Light On Dark Water

Just Your Luck

My job as director of administrative systems at a small
college is very much a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none affair
that involves a lot of direct support of the people who use the
administrative information system. Over the years I think almost
every one of them has asserted confidently that he or she has
been unfairly singled out by fate to experience an inordinate
number of computer-related problems. I often hear personalized
versions of Murphy’s Law such as “If it can happen,
it will happen to me.” Phone calls frequently begin with
remarks that may be apologetic (“I’m sorry I’m
always bringing you a problem”), irritated (“I just
did this yesterday and now today it doesn’t work”),
self-deprecating (“I broke it again”), or
anthropomorphically paranoid (“My computer hates
me”).

I never know whether it’s a comfort or otherwise when I
feel obliged to tell them the truth, which is that their problems
are nothing special, and that every single one of their
co-workers feels equally put-upon. Today’s computer systems
don’t really work that well, all in all (compared, say, to
your car) in spite of the fact that they have a quantity of
memory and horsepower that the artificial intelligence
researchers of thirty or forty years ago would have deemed
sufficient to support reasoning on the level of HAL, the
conscientiously homicidal computer of 2001: A Space
Odyssey. Systems do far, far more than they did when I first
got into the business in the late 1970s, but I don’t know
that they do it any more reliably.

I think we all suffer from this impulse to believe that we are
specially chosen for bad luck, but obviously it can’t be
true that everyone has more bad luck than everyone else. Twice in
the past few weeks or so I’ve heard my wife use the phrase
“with my luck” or “just my luck” in
expectation of some inconvenience, and I daresay most of us use
it from time to time. Most often we say these things
half-humorously, because most of the things we complain about
most of the time—those of us in affluent societies, at any
rate—are fairly minor. We don’t generally speak this
way when something truly terrible happens, such as the sudden
death which overtook a friend of mine two days before Christmas;
the idea that such a blow was delivered with conscious
malevolence is too dreadful to be trifled with.

So either we all suffer from the same persecution complex or
we are all being persecuted, and as I have no doubt at all that a
statistical analysis of problems encountered on any given day
ranging from minor annoyance to death would show a pretty even
distribution, it must be the latter. “Persecuted” may
not be the right word; there may be no intention behind the
general tendency of things to go wrong. But our impulse to
feel persecuted is evidence of something—of two things,
actually. In the first place, we feel that we have some right to
expect that things go well rather than badly, and in the second
place, we feel that there is something personal in the way we are
treated by the universe.

If the Christian faith is true, then both these
impulses—these emotional beliefs—are in fact correct.
The world was meant to be a better place, and each of us
is the object of particular consideration on the part of
the ruler of the universe. In a way that is not mere illusion,
that is accurate at least in relation to perspective, each of us
is the center of a universe, the pole around which all else
revolves. The fact that the earth is in motion relative to the
sun and to the other planets, and all of these in motion relative
to the rest of the galaxy, does not alter the functional
relationship of the sun to the earth. By rights the interlocking
movements of these worlds should be harmonious, blessing all
equally. Instead, the worlds depart from their orbits frequently,
disturbing, abrading, and colliding, with consequences ranging
from comic to tragic.

But that of course is not the end of the story. We may or may
not be individually persecuted—I’m not about to
venture into speculation about the details of the interplay among
our own sins and errors, the malicious schemes of evil spirits,
and the permissive will and providence of God. But salvation,
escape from misfortune both trivial and great into a world of
never-interrupted, never-even-diminished perfection, is
specifically offered to each of us, at the cost of nothing and
everything. Just our luck.