Science appeals to me because of its ability to identify objective truths.  You can describe something true about carbon in a way that’s much harder to do about a novel or a painting.  But although I like science, I’m not a math person -  I studied biology in college because it let me learn science while mostly avoiding equations.  So it took a special teacher to make me like a really math-oriented science like physics.  Mr. Blanchard (I changed his name), my high school physics teacher, was able to do that.  He made physics fun and understandable, and helped me have the confidence to take more science classes.  And while I don’t remember much physics any more, I do remember one particular day in his class.

The class had done poorly on an exam, and we were all feeling panicked about it.  Mr. Blanchard, to put things in perspective I suppose, told the class that at one point in our lives we would all fail big time at something that really mattered to us.  One student, with considerable chutzpah, asked Mr. Blanchard what he had failed at.  Without missing a beat he answered “being a father.”  No one asked him to explain that, and he moved on with the lecture.  But I knew what he meant because my friend’s older sister went to high school with one of his kids.  She had told me that one of his teenage sons had committed suicide.  I don’t know if Mr. Blanchard was really a failure of a father; parenthood is not something where we can be assigned pass/fail grades.  But he thought he was a failure, and there are no second chances when it comes to raising children.

Mr. Blanchard’s prediction that failure is inevitable is at odds with an idea I’ve heard regularly at church, which is that “God will not test us above our ability.”  Is this true?  And where does the phrase come from? [Read more...]