DW's Blog

To What Will Be

by DW Green — October 16, 2019

The ultimate outcome is in the lap of the gods

When General Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote to his wife on the eve of the invasion of Normandy, he told her, “Everything we could think of has been done, the troops are fit, everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the gods.” He’d done everything he could—and now, what would happen would happen and he was ready to bear whatever that was. In fact, Eisenhower had written another letter that night and prepared it for release in case the invasion failed. If failure was what God—or fate or luck or whatever you want to call it—willed, he was ready.

There is a wonderful lesson there. The man in charge of perhaps the most powerful army the world had ever assembled, on the eve of the most expertly organized and planned invasion the world will hopefully ever know, was humble enough to know that the outcome ultimately belonged to someone or something bigger than him.

And so it goes with all our ventures. No matter how much preparation, no matter how skilled or smart we are, the ultimate outcome is in the lap of the gods. The sooner we know that, the better we will be.