Christian discernment takes patience and prayer and is not something easily reducible to a few simple axioms or methods. However, through the use of our reason we can at least approach discernment having ruled out certain impossibilities. One thing that we can be sure of, for example, is that God will never intend for us to sin as a means of accomplishing or reaching a good. The question of “ends and means” may be a familiar one in regards to imagining more extreme circumstances, but consider a more ordinary example: