The Family O' Blevins

As we hurdled through the streets of Beijing crammed with some friends in the back of a taxi, one of them said, "I had a weird thought the other day. In the US, I would pray for the nation, the nation's leaders and its people, you know. That was just 300 million people or so. But now, in China, when I pray for the country, I'm praying for a whole 1.3 billion people! So I was thinking, maybe it takes more faith when you're praying for more people."
"Kind of like a faith pie that you divide up among the people you're praying for," I said. "If your faith pie that you give to China is as big as the one that you give to the US, then the Chinese don't get quite as much."

A faith pie that you slice up and distribute among the people you pray for? We went on this subject for awhile. A little facetious and inaccurate, but may have some metaphoric value. I thought of a dilemma with faith pies though. If I bake up a big faith pie praying for China, then is the sum of the pieces as valuable as just giving the whole thing to a single individual? What if the distribution is too sparse to do much good if it's divided among too many people? And if I'm praying for multiple people, it seems like I should be careful to not sneak a bigger piece to my wife than to the elevator boy at our apartment complex looking for a job. That doesn't seem nice.

Also, what if a whole bunch of us are shipping huge faith pie pieces to one person? Is it possible for them to get a surplus of faith pie pieces, while someone who really needs pie isn't getting enough? I suppose we could coordinate our efforts to make sure that pieces of faith pie are being distributed fairly and according to peoples' needs.

There's no breakdown in the delivery system, but there could be a problem with ensuring that pie's destinations meet everybody's needs, and there aren't big conglomerations of pie pieces piled up on someone's doorstep when someone in ample need of grace has too little. I don't think pie pieces should be distributed evenly across the board, just to make sure everyone gets what they need. President Monson needs a lot of pie, and I'm sure he gets it. Hopefully we're mindful enough to remember to give some big pieces to those who aren't quite as prone to frequent our thoughts but need us nonetheless.