Photo credits

The Embalse de Riano in northern Spain. The picture was taken by .... me!

Monday, February 4

Prayer works

On Friday, I came to the conclusion that I had dropped an almighty clanger at work. The passive emergency bypass weir that I had designed for the XYZ screen could not possibly work. It would be overflowing all the time, not just in emergencies. What is more, it was impossible to fix the error - it simply can't work. It's the wrong approach to the problem. And I felt that I had gone wrong, negligently, in my calculations.

So my last act on friday was to email the project reviewer - who was working over the weekend - to let him know. (ie we are struggling to meet deadlines which we will be penalised for missing)

I then spent the whole weekend worried and trembling in anticipation of the ... no I can use that word on a Christian blog, lets say 'telling off' that I would get on monday. I asked my woife and kids to pray, which they did.

So, when I arrived, rather than having the usual cup of tea and blog surfing session before starting, I went straight to the reviewer, and found that he wasn't as cross as I expected. For a start, my error was not a negligent one. I had thought I had not completed an iteration or a common sense test, but in fact I had just missed out a required freeboard somewhere else in the calculation - a simple error rather than a really stupid one. And furthermore, I had now discovered a flaw with the type of screen proposed by my mechanical engineering colleagues, and we are now referring the matter to the manufacturer to get it resolved.

Now the cynic will say that all that would still have been the case had we not prayed. But the Bible teaches that our timeless God knows our prayers before we speak them, and I think it says he is already sending the answer.

So I remain convinced - prayer works.

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