Reference Point

I’ve been building things at work. Like modeling in SolidWorks and then milling and drilling aluminum building. Sometimes, though, things don’t always fit. There was the time that the holes were drilled about 2 mm too close to each other. It (rather embarrassingly) took me about 2 hours to try and fix it by using larger drill bits offset slightly from the center (a practice that I would not encourage, as it’s not very efficient). The final product looked… well, let’s not go there. But it worked! Maybe not as well as it could have had it been done correctly the first time, but sufficiently well to get everything working. Every little step- scoring to mark the center of the hole, center punching, center drilling, and then drilling- had its own margin of error. It looked small, but those errors kept compounding. Not pretty. So when it came time to double check all the dimensions, I didn’t base anything off of a previous step. I went back to the original. So that I could make the real thing my reference point.

I think life is kind of similar. We base our decisions and our values off of a foundation. And then if we switch what we’re comparing everything to, everything shifts just a tiny bit. And the next one a bit more. And so on until we wake up one day and wonder how we ever got here. I think it can also happen not only with decisions. Say we’re trying to learn more about God, about our faith. We read books that other people have written based off of what they’ve learned from the Bible. And I think that’s totally great! We can learn a lot from other people. What I think is dangerous is when we take those books and make them the only thing we read and give them as much importance as the original reference point. We need to take those things that we learn and always be comparing it to what the Bible says. Our frame of reference will always be shifting if we base things off of other people. I think it’s a good idea to make sure that we’re constantly referencing the original frame of reference- one that is based off of One who is constant and sure. That way, when we’re done building, we can look back and see something that has straight walls and a solid foundation. Only when we’re using the correct frame of reference can we really walk the way we’ve been called to walk.