No, FK, what matters is that you will eat tonight because that's what "predestined" means. Predestined means that you cannot change your "destiny,"an inevitable course of events/actions.
What happens to a character in a movie is "predestined." Your will counts for nothing. You can sit throughout the whole movie and pray that the movie end the way you want it; it's all for naught. And if it does end the way you wanted it to end, it's not because of your prayers! You just guessed. :)
Someone gets sick. People pray. The sick person gets better. Was prayer answered? YES. God ordained the prayer as well as His healing of the sick person.
So, instead of just healing a person, God wants us to dance, cry, worry and pray to him?
Ten there is the other scenario: a person gets sick, his loved ones worry, cry, dance, pray, and the person dies anyway. The prayers are "not answered" because it was predestined for that eprson to die.
It's sounds like God wants us to go through the hoops to get our answer instead of just putting our destiny in his hands! Not that any of what we do changes anything, he just wants to beg him? I don't know that "God," FK.
What happens to a character in a movie is "predestined." Your will counts for nothing.
I don't think that necessarily follows.
Maybe I should say I don't FEEL that necessarily follows. I would hate to dignify my unease with the simple (and seemingly unassailable) opposition of free will and predestination with the word "think".
But we can chip away, I'd guess, one or two layers by realizing that, while acts of will (if they indeed exist) are mysterious, they are "events", and could be comprehended within the purview of things God predestines. We could say, if we wanted to resort to cartoons, that God predestined that I'd take a notion to go get a #2 Value Meal with a Sprite, that I would momentarily struggle with the notion of adding another 1/4 inch to the plaque in my carotids, that I'd say to myself, "Well, I MAY die from this food, but somebody is certainly going to die if I don't get some food," and then form the 'subjective principle of volition' "I'm driving to Mickey D's."
Look at Oedipus: He was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother and sue Freud for the breach of confidentiality, or at least the royalties.
He willed plenty of things (as did those who pierced his feet and exposed him, and the shepherd who took him home and reared him). He did not will to kill his Father, but he willed to kill the man old enough to be his father and to take to his bed the queen old enough to be his mother.
And while God's self-disclosure to the elect seems overwhelming, yet there seems to be a great big "YES!" arising in the heart of the saved to answer the "yes" which is said to be always with God.
It may be the the problem is that we think that our will is like God's or His like ours. When I have MY way, that may mean that others do not have THEIR way.
But as some of us have learned from being parents, it is possible for a person not to know what his real choice is, until the wily, perceptive, and patient parent helps him discover it. In that kind of situation, the parent gets his way, and so does the child.
Overarching the consideration of predestination and free will there must be, I dare to assert, the principle that man's will cannot come into its own until it is conformed to God's. We are taught by our Lord to pray that God's will be done on earth as in heaven. So formally (in the sense of 'on paper') we say at least daily that we "choose" God's will over our own.
This seems to me entirely in concert with Pauline mysticism, indeed with the teaching the askesis, of our Lord. My "own" , unregenerate will is a will toward death, a will of the flesh which dies. For my will to be united with God's there must be something like dying. That something, that divinely deadly poison is placed at the core of our flesh in our Baptism, and the rest of our days, this side of Heaven, are a pilgrimage to the Cross, an ever deeper descent into the valley of the shadow, AND also a resurrection in which we live, yet not us but Christ in us, as Paul says.
When our redemption is complete, then, just as now when we don't know how to pray, the Spirit Himself of God prays in us, we will will not with our on will, but with Christ's.
Which is why, I dare say, Augustine says (I am told) of God that His service is perfect freedom.
What good is this will of mine anyway? It leads, it must always lead, to sorrow and death -- maybe not unalloyed, maybe in the black soot some diamonds will gleam with reflected light, but sorrow and death nonetheless. Let it die, then, and let the Spirit of God will in and through me. There never happened anything that was to God's glory that did not benefit me also. So let me be forgotten and despised, and let His glory shine in my darkness, and His will swallow up mine.