On The “One-Pot System”
By Josh Brake
I did my undergraduate studies in Engineering at LeTourneau University, a small private Christian university about two hours east of Dallas in Longview, Texas. I received an excellent engineering education—but the most significant part of my time at LeTourneau wasn’t the hours in class or lab. It was the relationships that surrounded them.
None of these relationships were as significant as my friendship with Bill Graff and his wife, Igglis, both of whom have now passed away.
By the time I arrived on campus in the fall of 2010, Bill had been on the faculty at LeTourneau for longer than I had been alive by more than a factor of two. I don’t remember much from those early days of Electric Circuits 1 except that I was a bit intimidated. Bill had a reputation for holding together deep kindness and extraordinarily high standards for work. This was the guy, after all, who had a t-shirt (made for him by students) with the line “I fight grade inflation!” emblazoned on the front.
Bill loved his work as an engineering professor—but at the end of the day, it was about a lot more than the circuits. Bill’s care for students extended beyond the classroom. He would regularly invite students over to his house adjacent to campus to meet and talk through homework, eat dinner together, or discuss questions about science, faith, technology, and theology.
There is no way to remember Bill without remembering his deep Christian faith. It motivated everything he did.
Brief devotions open every class at LeTourneau. Most professors would read a short passage of Scripture or share a story. Not Bill.
Bill’s devos were in a league of their own. They were scattered about on recycled punch cards; covered with notes, diagrams, and verses scribbled in Bill’s chicken scratch. Whatever Bill’s legacy as an engineering educator, these thought-provoking devotional lessons will surely outweigh any of his more traditional professional accomplishments as an academic.
Bill’s devos focused on exploring foundational questions about what it means to live a flourishing life, tying biblical concepts together with engineering analogies. There were decision trees to illustrate the consequences of sin. Graphs of functions that, when integrated, demonstrated common ideas about the goodness of one’s life (the good-bad curve).
One devotional shaped me more than any other: the two-pot vs. one-pot system.
Image credit: Engineering Your Faith, Bill Graff
In the dichotomous view of the two-pot system, the sacred and secular are separate and non-overlapping sets of activities. Spiritual activities like reading the Bible, prayer, and church attendance are squarely in the spiritual pot. The day-to-day activities of work, exercise, play, cooking, and cleaning the house are categorized as secular.
Through this lens, the life of the faithful Christian is one of competition: try to spend as little time as possible doing “secular” things and as much time as possible praying, serving others, and meditating on Scripture.
In stark contrast, the one-pot system rejects this false divide. Instead of looking to document our work on two separate ledgers, the all-encompassing lens of the one-pot system argues that everything we do is to be done to honor God. The one-pot system is Colossians 3:23–24 in its fullest interpretation: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.”
Whatever you do means everything, not just the activities we deem to be spiritual or religious.
This changed my life. I was raised in a Christian household as a kid and came to understand my faith as my own more deeply as a teenager, but never before had I understood my life and work in this way. I had been seeing the world through the two-pot system without even realizing it.
My time at LeTourneau saw the early growth of this integration which has been bearing fruit in my life ever since. The one-pot system meant that the many hours I spent each week studying, working in the lab, and teaching were not in competition with living as a faithful Christian. Somehow, God saw fit to call me into partnership with him in my work, not just somehow in the moments between class or problem sets.
The richness of the one-pot system continues to help me to understand how to rightly view the many activities which demand my time and attention. The ever present tension between home, work, church, and leisure need not be seen as a zero-sum game. There is no divide between the sacred and secular. It’s all to be done to honor God by loving him and loving others.
As an electrical engineer who spent many years in graduate school studying optics, there are few concepts more beautiful to me than coherence. In short, coherence is about the synergistic combination of multiple individual contributions. Seeing the world as a one-pot system unlocks coherence. It is both deeply satisfying and liberating. It frees us from needing to agonize about how we divide our time and helps us to see that God can be present even (and maybe especially) in what we view as mundane.
As Dorothy Sayers summarizes in her essay Why Work?:
Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
The question is not about what we do with our careers. It’s about how we faithfully partner with God in the places he calls us.
The first words of my PhD thesis are from Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
My giants are many, but Bill is at the front of the line. See you later, dear friend.
Josh Brake teaches Engineering at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA where he has been on the faculty since 2019. In addition to his work in the classroom, he writes a weekly Substack newsletter, The Absent-Minded Professor, where he writes about technology, education, and human flourishing all through the lens of a prototyping mindset. This piece was originally published there.