Can I still trust Divine Order?

That's what we say in Unity, isn't it?  It's all in divine order; so everything happens, or has happened, by God's hand; thus the way it's supposed to be. We say this about most everything, from finding the right parking place, to our friend losing their job, to even (respectfully) a death in the family. But if I step back for a moment and listen to what we (and I) have been saying, it sure seems to be drifting into the realm of predestination. Predestination, you say?... like the predestination where in I have no choice at all? Yes, just like that one. But that's not what I really meant to say, because, being a good New Thought metaphysician, I am a co-creator with God; so it can't be real predestination. So what's up?

Is divine order an absolute law, immutable and unconditional? or is there something more going on? Say, … maybe it's just the law of averages that it works out that way!

Where this question really comes into focus for me is in the practice of affirmative prayer, when I am knowing and trusting in Divine principle, and aligning myself with that principle to co-create with it. In my practice of prayer as a Religious Science spiritual practitioner, I was taught very clearly to release the realization of the truth into divine law, knowing that divine substance has been acted upon through my realization, and by this trust in the unwavering law, it's gonna’ happen (the subject of the prayer).

But what if it doesn't? It's simple answer to say, "well, that's because the consciousness of the person I was praying for; they weren't quite ready yet for the healing." Yet when the intention of the prayer does not manifest, it does open up the possibility that the immutable law may be not quite so immutable. As Dr. Tom suggests, it could be that as the early New Thought writers did their thinking in the time of Newtonian physics, where the world was ruled by mechanical cause-and-effect, it was a simple transfer to apply this mechanical worldview to the new emerging metaphysics.

But now we’re into quantum mechanics, where things are just not as cut and dried as Newton hoped. As Dr. Tom says, "When we peer down into the atomic level, certainty becomes probability." Thus, metaphysical principle and law in today's language might be better expressed as a bell curve: well, it kinda happens this way most of the time. What this opens up for me is: can I trust God that much? If a foundational part of my trust has been based on absolute laws, and now those laws are becoming soft around the edges, what does that do to my faith? Can I allow my faith to shift further from the black-white of perfect clarity into the gray fog of maybe? I believe that's where I'm headed, yet I think this time, rather than placing this shift in faith under the category of paradox, I believe this one belongs under a broader, yet more majestic, and tranquil place: the place of mystery.