Book Review: No Time To Waste, by JD Wetterling

No Time to Waste is a difficult book to categorize: is it a collection of amazing but true war stories? Yes. Personal memoirs? Yes. Engaging epistolary correspondence? Yes. Collected reflections on life, beauty, and even politics, with an occasional dash of humor splashed in? Yes. A practical and scripturally-grounded guide to personal evangelism? Well yes, it’s that too. But perhaps predominantly, it’s a book of evidences that, behind all the sometimes amazing and often mundane events of life, which seem random, happenstance, or guided by blind luck, there is a God who is not just aware in some distant and unaffected way, but a God who is actively directing every matter from small to great, for the eternal good of all whom he has chosen to preserve for himself and his Kingdom. This is true in times of war, when men who do not know or acknowledge God win extraordinary victories that they should not have won, by his meticulous providence; but it is true just as certainly and much more powerfully in times of peace, when the more miraculous victory of new, spiritual life is given to the least likely of subjects. That, above all, is the lesson this book drives home; and it is a lesson that we would all do well to bask in afresh.

It may take a good chef to make a great dish, but it takes a great chef to make a good meal. One thing done well requires a certain amount of skill, but to do several things well, and not just to do them well, but to piece them together in such a way that each individual part sets off and complements the unique contributions of every other part, so that the product is a balanced and harmonious whole, must certainly require much more skill. In a way, No Time To Waste attempts the latter. It contains op-ed articles reprinted from various major newspapers, manuscripted sermons and bible meditations, riveting war stories, both from the intense sub-oceanic world of the Pacific Front of World War II and the high-speed aerial world of a fighter pilot in Vietnam; but predominantly, and interspersed in such a way as to weave every other element into a mutually-interpretive whole, it is a correspondence, by e-mail, between two casual acquaintances, with an unlikely beginning and an unlikelier end.

Skilled fighter pilot JD Wetterling first met World War II war hero Captain Jack Bennett after the latter responded to one of his articles printed in the Wall Street Journal. Both of them knew by experience the stark realities of war, and so a close friendship was soon forged. But although there was so much that bound them together, even across a generational gap, there was one thing that kept them worlds apart, one greater divide that JD wanted desperately to bridge: both soldiers had been preserved by God’s unusual grace from the devastations of war, but only he had been snatched out of the greater devastation of sin, self-sufficiency, and blindness. He now had a brother in this world, whose bonds had been forged in the same fire of war that the intervening decades could not quench; but he wanted a brother in the next world, with bonds forged in the fires of God’s redeeming love, which all eternity could only make stronger.

And so the story unfolds: while the book contains much more than this, the bare outline is the correspondence between JD, a former fighter pilot now serving as an elder in a Presbyterian Church, and Jack, a former submarine commander now retired, but with a sharp, inquisitive mind, and a desire to probe into eternal truths. In the course of the correspondence, what comes to the fore is how, over and again, the providence of God, which preserved Jack in the war, is now bringing into his life everything necessary to bend his will, overcome his blindness, and bring him into the eternal Kingdom of Christ. World War II has many stories of great triumph in the face of overwhelming odds; but never has there been such a victory over such impossible obstacles as the miracle of the rebirth of a heart conceived in iniquity and born in sin, the miracle of divine, unstoppable grace. All praise to the Savior of the undeserving, for his unspeakable miracle of regeneration and eternal life!

Available for purchase at Amazon.com

Leave a Reply