“One vote won’t make a difference.”

“One person can’t possibly change anything.”

One can hear an equal number of people refuting these statements. It seems people are locked in an eternal struggle over the impact one single person can have on something bigger than themself.

Gavrilo Princip

Let’s take a trip back in time. I would like you to meet one man who single handedly changed the face of the modern world. Meet Gavrilo Princip.

I know what you must be thinking. “Who was Gavrilo Princip?” His is not a household name. In fact, I would imagine that most people have no idea who he was. Most people wouldn’t know that he was responsible for two wars and the deaths of millions of innocent people.

Gavrilo Princip was born in July, 1894, to parents so poor they had to send him to live with his older brother in modern-day Croatia. In that time, Croatia was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Gavrilo was a subject of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Gavrilo, along with many other Yugoslavs, was angry with the Austro-Hungarian government and wanted to form an independent Yugoslavia. He was quoted as saying, “I am a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria.”

In 1914, Gavrilo hatched a daring plan. He would assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the younger brother and heir to the Emperor himself! He was living in Serbia at the time, and saw his opportunity when the Archduke was to visit Sarajevo. Thanks to a wrong turn by the Archduke’s driver, Gavrilo Princip had a clear shot from only half a meter away. The Archduke died the next day.

This so infuriated the Austrians that they declared war on Serbia within a few weeks. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, along with their German allies, invaded Serbia. The Russian Empire was quick to jump to the defense of their Slavic brethren, and Germany used this as an excuse to invade Belgium and France. England joined the war to defend their French and Belgian allies. World War I had begun.

German postage stamps ranging from 500,000 to 50,000,000,000 Mark

This was bad enough, but after Germany lost World War I, the Allied Powers demanded stiff penalties on the German people. This resulted in rampant hyperinflation (50 Billion Mark postage stamps were common). Germany became so downtrodden they chose a radical new leader in their next election: Adolf Hitler. The rest, as they say, is history.

Gavrilo Princip used his hatred of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as an excuse for murder. The result: over 35 million dead in World War I and over 60 million dead in World War II. Hate is a powerful and dangerous emotion. Gavrilo Princip, one man, certainly made a difference.

Imagine, though, the difference that could be made if, instead of hate, one acted out of love! Imagine what one could do if the death that resulted from their actions was one’s own, in sacrifice, instead of their enemy?

Like Gavrilo Princip, Jesus was born in a country under occupation. The region of Judea was a part of the Roman Empire, and many of His countrymen were upset and angry with the Roman government. Some sects of the Jews, such as the sicarii, were a group of assassins devoted to expelling the Romans from their lands.

Despite the political turmoil, Jesus’ first and only thought was of love. He could have, with a thought, eliminated the Roman Emperor and taken up the throne Himself – in fact, many Jews wanted him to do this. However, Jesus’ love for His people overrode any such thoughts. Jesus mentions this many times, but one verse has always stuck out to me as a perfect example His love: “If anyone hears what I am saying and doesn’t take it seriously, I don’t reject him. I didn’t come to reject the world; I came to save the world.” (John 12:47). In this verse, Jesus is saying that if you don’t agree, that’s your decision. He will not judge you, that’s not His job; He only came to save us and offer you the Truth.

Many Jews believed in Jesus, but many did not believe. They saw Jesus as a threat to their way of life, and plotted to kill Him. Jesus, of course, knew all of this but intentionally allowed them to carry out their plan. Jesus’ original intent was to sacrifice Himself for the good of all mankind. He took the sins of the world on His shoulders and died so we wouldn’t have to.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t dead for long. He rose from the dead three days later, exemplifying the power God has over death and Satan. Jesus made a difference.

Consider the contrast between Gavrilo Princip and Jesus. Gavrilo Princip used hate as his fuel to make a difference. As a result, millions of people died horrible deaths. Jesus, on the other hand, used love as His fuel, and an uncountable number of people now have the opportunity to have eternal life in God the Father.

You, one person, have the ability to make a difference, too. Try to live your life filled with love, instead of hate; and you will make differences in the world that you cannot imagine.

Enigma Machine

Forgive the bad pun in the title, I couldn’t resist myself! The following is a brief thought I had after reading a book on World War II code-breaking (the $20 word is cryptanalysis). Allow me to give you a brief history lesson.

In World War II, Nazi Germany used a machine called “Enigma” to encode secret messages from the German High Command to the various Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Kriegsmarine divisions in the field. The Enigma was an ingenious device—it replaced a letter with another, different letter based on the path of an electrical current through rotating rotors. It was small and compact—slightly larger than a child’s lunchbox. Output from the Enigma machine would be blocks of five characters, complete and utter gibberish to anyone without another Enigma machine. The book Enigma, by Robert Harris, gives the most chilling description of the Enigma machine I have seen, so permit me to quote it for you here:

Electric current on a standard Enigma flowed from keyboard to lamps via a set of three wired rotors (at least one of which turned a notch every time a key was struck) and a plugboard with twenty-six jacks. The circuits changed constantly; their potential number was astronomical, but calculable. There were five different rotors to choose from (two were kept spare), which meant they could be arranged in any one of sixty possible orders. Each rotor was slotted onto a spindle and had twenty-six possible starting positions. Twenty-six to the power of three was 17,576. Multiply that by the 60 potential rotor-orders and you got 1,054,560. Multiply that by the possible number of plugboard connections—about 150 million million—and you were looking at a machine that had around 150 million million million different starting positions….And the Germans changed these daily, sometimes twice a day.

