On a recent family trip to visit some of the Church historic sites, we visited Kirtland Ohio and the Visitor Center there. In the Family Living Center they had many workshops where Missionaries demonstrated how the early people of Nauvoo made candles, carded wool, braided rugs, baked bread, made rope and bent horse shoes.
Making a rope was one of my granddaughter’s favorite exhibits. She was invited to help the Missionary in demonstrating how small pieces of twine are twisted together to make a single cord. Then each cord is twisted together again to create a rope. This newly created rope had structural integrity through the intertwining of weaker cords. The integrity of the rope however, was only as strong as each individual cord. If one of the cords were to weaken or break, we were told, more pressure and strain would be placed upon the remaining cords, eventually causing them to weaken and break as well.
As the Missionary finished his presentation he likened the rope to our own personal integrity. It is only as strong as the principles that have been intertwined to create it. As long as the model it is based upon is unimpaired, the cords are also secure. The compromise of even a single principle will however weaken our integrity in accordance with the law of sequential stress.
I love how everyday things can be likened to important principles in our own lives.
