Switch Point

Seriously, there is involved in such simple decisions the entire question of what we do with our lives. It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living.

At one time I worked for the railroad. I had responsibility for what is called deadend traffic—mail, baggage and express cars that are carried on passenger trains. I received one day in my office in Denver a telephone call from my counterpart in one of the eastern railroads. A train, he reported, had arrived at Newark , New Jersey , without its baggage car.

We began to check and learned that the car had been properly loaded and properly trained in Oakland and had been delivered by the Western Pacific in Salt Lake City to the Rio Grande . The D. and R.G. had carried it to Denver and delivered it to the Missouri Pacific, which carried it to St. Louis for delivery to the Baltimore and Ohio . But a thoughtless switchman in the St. Louis yard, careless of his instruction, had moved a small piece of steel, a switch point, about three inches, with the result that a car that should have been in Newark , New Jersey , was in New Orleans .

On such seemingly small hinges turn our lives. Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.

Gordon B. Hinckley "Caesar, Circus, or Christ" BYU Devotional Oct 26 1965