To give you a better idea of what that number means—it has eighteen zeros. If all six billion people on Earth had one starting position apiece, and took one day to test, it would take 25 billion days—over 68 thousand years, to try every possibility. Keep in mind, too, that the above figures only correspond to the Enigma machine used in Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe communications. The German navy, the Kriegsmarine, used Enigma with four rotors, instead of three. This increases the total number of possibilities to 8,773,939,200,000,000,000,000, or almost 9 sextillion. In the face of such staggering figures, it would have been all too easy for the Allied powers to simply give up and stop trying to crack the Enigma code. However, they had a secret weapon on their side—the Bombe.

The Bombe was more than the first electrical computer—it was the first machine specifically designed to break a code created by another machine.

The Bombe had 108 drums, each matching one rotor in an Enigma machine. Each drum rotated until a possible match was found, going through every possibility in about 6 hours. This made the Bombe extremely noisy—imagine the sound of 108 drums rotating at 120 RPM, starting and stopping as it found matches.

British Bombe

The Bombe was also quite large to fit all this equipment in—most were about 7 feet by 6½ feet by 2 feet, and weighed about a ton.

The Bombe was dangerous—often, oil would leak and puddle near the floor. If an engineer left the access panel open, it would spark long blue arcs of electricity as it found matches. A constant smell of ozone was in the air in the decryption room.

The Bombe was big, ugly, dangerous, and extremely complicated to use and repair. I’m sure the British would have preferred something smaller and cleaner. However, it played an indispensable role in the course of World War II. If the British had not had use of the Bombe, the outcome of the war would almost certainly be different.

Allow me to draw a parallel here. Sin seems easier to manage. A life in the world is smaller, compact, more convenient; just like the Enigma machine. However, if we fall victim to the temptation, we find that our life becomes a series of meaningless letters—coded to the point where we don’t know what happened or why. We realize that we can no longer take care of our problems on our own.

If we let God take control, though, our lives often become messy, and dangerous, and even ugly from a worldly perspective. However, it works. It works so well that no one could possibly recreate it—even with the entire population of the Earth to help. Let’s take the story of Paul, for example.

Like many Jews with Roman citizenship, Paul had two names—a Jewish name, Saul, and a Latin name, Paul. Paul was a powerful Pharisee in Roman-occupied Israel. The Pharisees were a political and religious movement in Jewish circles who believed that the only way to heaven is to obey the long list of Jewish laws. In fact, Paul calls upon his upbringing and heritage in the book of Philippians: “You know my pedigree: a legitimate birth, circumcised on the eighth day; an Israelite from the elite tribe of Benjamin; a strict and devout adherent to God’s law; a fiery defender of the purity of my religion, even to the point of persecuting the church; a meticulous observer of everything set down in God’s law Book.” (Phil. 3:5-6)

Paul spent years persecuting Christians, even holding cloaks and congratulating other Pharisees as they stoned Stephen for his belief in Christ. (Acts 7:57-8:3). Paul’s polished image in the Jewish community was about to tarnish, however, during a trip to the city of Damascus. While on the road, Paul saw a blinding light and fell to the ground. He heard a voice asking “Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?” When Paul asked who was speaking, the voice answered, “I am Jesus, the One you’re hunting down. I want you to get up and enter the city. In the city you’ll be told what to do next.” After this, Paul was blind and did not eat or drink for three days. (Acts 9:3-9)

Saint Paul Writing His Epistles

In the city, God spoke to another man, Ananias. God told Ananias to find Paul in the city, place his hands over Paul’s eyes, and pray to heal him of his blindness. God mentioned that “I have picked him as my personal representative to non-Jews and kings and Jews. And now I’m about to show him what he’s in for—the hard suffering that goes with this job.” (Acts 9:11-16).

Before Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, his life was like the Enigma machine. It was compact and convenient, beautiful in the eyes of his peers and those in the world. However, once he realized that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, his life grew unimaginably more complex. His life was threatened multiple times and he was imprisoned and beaten for his beliefs. However, Paul’s many letters to the various churches in the area constitute the vast majority of the New Testament. God’s choice to use Paul, along with Paul’s involvement with the early Christian church (even working beside his former enemies), strengthened the early church far more than would otherwise have been possible.

Just like the Bombe made it possible for the Allied powers to defeat the Germans in World War II, God used Paul to strengthen the early Christian church so it would be more effective in its outreach to others. Paul’s life was messy, and dangerous, and ugly, but it worked. If we allow God to take full control of our lives, our lives will be messy and dangerous; but they will work.

Let’s get one thing straight, before I begin. I don’t claim to be a theologian. I have tried to be impartial, and only give comparisons, metaphors, and descriptions that are generic to the Christian faith. However, I cannot help but to base the devotions, at least in a small part, on my personal interpretation of Scripture and my personal experiences as a Christian. For that, I apologize; no slight was meant. For the sake of readability, all Biblical references will be taken from the Message Bible, unless otherwise noted.

I sincerely hope that you enjoy these little devotions, and that they may open your eyes to a new understanding of God. Please don’t hesitate to leave your comments or questions; however, posts that are deliberately mean, derogatory, or otherwise insulting to anyone or any faith, will not be permitted and will be quickly deleted. Spam, of course, is also not permitted.

Enjoy!