Back in the 1980s a friend of mine was a trainee bank manager with the then National Westminster Bank in London. Part of the way through the training program the trainees were given a test. They were ushered into a room full of desks, on each of which was a test paper that was several pages in length and which opened with the following rubric: “Please read this test paper carefully. Do not attempt to answer any of the questions before you have finished reading this test paper”.
My friend obediently read through the questions without writing anything, even though he knew some of the answers without the need to consider the questions deeply. He could so easily have completed those questions as he went along. At the very end of the test paper he read the following rubric: “Do not write any of the answers to the questions on this paper”.
It transpired that the real purpose of the test was not to see what the trainee bank managers knew but to see whether they could carry out the simple instruction of not writing anything until they had finished reading the test paper. My friend was the only person who passed that test. The salutary lesson of this exercise—we may know that we are being tested but we may not recognize what we are being tested on—is even more applicable when it is God and not a bank that sets the tests.
