In 1997, a team of IBM engineers designed and developed Deep Blue, the computer that outmanoeuvred chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue was equipped with thirty-two processing engines that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second. Now, I don’t know about you, but I have a tough time with the fifty-fifty stuff: true or false; right or left; chocolate or vanilla? I can’t even imagine contemplating 200 million contingencies in a split second. But 200 million contingencies is laughable compared to our Omniscient, all-knowing God; the One who took every contingency into consideration before a nanosecond had even ticked off the clock of time. Think of your life as a game of chess. You are the pawn and God is the chess grandmaster. You have no idea what your next move should be. But God already has the next 200 million moves planned out. Some of His moves won’t make sense to us, but that’s because we can’t compute 200 million contingencies at a time! You’ve just got to trust in the LORD and stop trying to figure everything out.

Mark Batterson

Source: Mark Batterson, 2006, In A Pit With A Lion On A Snowy Day, Colorado: Multnomah Books, p.29-30