 of Divine Audacity:
GOD is not a superhuman personality that imposes order. Rather, GOD is order, the organizing principle revealed in the pattern and sequence inherent in all of life. Divine order is not a correction of some unhappy condition but an integrated arrangement of energy in a pattern, sequence or method.
The challenge for us is to understand what and how this integrated arrangement is like and how we can participate in the process of Divine order to support its unfolding.
Pause and realize that supporting the emergence of Divine Order is how we participate in and express the spiritual Power of Order. It is not how we impose our will or get our way in any given challenge. It is a powerful process of Wisdom, discernment and Strength and Faith that supports and sustains us in this quest. We are called to discern and recognize that there is a pattern unfolding and a necessary sequence of things, which happen in the fullness of time or “God’s time.” Cultivating our capacity to hold space for that process or organization to reveal itself and unfold is part of how we participate in the spiritual power of Order. Remember that old Bartels and James joke, “we will sell no wine before it’s time…it’s time!” Patience is part of Order!
Our practice of Faith as the assurance of things hoped for sustains us in this process of Order unfolding. We affirm the highest and best good for all and then let go of attachment to outcome. We choose to trust that Divine Love and Divine Order is at work in all circumstances, even when we can’t see it, even when there seems to be no evidence of it. There is an organizing principle of order evident throughout nature, which is what sustains life energy even in the process of change.
We read in the gospel of Mark 4:26-29
The Parable of the Growing Seed
26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle because the harvest has come.”
Change happens, growth happens and we do not know how. There is an order unfolding that contains seeds of consciousness for a new way of being, a new way of showing up and supporting each other and it is a spiritual process, a God process. We are assured of this harvest when we cooperate with Divine Love, allowing and supporting Divine Order, not our personal understanding of order. There are infinite possibilities, just as this full grain at time of harvest is ready to manifest. Our challenge is to be awake, to be ready and to step up to bat with great expectations of good.
I want to leave you with the words of Howard Thurman, an amazing contemporary mystic:
Our dreams belong to us; they come full-blown out of the world in which we work and hope and carry on. They are not impostors. They are not foreign elements invading our world like some solitary comet from the outer reaches of space. No! Our dreams are our spirit, the vital part of us. They become for us the bearers of new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope. Even as they romp among the stars they come back to their place in our lives, bringing with them the radiance of the far heights, the lofty regions, and giving to all our days the lift and the magic of the stars." - Howard Thurman
May it be so…Blessings on the Path,
Rev. Deb