Last Thursday I got a text from the 2nd Counselor in the Bishopric of my ward. The dreaded text: "Can you speak in sacrament meeting this Sunday?" I told him that I could, and with such short notice, he told me that he would just let me pick my own topic. Some people might find this a relief, but to me, it was a nightmare. Friday and Saturday I thought and thought about what to say, and managed to put together a decent outline on obedience and repentance, but something was missing, and I knew it.
In the middle of the first talk in sacrament meeting, it came to me--Factors of Safety.
Say you're building a bridge (something we MechEs rarely do, but this is a hypothetical), and you figure that the biggest thing that will ever drive across the bridge weighs 5 tons. You could design your bridge to hold exactly 5 tons, and feel satisfied. In this case, your safety factor would be exactly 1.
Here's the problem with that:
It turns out that when you design something with a safety factor of exactly 1, it's what my Strength of Materials prof calls "on the verge of failure." A fly, a crack in the deck of the bridge, that extra sandwich the truck driver ate for lunch, any of these things could be enough to cause the bridge to fail under a load it should have been able to hold, per your design.
Solution? Say you figure the bridge needs to hold 5 tons. Design it for 10 tons, just in case. You now have a safety factor of 2.
Life, as it turns out, is a bit like this. In Alma 36:1, the prophet Alma reminds his son, Helaman, that "inasmuch as ye shall keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper". The words "inasmuch as" here could just as easily be rendered "to the degree that", leaving us with "To the degree that ye keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper."
It turns out, there are various degrees of obedience. For instance, we're commanded to read our scriptures every day. Technically, I suppose that if I read one verse of scripture every day, I am being obedient to the commandment; however, if I'm doing just the bare minimum, it begs the question: am I living my life on the verge of failure? If so, and if we desire the blessings of the Lord in the full degree to which he desires to give them to us, we ought to ask ourselves what kind of safety factors we need to introduce into our lives.
In the middle of the first talk in sacrament meeting, it came to me--Factors of Safety.
Say you're building a bridge (something we MechEs rarely do, but this is a hypothetical), and you figure that the biggest thing that will ever drive across the bridge weighs 5 tons. You could design your bridge to hold exactly 5 tons, and feel satisfied. In this case, your safety factor would be exactly 1.
Here's the problem with that:
It turns out that when you design something with a safety factor of exactly 1, it's what my Strength of Materials prof calls "on the verge of failure." A fly, a crack in the deck of the bridge, that extra sandwich the truck driver ate for lunch, any of these things could be enough to cause the bridge to fail under a load it should have been able to hold, per your design.
Solution? Say you figure the bridge needs to hold 5 tons. Design it for 10 tons, just in case. You now have a safety factor of 2.
Life, as it turns out, is a bit like this. In Alma 36:1, the prophet Alma reminds his son, Helaman, that "inasmuch as ye shall keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper". The words "inasmuch as" here could just as easily be rendered "to the degree that", leaving us with "To the degree that ye keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper."
It turns out, there are various degrees of obedience. For instance, we're commanded to read our scriptures every day. Technically, I suppose that if I read one verse of scripture every day, I am being obedient to the commandment; however, if I'm doing just the bare minimum, it begs the question: am I living my life on the verge of failure? If so, and if we desire the blessings of the Lord in the full degree to which he desires to give them to us, we ought to ask ourselves what kind of safety factors we need to introduce into our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment