In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars

by Mark Batterson

In 1997, a team of IBM engineers designed and developed Deep Blue, the computer that outmaneuvered chess grand master Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue was equipped with thirty-two processing engines that could calculate 200 million chess moves per second. 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 the Omniscient 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 Grand Master. 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, but that is simply because we can’t compute 200 million contingencies at a time! We’ve just got to trust the Grand Master.