One Tiny Pin

My son Rob is a mechanical engineer who designs parts for the aerospace industry. He once showed me a steel pin, a cylinder whose length was 3/4 of an inch, with a diameter of 1/16 of an inch. He asked me to estimate what this pin cost at a typical hardware store. I guessed that it would be less than a dollar, which we confirmed online—$0.76.

Then he asked me to estimate its cost if purchased from Boeing to replace that same pin in a working 747 jet. I guessed that it would cost $20. Oh no, the price was $657. “You know what the difference is between the two pins?” Rob asked.

“No,” I said.

“Mostly research and paperwork.”

It turns out that the “real” pin from Boeing does have some differences in metallurgical composition from the “cheap” pin—the one from the hardware store. But these differences are small and would explain only a few cents in cost. The real pin was meticulously designed, bent, stressed, heated, frozen, crushed, and used in simulation of its actual function hundreds of thousands of times. And each step was ratified by multiple engineers and certifying organizations. The cheap pin looks like the real one, and it might actually function on a jet for a while, but the real part has been PROVEN to work.

Real Love has been proven to work in real life, in uncounted cultures and languages, in every kind of relationship, and without fail. On occasion Imitation Love appears to “work” for brief periods of time, but eventually it fails—for everyone. Real Love requires more “research and paperwork”—more reading, preparation, practical application, and consistent use—but it’s worth the price, because it simply works. It keeps the plane in the air. It doesn’t cause the catastrophic failures experienced routinely with the use of Imitation Love.

Imitation Love often appears to be inexpensive—and certainly widely available—but we uniformly fail to appreciate the real price until our plane plows into the earth with a cost beyond calculating. Real Love is worth whatever we pay to find and keep it, and in the end it is a far better bargain than all its counterfeits.