The night before our travel, when we were packing bags and making the final check list, Talia asked me to give her some verses from the Bible for her to write in the handmade greeting cards she was making for her classmates. That surprised me a little, but I did recall vaguely that she had done it in the past years as well.
So I asked her if this was a mandatory project that was required for class. She answered ‘no’ and explained that it is something that she wanted to do, of her own free accord. Now she had my attention. But when she asked me for 18 different and appropriate verses – one for each of her classmates to fit their particular disposition – I knew that we needed to get our ‘efficiency’ hat on. I was still smarting from fever which had kept me down the previous 2 days, and with all that needed to be done for the next day’s journey to the other side of the planet, neither of us had enough time for such niceties.
So I helped her pick 6 different verses and told her to make do with them, by writing them three times for different classmates. This she was able to do quickly enough and I assume that her classmates were none the wiser about it.
When time is of the essence, efficiency is dear. And when life is of the essence, effectiveness is. Back when I was in school, I learnt that efficiency is ‘doing things right’ and effectiveness is ‘doing the right thing.’ This is a crucial lesson for nations just as much as it is for individuals. One cannot emphasize enough, the importance of making the judgment call as to what should be given priority in a given situation.
The Allies learnt this sobering lesson early in the First World War. In January 1917, the British intercepted a telegram – now famous as the Zimmerman Telegram – during a prolonged stalemate in the Great War. It was from the German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman and addressed to the Ambassador in Washington D.C. and meant for the Imperial German Minister in Mexico. It stated that Germany will come to Mexico’s aid – if Mexico attacked the United States.
Germany and Japan – who would give it assistance from the west coast – would help Mexico regain lost territory – California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, New Mexico and parts of Colorado. When the British revealed the contents to Woodrow Wilson, it brought the reluctant President and the Americans into the war on the side of the Allies and thus avoided a potential catastrophe and secure victory.
Catastrophes or even their future threat are usually a time for sober reflection and preparation. For the nations of the first Great War, this included the actions that needed to be taken to avoid similar destruction. After the war, in 1919 a young Lt. Colonel was asked to study how long it would take to transport military supplies from one coast of the United States to the other. Two convoys were sent from New York to San Francisco and the time taken was – 62 days!!
It needed to be done in 3. That is efficiency. Efficiency should lead to effectiveness. Otherwise, any war could very well be lost. Over 30 years later, that Lt. Colonel came to power as the President of the US and in 1956, signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. Connecting the nation with highways had numerous effects, besides enabling the transportation of supplies from coast to coast in 3 days.
People could travel more, and they did. This meant they needed more cars, and there was a boom similar to that of the ‘roaring 20s.’ And hotels and restaurants popped up. People moved out of the cities and into the suburbs. Therefore, new housing was needed – and department stores to do their shopping. The economy grew because of all these indirect and unintended consequences. But one needs to pause and ask how the British came about intercepting the telegram.
Was it serendipitous? As a young man, I have come across serendipity being defined as looking for a needle in the haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter! Well, in this case, not exactly. As the historian Barbara Tuchman explains in The Zimmerman Telegram, the first act of aggression in the Great War was done by the British at 4 am on Aug 4th, 1914. In the misty North Sea, a British ship went along the German-Dutch coast with grappling irons being dragged on the seabed.
Just four hours before, Britain had declared war on Germany and the Central powers. This first act of World War I was something a person normally may not associate with aggression. As the irons came across what they were looking for on the seabed, they pulled the communication cables up and cut them. The British were not only trying to conduct the war efficiently, they were trying to be effective. Cutting the transatlantic cables meant that Germany would have to rely on wireless communication – and while all messages were coded, a certain part of the battle was won when there is access to the messages.
Now think with me on this. What happens when time is not of the essence? If you had plenty of time to accomplish something you wanted, is efficiency necessarily a virtue?
Imagine if I had all the time in the world. In anything I wanted to accomplish, as long as I had set for myself that I would do it, but not for some time, efficiency is barely my concern. And if I knew my enemy’s weaknesses, I would know what I needed to do, and when. That is what God has, and does. Being eternal, He has ‘all the time in the world.’ Efficiency is not something He needs to care about. Being omnipotent, He has all the resources He needs to accomplish what He wants.
So when we doubt if He cares – or whether He even exists – because of His apparent nonchalance when He does nothing to protect many of the ‘innocent’ from even gratuitous evil, we work on the assumption that all will be lost because of His inaction. Because this life is all we perceive as real.
It is therefore no small accident that evil and suffering are the number one reason people are agnostic or atheistic in their beliefs and practice. The force of argument that is usually followed is that we, being quite good and having some power will curb evil if we could, a fortiori if God is all powerful and if He is all good, He will definitely stop evil. Since He doesn’t, He is either not all powerful, or all loving, or He’s just a figment of our imagination.
To be sure He will deal justly with evil, and He has. But He being a person with a free will, does not behave as non-volitional objects which respond to natural forces – such as a rock falling over a cliff due to gravity. His behavior is not law-like in that sense, following a syllogism (even that most famous and foundational of syllogisms ‘All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal’ talks only about the fact that Socrates will die and is silent about when he will die.)
God’s dealing with evil is more akin to a man jumping off a cliff, on a glider. The law of gravity is neither broken nor suspended; the laws of aerodynamics just take over. More information is added into the system. God’s Will is bound to His nature, and that demands that evil be answered.
However, His wisdom and purposes determine when and how the evil will be answered. The fact that He is not efficient (as we deem efficiency) does not mean that He will not be effective. The true God also extracts a price, as His just Nature demands that He be ‘effective’ in dealing with sin. But since He knew that we are incapable of paying it, He paid it Himself. He became the price when He took upon Himself human nature, lived and then died for us.
In doing so, He dealt with evil. He dealt with it in the sense that as the most righteous and just Judge, He would not ignore the ravages of sin, and yet be merciful to us – its perpetrators – by not bringing upon us its penalty. More than that, He raises us up to enjoy His intimate presence forever. The truth is that whatever we believe, all roads do lead to God. The question is whether we want to meet Him as our Judge or as our Savior.
The Christian proclamation is that there is only one road that does lead to Him as our Savior. Every other leads us to Him where we are in the unenviable and utterly hopeless position of having to justify ourselves before a Perfect Being. So if I may be brazen enough to rearrange Donne, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, for it will surely toll for us. And when it does, He will have all the time to hear our case, and if we are of the tribe that adheres to that most reasonable of propositions ‘nobody’s perfect,’ we ought to know now that we will be found wanting then.
Navin is a regular writer for Family Mantra. He grew up in Chennai and presently resides in Philadelphia.
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