Whatever happened....

Have you ever had a particular appointment to keep, been on the way to work, or even on the way to church, and you are running late? You're rushing around, and the phone rings! You know you shouldn't stop to answer the phone, but you do anyway, and find yourself stressed because you're even later than you were before? Then, as you're driving to your intended location you come upon a car accident that has just happened. An accident that requires paramedics and emergency personnel. An accident that you know you may have been involved in had you not stopped to simply answer the phone.
And then you think - would that have been me? You thank God that it wasn't you, and pray for the people to which it did happen.
Have you ever been diagnosed with something or had a life changing event happen that caused you to try to think back to what may have precipitated the onset of the occurrence?

This week, someone gave me this quote: "Whatever happened, something happened before."

Meaning, I suppose, the we may never know the specific details of what forces combined together to place two cars in an intersection such that they crash together; that we may never know the specific carcinogen that invaded our body, only that we now have to fight it; that we may never know what minute particle combined with another to create havoc.
You may have heard of the movie "The Butterfly Effect." I haven't seen the movie (rated R), but I understand the concept. Butterflies flapping their wings off the coast of Africa, can create enough of a wind mass to effect weather in the Atlantic Ocean.
From the simple act of flying, butterflies have the capability to effect (and even affect) thousands of lives across an entire ocean. In science, the butterfly effect is part of chaos theory, or scientifically - The butterfly effect is a phrase that encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial condition of a dynamical system may produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system.
Thinking on these things, what calms my heart is knowing that God is in control. It would be impossible to have peace were it not so.
Whatever happened, something happened before...
God is and was and will be.