Sun. Feb. 14, 2010 (Karl Brown)

On St Valentine's Day, Karl Brown offered parables illustrating differing approaches to serious engineering problems. For example, why is it that something as commonplace as the household toilet ever fail to do its job properly? Everybody knows this happens, so why have so many engineer-designers overlooked these ubiquitous flaws? In order for any design to work flawlessly, engineers must discover and admit that mistakes have been made in their designs, isolate the flaws, repeatedly correcting and testing them. If the engineer-designer look the other way, the problems continue. By contrast, one of the inventors of the personal computer admitted his initial mistakes publicly rather than veiling them (he published and distributed them with the subsequent model). 2 Cor. 3.12- speaks of people having "veils" over their minds when reading scripture. Even today, our minds can be "veiled" when thinking about things. Who will lift our veils? How do we lift our own veils, see our flaws, accept where we are wrong, stop hiding behind our veils of denial and instead accept good criticism with much thought? Perhaps recent problems with cars can serve as metaphors for our lives -- refusing to admit there are serious problems until critics force the problem into the open. [JEK] Listen to the sermon audio MP3 recording from Sunday, Feb. 14th, 2010 using your browser's preferred media player.