For the past few months, my husband and I have been watching a brilliant show called Person of Interest. If you aren’t familiar with it, the premise is that there’s a machine that sees everything and can predict threats of violence–mostly designed to prevent terrorist attacks, but its creator also uses it to try to save the “irrelevant” people–people whose lives are in danger but aren’t relevant to national security. To do so, he’s assembled a rather unlikely but very effective team.

{spoilers ahead}

Deus ex Machina. God out of the machine. It’s an accurate statement in this case–the machine almost acts as a god, seeing all, able to decide by sharing information who lives and who dies. And as we’ve gone through the seasons, one character in particular, a woman called Root, has really caught my interest.

She’s completely crazy. When we first meet her she has no qualms about killing, and she manipulates everything to get her way. But later, for some reason, the machine chooses her to be its closest ally. It communicates with her by any means possible, giving her constant instructions. Go here, it might say, or tell this person this, or say that. It doesn’t tell her why. It doesn’t give her the bigger picture. It just instructs. And she follows.

She has such complete and utter faith in the machine that she yields complete, unquestioning obedience which leads to an unruffled calm that is fascinating to me. Every time I see her on the show, a question is pushed to the forefront of my mind.

If an insane woman can have that much faith in a machine leading to that much peace, how much peace could we have as Christians if we trusted the real God that much?

What if we were that obedient and faithful? That level of calm and content is within our grasp–we really do have the ear of a real sovereign–the One who can truly see not only through surveillance, but into the hearts and minds of men. We have the words of the Creator of the universe to guide us. We serve a higher power not made or programmed by men.

I crave that peace and that simplicity. To hear and to obey. To do away with this battle of my will against His goodness. So if Root can do it–why can’t I?