How Not to Save the Situation

How Not to Save the Situation
JUDGES 21:1-25

The story goes that in 1941, on the eve of the U.S. entry into the 1939–1945 war, two teenage ham radio operators who had joined the U.S. National Guard were enrolled into the army and were trained in “scrambling” messages to try to avoid their being understood by the enemy. This involved the use of random groups of five letters, which for fun the two young men turned into acronyms. One day the letters were SNAFU, which instantly became “Situation normal, all fouled up” (except that the next to last word wasn’t actually “fouled”). The word became a standard description of the military situation just before and after Pearl Harbor. It is often the case that in war things do not turn out in the way the best intelligence suggested they would, and you cannot see the implications of the actions you take...