One of the YouTube creators I follow is Martin Molin of the Wintergatan channel. For the past several years, he has been toiling at building a music machine that works with marbles. As he has tried over and over again to produce his mechanical magnum opus, he has stumbled from point to point, trying to find a way of producing something that will wow his audience. While he has tried many different things over the years, he’s always been trying to find an efficient way of finishing his project; to no avail so far.
This has made me begin to think about the obsession with efficiency that our modern world seems to evidence. Technology is often sold as a way to be more efficient, to get more done in less time, so we can have more time for other things. Personally, I’ve tried things to make myself more efficient, as well, such as documenting my computer code better, or writing down processes as I do them, so I don’t have to remember them later. Now if only I could remember where I wrote them down….
In all of this, I began thinking about how God does things. Interestingly, his approach to his ultimate goal of gaining glory for himself seems very inefficient—at least from a human perspective. I mean, wouldn’t it have been much quicker and more efficient to send Eve the promised redeemer to set it all right in Adam’s day rather than making us wait at least 4000 years before the Savior came? How about with Abraham? He had to wait 25 years before he saw the promised son and then he was required to sacrifice him to prove the faith that saved him more than 30 years earlier. God gave 230 years to the patriarchs and 400 years to their offspring living in Egypt, after which Yahweh bore with Israel for 1000 years before he finally allowed his wrath its full play; and even then he held himself back. It took 400 more years before he was ready to incarnate himself and bear our sins. And once he rose, he went to heaven, waiting another 2000 years before returning. And he has oddly tied his return to the preaching of the good news all over the planet before he is willing to get on his white horse and come save us. I mean, come on! It would have been so much more efficient to die, rise again, and inaugurate the physical Kingdom of God!
But, says a dear Reformed theologian, God has a great plan that he is completing. He will bring it all to pass in the right time according to his sovereign will. Yes, I believe so, too. Yet, plan aside, when we look at God’s directives for worshipping him, there is a lot of perceived inefficiency there, as well. After all, what’s the point of dragging that heavy box around on four guys’ shoulders when you can just as easily put it on a cart? Why is the wash basin after the altar? What is it with having to change the bread out once a week? How about making an agrarian nation take a break one day a week for 24 hours, when everyone knows that the cow needs milking every 12 hours? Then in our day and age, couldn’t he have been a little clearer on the details of church hierarchy and leadership? What about points like exactly when we’re going to be raptured and how all of those disparate Gospel accounts fit together into a single timeline? It boggles the mind.
So I’ve come to think that maybe God likes what humans call inefficiency. He has his way of doing things and it is certainly not ours! His way is along the same lines as G.K. Chesterton’s contention that God has the same childlike delight in making each daisy perfect individually, simply because he likes the repetitive nature of it, much like little children enjoy repetition. It is certain that he has more than one thing in mind when he sets events in motion—in that way he is extremely efficient, the ultimate multitasker—but it also seems that he doesn’t mind doing things in complicated ways that don’t make sense to the human mind. God’s ways are higher than ours, says the Reformed theologian once more. True, they are. But we have to leave it to him to sometimes be inefficient; not because it makes sense to us, but because he can. And when things don’t run with German precision and efficiency, we should praise him for it. When you end up in that bureaucratic line which, for whatever reason, has five forms to fill out instead of one, wasting an afternoon that could be spent expounding on the wonders of God’s salvation, then what is your response? That is by no means efficient; but God is there with you in the inefficiency.
Perhaps we need to dial back the efficiency meter and sit out under the stars a bit and enjoy the calm. Drive the scenic route rather than the one on Google Maps and get there later. Put down the phone and read a book. Take a walk without a podcast blaring in our ears. Do our work with pen and paper rather than keyboard and screen. (Oh, how I struggle with that one as the speed of my handwriting can’t keep up with the speed of my thoughts!) Since God calls us to actively rest one day a week, embracing that divine inefficiency will certainly make our lives better. After all, he rested when he didn’t have to—twice! The first was on the seventh day of creation. Can you guess when the second time was?