My phone has a GPS navigator built in. It’s very convenient. Although I haven’t had the need to use it too often, it has nevertheless been very handy when I have needed it. Once, when trundling down the freeway, I asked my wife to turn it on. You know, just to see how long it would take it figure out where we were, and that sort of thing. Just fiddling, really. So she turned it on, it found us, and got it right. It put our position on the map, showed us travelling in the right direction, and updated our position ever second or so. Then she noticed that it also showed how fast we were travelling. We were on a freeway, with a posted speed limit of 110 km/h, and that was what I had my cruise control set to. My speedo (speedometer for non-Australians) read 110 km/h, but the GPS had us travelling at between 104 and 105 km/h. Now this tied in with other times I’d had independent verification of my car’s speed. We’ve been past overhead radar speed signs that tell you how fast you’re going, and these consistently had the car doing around 5 km/h less than the velocity reported by the speedo.

Why is my instrumentation incorrect? I’m pretty sure my wife’s car does a similar thing. Is it something promulgated by car companies to make it less likely for people to get caught speeding in their vehicles? Something done in conjuction with the police so that if someone is caught speeding, they know very well that they have been speeding? If I’m caught doing 120 km/h by police, then my speedo would have been telling me that I was doing 125 km/h … not something that’s likely to happen by accident!  I daresay most people would give this very little thought, but for me, inconsistencies are really irritating. Being a programmer, if something isn’t right, it’s wrong, and needs fixing.

So what am I to do? Do I go with what is independently verifiable as correct, or do I go by my own instrumentation? Well, in 1 Corinthians 8, Paul talks about people and the attitudes towards eating meat sacrificed to idols. There are people who believe that God made all things good, and what they eat doesn’t impinge on their relationship with him. So eating this meat is not a problem for them. Other people grew up in the understanding that eating meat sacrificed to idols would defile them, and so it would injure their consciences to eat. Similarly, while I’m confident that travelling at 115 km/h according to my speedo is really 110 km/h to anyone in a position to judge it with a speed camera, I’m not comfortable as I’ve been brought up with the understanding that I should trust my instruments. For me, sailing close to the wind that way is sin. I have to go with my own instruments.