Yesterday, I ate a sandwich that someone else had made for me. It was a really good sandwich - peanut butter and honey - one of my favorites. But there was something different about this sandwich, though I didn't notice anything odd about it until I was half way into the sandwich. It was made using sourdough bread.
Peanut butter and honey on sourdough sounds like a strange combination, but it actually tasted pretty normal. With the sweetness of the honey overpowering the sourness of the bread, I didn't even notice that the bread was sourdough until after I had taken several bites. (By the way, the person who had made the sandwich wasn't trying to pull a prank on me. It was the only kind of bread they had.)
Thinking about the sandwich and how long it took me to realize it was made with sourdough, I thought of a few spiritual applications we could take from my experience.
1) Perspective Influences Your Experience.
As I started eating the sandwich, I already knew that the sandwich was peanut butter and honey, one of my favorites. As I took my first few bites, I was expecting to taste honey and peanut butter, and I did, and it tasted great. When I realized that the sandwich was made with sourdough bread, and that I hadn't noticed it before, I tasted the sandwich carefully, trying to notice the sourdough bread, and that time, I did, and it tasted kind of weird.
I think it's true that people with positive attitudes see more good in the world than those with negative attitudes. If you look for the good in the world, you'll see it. If you look for the bad, ditto. Whether I was expecting to taste peanut butter and honey or sourdough bread, that was the part of the sandwich that stood out to me, and it affected the way I thought the sandwich itself tasted. The sandwich itself hadn't changed, but my perspective and expectations had.
Practical application: Look for the good in the world. Keep a positive attitude, and your view of life will improve. Your life may not change at all, but the aspects of your life that stand out most to you might.
2) Satan Will Often "Sweeten the Deal."
I normally don't like sourdough bread. It tastes funny to me, so under normal circumstances, I don't consider myself likely to eat a sourdough sandwich. But when I ate that sandwich yesterday, I didn't notice the sourdough bread at first, because the sweet taste of the honey distracted me from the strange taste of the sourdough.
Satan often "sweetens" temptations so we won't see them for what they are. He makes temptations seem harmless and desirable, so we sometimes partake of them without even realizing that we're being tempted, and sometimes, even when we know that what we're doing is against God's commandments, we justify it by saying, "It isn't really that bad. When you think about the honey, you hardly notice the sourdough at all." That's how he gets us sometimes - by offering us something we want badly enough that we're willing to accept a "barely noticeable" amount of sin to get it.
Practical application: Pay attention to what you're doing. If any part of it feels wrong, it probably is. Make sure that you only do things that are 100% approved by God. Of course, that's much easier said than done, and we often end up partaking of small amounts of sin by mistake. When that happens, our job is to realize our mistake and start repenting as soon as possible, then to find out how we were fooled in the first place so we can avoid being fooled in the future.
3) God Does the Same Thing.
Just as the fact that I didn't notice the sourness of the bread because of the sweetness of the honey could be applied to not noticing the bitterness of a sin because of the sweetness of the temptation, the same principle could be applied to living the gospel. There are some occasional difficulties to keeping the commandments. There are parties we can't go to, movies we can't watch, beverages we can't drink, and other things that it might be fun to do, but we know we can't, or at least shouldn't. At the same time, we're also asked to do some things that we may not want to do, such as giving service, teaching lessons and giving talks in church, and fulfilling other church callings. These things can seem bitter (or perhaps sour), but they yield the sweet blessings of the gospel.
The practical application to this principle is much the same as the first: Focus on the good. While it may not be fun or convenient to give service, the blessings you receive make the experience worth it in the same way that the sourdough bread certainly wouldn't have tasted good on its own, but with the honey, it actually tasted pretty good. If we focus on feeling the spirit and developing Christ-like love as we serve in the gospel, any sourness we experience in the process will be "swallowed up in the joy of Christ" (Alma 31: 38).
There is some good and bad in almost everything. Sometimes we have to endure the bad to enjoy the good, and sometimes we have to see through the good to avoid the bad. As always, it's best to have heaven's guidance as we choose what to partake of and what to focus on. For example, I could have focussed on the unique culinary experience and seen it as a gateway to trying new and different foods and food combinations, but instead, I reflected on the potential spiritual meanings that could be found in a peanut butter, honey, and sourdough sandwich, and I ended up with at few spiritual principles that may bless my life and will hopefully also bless yours.
I wonder what other good, valuable, spiritual lessons may be hiding in seemingly ordinary items and experiences. Since starting this blog, I've developed a "taste" for those kinds of lessons, and I've been picking up on them much more frequently. I'm coming to learn that it's true that "all things bear record of [Christ]" (Moses 6: 63), even something as simple or as strange as a peanut butter, honey, and sourdough sandwich.
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