Faith Matters: Things can change quickly, but who really is in charge of our fate?

There’s really no reason for you to have heard of a city called Spearfish. It’s located on the western edge of South Dakota and other than a gold rush in the late 1800s, it’s a relatively quiet place to live.

Spearfish holds a record for something most people move to Florida to escape: the record for the fastest change in temperature in history. On Jan. 22, 1943, at about 7:30 a.m., the temperature was a balmy minus-4 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s what we would expect for a town in South Dakota in January.

But two minutes later, after the Chinook winds had kicked up, the temperature rose by 45 degrees. By 9 a.m., merely an hour and a half later, the temperature had climbed to 54 degrees.

But just as suddenly as it began, the temperature changed again. The winds turned off and the mercury dropped back down to minus-4 degrees … in only 27 minutes.

It was definitely a day that would remind you that you’re not in charge.

Life can change just as fast. One day you’re on top of it all: a good-paying job, the kids are healthy, your marriage is going well. But then, in what seems like a blink of the eye, everything changes. You lose your job, a child is diagnosed with a disease, or your once stable marriage is now on the rocks.

Life can change that fast. And when it does we feel terribly out of control.

In Acts 14 Paul and Barnabas find themselves in a town called Lystra. As they walked the town, Peter healed a man who was born with a crippling condition in his feet. The town’s people went nuts proclaiming that gods had arrived

They began calling Paul “Hermes” and Barnabas “Zeus,” after the gods of Greek mythology. Waving them off, Paul and Barnabas explained they were far from gods — a conversation that wouldn’t have needed to take place if they had been traveling with wives, by the way.

But that’s not what’s so interesting about this story. In what seems like a matter of minutes, about four verses later, the crowds change their minds and want to kill them. The same people who were earlier calling them gods began throwing stones at them.

And we’re not talking about those little rocks you find in your grandma’s driveway in North Carolina, but rather stones the size of baseballs and softballs. One minute they want to worship them, and the next minute they want to kill them.

What Paul did next is amazing. He didn’t seek revenge; he didn’t pout; and he didn’t quit and go home. He simply got up and went to the next town to share the Gospel.

Life changes quickly, and we can’t do anything about it. The only thing we can control is the way we respond. We can seek revenge, pout and quit, or we can get up and move on. But life will always be like the weather: unpredictable.

And one thing’s for sure: It will always remind us that we aren’t the ones in charge.

Dr. J. Phillip Hamm is the senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Palmetto. You can reach the church at 941-722-7795 or visit www.fbcpalmetto.com. Faith Matters is a regular feature of Saturday’s Bradenton Herald written by local clergy members.