Embrace the Gift

The only problem I have with this video is that the first gift of Christmas was wrapped: "And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger." - Luke 2:12 Then again, He wasn't wrapped at the moment when He came into the world, so maybe it's okay to say that the first gift wasn't wrapped. Perhaps I'll try to find something blogworthy about the difference between being wrapped in decorative paper, being wrapped in swaddling clothes, and not being wrapped at all, but not this morning. No time.

This morning, I'm just going to skip to the end and encourage all of us to discover the Gift by reading the scriptures, and to embrace the Gift by letting Him change your heart and your life. I know you hear this every year, but Christmas is only seasonal, but the effect it should have on us should last all year, or longer. It, like the Sacrament, is a regular reminder of things we should keep in mind all the time and should be part of who we are. As Christians, and as Mormons especially, we have promised to take upon ourselves the name of Christ and always remember Him. Let us remember the Gift, and take time this season to thank God for Him.

Things to be Grateful For

When I need to quickly get an inspirational thought to blog about, I typically look in two places: Facebook, where my mom and sister frequently share inspirational thoughts on pretty photos, and on LDS.org's daily messages, which are usually too long or off-topic from anything I'd like to share. This morning, I was pleased to find a daily message that isn't terribly long and that struck a chord with me.

Do material possessions make us happy and grateful? Perhaps momentarily. However, those things which provide deep and lasting happiness and gratitude are the things which money cannot buy: our families, the gospel, good friends, our health, our abilities, the love we receive from those around us.

-Thomas S. Monson, "The Divine Gift of Gratitude"

 We frequently hear reminders that Christmas isn't about things. It's about spending time with family, expressing love for each other (sometimes through gifts), and remembering Jesus Christ. Of course, we also hear reminders about Black Friday door-busters and last-minute savings on the top gifts for everyone on your list. Many people believe that Christmas has been too commercialized, and they're probably right. Thankfully, it's still possible to keep the true Spirit of Christmas with us, sometimes with the help of occasional reminders like this.

When you really think about it, the best blessings in the universe are things that money can't buy. Without repeating the items on President Monson's list, these blessings include the presence of the Holy Spirit, the feeling of being forgiven, our knowledge of God's plan for us, and the hope and promise of eternal happiness. Or maybe all those things were summed up concisely when President Monson listed "the gospel." When you compare your material blessings to your eternal blessings, you discover that things of this world really don't matter all that much. Sure, they're nice, and they make life more pleasant, but it's often (I would almost say always) true that the pious poor are happier than the irreligious rich. Which group do you think truly has more to be thankful for, the group whose treasures will remain and waste away on earth, or the group who has few earthly treasures, but whose real treasures are eternal?

We have eternal treasures far more valuable than the things we give each other on Christmas. This Thanksgiving/Christmas season, let's give thanks to God for the blessings we have that are worth far more than any material things.

The Bailey Effect

You've heard of the Butterfly Effect, in which the exact path and power of a hurricane might be affected by the flapping of a butterfly's wings some weeks before. Last night, my family watched It's a Wonderful Life, in which we witnessed how life in Bedford Falls Pottersville would have been different without George Bailey. In that movie, Clarence makes the comment, "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

My hope is that none of us have to have a near-death experience followed by a foray into an alternate universe in order to see the value of our existence. We each influence others in ways we may never fully realize. Our friends, neighbors, and family members have all had their lives changed by our presence in it. For George Bailey, it was a positive influence that he didn't see and couldn't appreciate. In our lives, we would do well to consider what kind of impact we have on the lives of others, and evaluate whether that's the kind of influence we'd like to make. Thankfully, many of the people I know have positive influences on those around them, including me, but now I wonder, am I having a positive influence on them? And how strong is my influence on others? How would the world be different if I had never been in it?

Mind you, those questions were rhetorical. I don't actually want to know. I just think that it's something worth thinking about. I want to have a George-Bailey-like effect. I want to have a strong, positive influence on others. Maybe I already do. But even if I do, I know that my influence could be stronger and more positive, so there's always room for improvement. Then again, the same could be said for the strength of the wind caused by the flapping of a butterfly's wings. Maybe small acts of human kindness are all that are needed to make the world a better place. That's what George Bailey learned that Christmas Eve. May we all learn that lesson, too, and learn to appreciate the value of our lives and the power of the influence we have on others.

