Am I Sure About This?

Math blogger and professor Terence Tao offers some advice to folks in his field that, it seems to me, provides useful thinking about several other arenas as well.

Tao suggests that if a mathematician tries to solve a problem and comes up with an immediate, brilliant obviously correct answer, he or she should test it out even more thoroughly than an answer that shows up after lots and lots of hard slogging. In other words, Archimedes should probably have said, "Eureka! Maybe!"

Although it's not exactly like Tao's suggestion, I find myself applying a similar principle when I write sermons, for example. There are times when the perfect illustration or saying or turn of phrase occurs to me, one which will reveal exactly what I intend to say in a manner so clear that the fidgety pre-schoolers in the eighth pew will be able to use it to convert Richard Dawkins.

The problem, of course, comes when I then try to build my sermon and find that getting from where I start (the Biblical text) to where I want to go (my brilliant thought) is by no means the straight and direct path I thought it was. It winds, meanders, doubles back and contorts in order to make the journey, which is a clue that no matter what I might have thought from the start, the actual truth is not as fun: I can't get there from here. In fact, on more than one occasion I have found that my perfect illustration or brilliant idea turns out to be -- this is embarrassing -- completely wrong. Which is probably a relief to those pre-schoolers, who can go play on the swings instead of flying to England to witness to Richard Dawkins.

Now, this doesn't always happen. Sometimes those flashes of insight are almost as brilliant as I think they are and they do work as perfectly as I hope they would. After all, Archimedes was right about displacement. But we both found that out when we tested our work.

Most of the time this blog, of course, undergoes no such testing, which no doubt now makes sense to those of you who continue to read it.

(H/T Leah Libresco)