Why Is God So Inefficient?

I can imagine an exchange between God and myself around 2016 that went something like this:

Me: O God, I can’t wait till I finish spiritual direction training this summer. I’ll aim to recruit, oh, maybe 15 clients, meet with each of them once a month, make $30,000 a year to keep us afloat in quasi-retirement.

God: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Me now: I practice spiritual direction, which I adore, with three to four clients, whom I also adore. This number has hardly changed since 2016. (Whether three clients or 15, the $30,000 figure just shows I didn’t think the math through very well.)

This has me thinking about what I’ll call the divine economy.

Some background: For 30-some years I ran my own for-profit business, writing ad and marketing copy for other businesses, from global banks to nine-hole golf courses. In other words, I sold my services to companies so they could sell their products and services. It’s hard to get more capitalist than that.

Along the way, I inhaled the capitalist values that businesses need to run profitably. Efficiency. Productivity. Time management. Goal orientation.

You don’t do that for 30-some years and then forget all those values once you move into a more mystical, spiritual vocation, like spiritual direction. That would be fine if the divine economy ran like a capitalist venture.

It doesn’t. As a result, over the past 10 years I’ve had a big rethink.

For instance: there is nothing wrong with having only three to four clients. It might be just as “good” as having 15, because who knows what impact will come of it? Maybe one of my clients—I’ll pick the minister—uses an insight from our work together in a sermon one Sunday, and it touches someone in the congregation, and that person acts on it, and through six degrees of separation it molds the thought process of one of our age’s great wisdom teachers.

Or not.

Or maybe the whole point of training for spiritual direction was to take a deeper plunge into my own spiritual practice—which, thanks to a crisis during the training, now includes Zen—and that’s invisibly shaped me to the point where one or two nameless individuals watch me model spirituality and it has a slight effect on them.

Or not.

You see the efficiency here? The goal orientation? Me neither.

The key here, I think, is that the action of Reality is so, so, so much bigger than we can possibly see. As a result, we cannot have the first clue which of our words or actions impacts which of our friends or clients or friends of clients and in what way. Each of us, as I’ve said so many times, is one person among billions, with exactly one-person’s capacity to make a difference.

That’s very small. But small is not negligible. All we can do is keep doing, keep being, one step at a time, and trust that the vast Reality we swim in will turn it to fruitfulness.