When I was in elementary school, about second grade or so, they started allowing some of us young boys pick up the attendance cards at church. The first Sunday that we did so, the father of one of the boys was in the foyer. We asked him what to do with the cards. “Take them into the office and count them,” he told us. And so we did. Sunday after Sunday, for several years, we would faithfully pick up the cards, take them to the office, and count them, leaving a piece of paper on the secretary’s desk with the tally written on it.
There’s no point in counting attendance cards. It didn’t need to be done. No one used that tally for anything. But no one ever told us that, so we continued to faithfully do as we had been told.
Go ahead. You make the application from that story.