Sorry marron for not having written sooner. I'm working on a project that has become rather all-consuming of my free time lately. What you write here anticipates some of the points I'm struggling with in that venture.
To respond to the points you raise here, let me begin by saying that my understanding of God -- imperfect as it is -- is that promulgated by the Council of Nicea, AD 325: That there is One God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It seems very clear to me that at least One of the Persons is not in time -- the Father, in the sense of St. Thomas Aquinas' Unknown Tetragrammatical God. The Son, "Who was God, and was with God" in the Beginning, incarnated in time in the person of Jesus Christ -- the God of the Presence (in Aquinas' theology) -- was crucified, died, and was buried; then He rose from death and ascended into Heaven (i.e., left space-time altogether) and is reunited with the Father.
From the human point of view, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity -- the Holy Spirit, God the Comforter -- is "in time" to the extent that He is in human souls (but souls are themselves timeless, eternal!).
Having said all this, there is an extraordinarily important sense in which the Son is still in the world of space and time. For the Son is the Logos of God, the Word of the Beginning. The Logos is in the world as its primary creative principle and as its ever-enduring, fundamental ordering principle.
The Nicene Creed says that the Son is "begotten, not made" of the Father; and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both Father and Son. Thus both Son and Spirit, like the Father, are "uncreated"; they are True Eternal God. The manner of the emergence of the second two divine Persons is particularly fascinating to me, and the fruitful source of frequent meditation.
For the Son Who was begotton of the Father, the Logos or Word of the Beginning, was incarnated as man in order to become a divine sacrifice for the purpose if restoring man into loving communication with the Father, to heal the breech that existed between God and Man commencing with the rebellion of Adam. After the Cross, the facilitator of this reconciliation is the Holy Spirit -- Who proceeded from the Will of Father and Son to "enter the world" as divine-human mediator and comforter after the Resurrection of Christ.
One meaning of Logos to my mind is God's plan for the universe. That plan will certainly be realized to the purpose or goal that God foreknows from the Beginning. To use a Platonic analogy: The Father is the Unknown God of the Beyond, Divine Nous -- infinitely willing, creating, loving intellect; the Son is the Logos, the Word of that willing and loving infinite Intellect that was "spoken" or "breathed" into existence at the beginning of creation. The Holy Spirit is analogous to the Demiurge, who uses persuasion to being souls into alignment with the divine plan.
There is free will in the world, for a man can always refuse to participate in the divine Plan. What is known in faith however, is that the divine Plan will be realized. The man who turns away from the Holy Spirit working in his soul to bring him into loving relation with God will probably not be a part of that plan, when it is brought into its glory at a time known only to God Himself.
So I agree with you: "God controls the future, and that men are free agents." Yet from the purely human standpoint, it seems to me that for God to be immanently engaged in the here and now in a sense other than as the eternal paradigm set in heaven and breathed forth in the Word (which is ineradicably imprinted on this world and the next) requires human souls freely willing to become a habitation for the Holy Spirit, and to follow Christ.
Well, that's the best I can do to try to explain certain reflections that have seized me, heart and mind, in recent times. I'm not sure I've directly answered the issues you raise, marron. What do you think?
I didn't address directly the "how" of it, but you have. God has a design, which is flexible enough to include us and our shenanigans, and he is engaged in the here and now keeping things moving generally in the right direction. That would be on several levels, our innate design, the operation of reason which is a part of our nature, but further by the various means by which he broadcasts his principles into the culture. The Church, with all its flaws is a key part of that.
And then there is the more direct means, by which his spirit moves in the hearts of men, to which some respond and some do not in the immediate term, but which over time brings his weight to bear on events whether or not people recognize his movements. Some are as you say more willing vessels than others, and some are more readily moved to action than others.
There even is a division of labor in this area; you have the people who transmit the word into the culture who may or may not fully understand the significance of what they are saying, and who may or may not fully reflect what they say in their own lives. As disappointing as this can be, it is important nonetheless that they are engaged in this part of the work.
Then you have the people who actually act on it, who may or may not be recognizably religious in nature, and often are not. But they are the ones who act, and actually make the word real in flesh and blood terms.
Of all the magnificent Scriptures describing Jesus, the one which always comes first to my mind is Hebrews 1:3: Who being the brightness of [his] glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power....