The word "luck or lucky" in our vocabulary!

I have struggled with this in the past.

Looking at life and the things that happen, we can't always see or understand the providence of God as He works it.

I have come to the conclusion that, providing we use the word with the understanding that God is sovereign, it's OK to use the word "luck" to describe how the situation looks from a human perspective.

Some situations are just not possible to describe with any other single word or phrase.

 

My steps are ordered by the Lord, so therefore, there is no such thing as "luck" (good or bad) in my life.

 

We try not to use it at all.

 

I have a friend who even refers to Church gatherings with many people bringing food as a "pot-providence"

There is no such thing as luck.

 

I love that. No such thing as luck but, to avoid using such a common term is somewhat unreasonable. Especially since it is generally used for events where the factors contributing to the outcome are unknown to the individual and not necessarily unknowable. The harder you work the luckier you get.

 

I guess I misspoke, we do use it for pot luck, I guess what I meant is we do use it as in good or bad luck.

 

It seems incongruous to me that some want to censor the word "luck," meaning fortuitous events, and have no qualms about our days of the week [Monday, the day of worship to the Moon, Tuesday the day to worship Tewes,...], or the names we call the stars and planets, or words like "weird" [Wyrd, the Norse god of fate] or "mascot" [a word from sorcery]. If you accept these things and then claim it is evil to say "I had a flat on my way to work; what rotten luck," then that just blows the roof off the barn.

 

I use the word luck now and then...and correct myself afterwards just about every time.

As for days of the week, maybe we can start a campaign to have them renamed. Maybe name them after days of creation? Lightday, Skyday, Landplantday, Sunmoonstarsday, Fishbirdsday...

 

Here is what I found once as the meaning of the names of the days of the week:

Sunday - sun-day, day of the sun.
Monday - moon-day, day of the moon.
Tuesday - Zeus-day, the day of the god zeus.
Wednesday - Woden's-day, the day of the god woden.
Thursday - Thor's-day, the day of the god thor
Friday - Frieden's-day the day of the god frieden.
Saturday - Saturn's-day, the day of the god saturn.

What, no goddesses?

HankD

 

Two completely different things. I can call today Thursday and not be worshiping a god.
Luck means God is not sovereign.

 

Just what dictionary defines the word luck that way?

 

Why spend our time worrying about such trivial things, rather than concentrating on the more beneficial? If we were to legalistically remove all seemingly "unchristian" words from our vocabulary, we'd also have to remove "fortunate" (derived from accumulation of monetary wealth), "disaster" (derived from bad star, an occultic reference) and "haphazard" (meaning random chance since it implies the lack of divine sovereignty). While we're at it, we might as well get rid of words like "hello" (since it has "hell" in it), "kiss" (since it's an acronym for Kindly in Service of Satan), and deviled eggs (since it contains the word "devil"). We should also stop driving Cadillacs (since they make a car called a DeVille), and Saturns (since Saturn is an ancient god). We should also instruct our kids learning foreign languages to refrain from using the French, Dutch, or German word for "match" (which is lucifer).

 

In informal discussions (i.e., everyday conversation) I may use the word "luck" even though I don't actually believe in random events. I try to avoid it, however.

 

To me, actually it was. There is no reason to think I would be a Christian today if I had been born to the native people of New Guinea, for example. God decided where I would be born and of whom, but I had no control over it... it is fortuitous, or to say the same thing with different words, I was lucky to be born of Christian parents in America [not that that makes one a Christian, of course, but it definitely increases the probability]. But I had NOTHING to do with the circumstances of my birth or the forced conditions of my upbringing.

In a Christian life things do not happen because you are lucky...they happen because Jesus allows them to happen after they are filter through his fingers.

I don't think this statement satisfies a Calvinist OR an Armenian. But I was almost killed at the age of 14 in a wreck; that was "unlucky." On the other hand, 3 guys in my high school class were killed in a wreck. This 'Jesus filtering events through his fingers' concept does not make good sense. Many quality assurance operations, and especially insurance companies with their complex risk analysis procedures would be foiled time and time again if their probabilities did not hold up. God does not seem to circumvent these odds to where they do not hold up, which seemingly would be expected if there were such filtering events because certain invdividuals are Christians.

 

Let's not make up new sins to avoid as we go along, we have enough trouble with the one's we already have.