Snapshots of Life
Sunday, February 25, 2007
Practical v. Doctrinal
Some topics for talks in church are easy. Some are hard. Give me a doctrinal topic anyday. You have near limitless information available for sources, not to mention personal testimony and experience with the doctrine to be addressed. Give me a practical topic and see me ponder and stew with no sense of what to do! Certainly, practice is influenced by doctrine, but for some reason it's harder to talk about. There are often many different ways and many good ways to apply doctrine and achieve practical goals. It becomes very challenging to offer something that will be of benefit, rather than a 7-minute workshop talk that shares the same scriptures and quotes we always hear for a given practical discussion. Besides, I feel somewhat unqualified to address a practical topic that I have yet to figure out. The topic: How to find balance in our lives. The setting: Stake priesthood leadership meeting. Any ideas??
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2 comments:
This is a very challenging question especially for graduate students I think. We spend so much time in classes learning theory that we forget how to do anything useful. The only saving grace that I have is when I actually have to do something useful in my research or for a project. This forces me to learn how to apply the concepts I've learned. It also represents the "hard part" of life. Many things are wonderful in theory and useless in practice. Furthermore, with regard to doctrine (and engineering incidently) it is very difficult to apply principles properly.
So the question is: how do you apply principles in your life in a meaningful way? In engineering it's typically rather straightforward. You apply equations and translate them into code and then see if it works. If it does - you win, otherwise - well...
This approach may not work so well for applying doctrine although I think we can gain some insight from it. In a sense there are equations but they are more obscure. For instance, we should have charity. Now we think about how we might apply charity in certain situations. For instance maybe you have the inclination to judge someone for something silly they did. Remembering our application we say "well, let's apply charity by not being judgmental, and futhermore, I'll say something nice instead." The final test works for engineering as well as doctrine - if it works - you win, otherwise - well... So how do you know if it worked, well you feel the Spirit, or warm fuzzies, whichever you prefer.
So all in all I think the application of doctrine is an exercise of picking a specific instance of something we CAN apply the doctrine to and working on that. Be very specific and hypothesize different situations and what you might do in that circumstance. This is the only way to make it real for people. We need to know what to do in certain situations. Those of us who learn by example will merely need one or two instances describing the application of the principle. Afterwards, we can integrate that application into our life.
Don't know if that helps but that's one engineer's perspective.
I once gave a talk in Sacrament meeting on this exact topic (I choose the topic). I will have to try and remember some of the details, although I do remember doing an object lesson that proved to be quite useful and I would be more than happy to explain it to you.
Good luck! What a wonderful opportunity!
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