I love analogies. For some reason they stick with me. Ever since I read CS Lewis’s rant whereby anybody who doesn’t accept Jesus for who he claims to be boils down to a poached egg, I can litterally visualize a poached egg between many people’s shoulders.
Perhaps I take them too far. The other day I was discussing with some friends how we as Christians are to “give God the glory” for the things that we do, and I decided that apache’s mod_rewrite was a fair analogy. For those of you who don’t know much about http redirection, this will not make a whole lot of sense, but there are several flags you can add when urls are re-written. Two of these are \[R] and \[P], redirect and proxy. A proxy rewrite makes it look the content is being served from the requested URL when really it comes from somewhere else. This is a how we look when we take credit for work God has done through us. The redirections method alerts the user to the fact that the resource really lies elsewhere and lets them request it themselves. This is what I believe we need to be doing with the credit due to God.
Tonight I was up at church praying and thinking about a problem I’ve been having, specifically my frustration with working with a team-member. She (codname Susan) and I seem to get along fine, but I haven’t felt like we are quite on the same page all the time.
I was running through other life experiences in my head trying to come up with something that would help me deal with this one and my experiences as an audio engineer came to mind. One of the most troublesome routines in mixing live sound is the getting all the monitor mixes just right. Levels can be just a little bit off and all of a sudden the drummer can’t hear the keyboard player and the guitarist can’t hear the drummer and the lead singer can’t hear the guitar and the keyboardist can’t hear the lead singer. You get the picture — the tone and timing all fall to pieces. If you’ve ever mixed monitors you know how fast that can happen.
I picture Susan and I in a band together, both trying to play the same song. I think she’s got the lead instrument and I’ve got some accompanement part. Unfortunatly I don’t have Susan in my monitors unless I stop playing to listen. Whenever I play I can no longer hear what she’s doing and I feel like I’ve incorrectly taken over the lead. Perhaps she can hear me and make herself blend correctly, but even if that’s the case, the role is backwards.
