October 1, 2015
By Eddie Pipkin
Destin Sandlin is an aerospace engineer (that is, he is a real rocket scientist who works at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama). He is also a YouTube educator, who makes entertaining videos about scientific insights, which he posts on a channel called, Smarter Every Day. Recently, a friend sent me a link to one of Sandlin’s videos. It was, frankly, a little head-shaking, a little mind-blowing, and definitely eye-opening, not only in illustrating the miraculous way in which God has designed human brain function, but also as an instructive take on the way ministry leadership often works.
The video in question is called, “The Backwards Brain Bicycle.” In it, some of the welders that Sandlin works with—guys he describes as “geniuses who like to play jokes on the engineers”—have built him a bicycle with a special gearing attachment to the handlebars which makes the bike steer opposite of the normal direction—that is, when you turn the handlebars to the right, instead of turning to the right, the front wheel of the bike actually turns to the left, and vice versa.
Sandlin, who is a highly intelligent guy, not to mention a pretty decent athlete, hopped on the bike thinking ‘no big deal,’ he could master this counter-intuitive thinking with a minimum of effort. Only, here’s the thing. He couldn’t. Fail after fail, he could not stay upright on the bike. It’s pretty funny to watch (and he later bets college students $200 that they can’t successfully ride this bike across a stage—and they can’t do it either—nobody can). But it wasn’t funny to Sandl