I remember my daughter applying for engineering jobs where they had several slots and the advertisements said one was reserved for female applicants.

In fact, same advertising every year.

Chatting with the secretaries she discovered they had never hired a female engineer and the inside talk was not this year but maybe next year.

Yet every guy not hired was shunted off with the explanation that they needed to hire a woman. It made it so much easier to reject people without the rejected applicants getting mad at the company or accepting why they really had not been hired.

None of those places actually hired a female engineer that year.

Too often what we hear, perceive and understand is curated and doesn’t actually mesh with reality.

Sometimes it is a message we miss (eg “Meet the Mormons” was aimed as much at members of the church to teach them to be more inclusive as it was to outsiders).

Other times it is to displace (like the job advertising used to displace disappointments).

Sometimes it is to reach out to people who would otherwise be reached (the hungry, tired and poor are the least likely to think anything positive is aimed at them).

Sometimes it is to make a balance.

Hawk has pointed out that it really helps to look at the reason for something.

For example, when Paul talks about the old law being a school teacher to lead us to Christ he isn’t saying we need to follow the law of Moses now, but rather it was necessary to create the environment for the Christ to appear.

There was an excellent essay on separating out the essentials today.

Everything else needs to be viewed in terms of how it leads us to those essentials or how it distracts us.

What do you think?

Image of “essentials” from https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logo_Corel_Painter_Essentials.png