"Include All Things in Your Gratitude"

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All things"? "All things"? Well, I guess so, if you consider that trials make you stronger, that hardship builds character, and that adversity can bring us closer to God. Still, it's hard enough to be grateful for all our blessings. How can we be grateful for all our blessings and all our trials, too? Actually, being grateful for everything might be easier than only being grateful for good things.

I've heard it said that it's easier to do something 100% of the time than 98% of the time. Emerson advises us to "cultivate the habit of... [giving] thanks continually." With such a habit, it'd be easier to give thanks for our trials than not to. If we make a habit of seeing the good in everything and giving thanks for everything, we can become better at giving thanks for all our blessings, even the ones that are blessings in disguise.

Being thankful for everything requires a certain amount of faith and/or perspective, but it can be done. Let's try to develop a habit of gratitude that includes even our trials and troubles. They contribute to our advancement even more than our regular blessings do, and thus do even more to contribute to our ultimate happiness than the things that bring us happiness here and now. We should try to have enough faith in God to know that He can use all of our life experiences to bless us and make us happier. This Thanksgiving season, let's try to be thankful for all our blessings, even the ones that don't look like blessings to us.

The (Foolish) Pursuit of Happiness

At first, I both agreed and disagreed with this quote. I disagreed with it because "happiness is the object and design of our existence" (emphasis added), but I agree with it because it sounds true. And as my mother pointed out when she shared this photo on Facebook, "If you strive to do and be these things, you will be happy."

God created us so that we could be happy, but the path to happiness isn't what many people think it is. Often, in the pursuit of happiness, people make choices that give them temporary happiness, followed by lasting unhappiness. God has shown us the path to true happiness, but because it's not easy or fun, many people have trouble following it. It's ironic that our desire for happiness pulls us away from the source of true happiness, and that if we forget about our own happiness and just try to make other people happy, we'll end up happier, too.

There's a lot of irony in the world, and most of it can be attributed to either Satan trying to trick us into thinking that evil is good, or God knowing that the path to happiness passes through the valley of sorrow. It's ironic that in order to get what we ultimately want, we have to put our own wants on hold for a while. In order to find true happiness, we need to stop looking for things to make us happy. Crazy, huh?

I want to be happy. Of course, we all do. But strangely, in order to gain happiness, I need to stop putting so much focus on things that I think will make me happy. Temporary happiness isn't important. Eternal happiness is.

Valiant as a Lightbulb

Knowing that I'm one of the leaders of a bunch of 11-year-olds who call themselves the Valiant Knights, and knowing that I try to see myself as a Paladin, who are known for their valiance and courage, my mom, in parting, advised me to "be valiant." One of my brothers, being random, added "as a lightbulb." Mom ask him in what ways a lightbulb could be valiant, and I accepted the challenge to answer that question for him.

At first, I thought that blogging about lightbulbs would be easy. I could just borrow a few lines from Elder Bednar's message on Revelation, add a few lines of my own, and I'd be done. But being suddenly given a clear message through revelation, which is a rare occurrence, by the way, has nothing to do with being valiant.

Because I wanted to tell my 11-year-old Scouts what it meant to be a Valiant Knight, I looked up the definition of "valiant," and was slightly depressed by its linearity. (Side note: How is it that Spell-check is okay with "linearity," but doesn't like my spelling of "lightbulbs"? How else would you pluralize "lightbulb," which it doesn't think I misspelled?)

Dictionary.search.yahoo.com defines Valiant as "Possessing or exhibiting valor; brave," and defines Valor as "Courage and boldness, as in battle; bravery." (Another side note: I love that the first example of valiant this dictionary gives is "a valiant knight.") So valiance is, uninterestingly, a synonym for bravery. What's so brave about a lightbulb?

Lightbulbs are best known for using electricity to generate light. They're also known for being fragile. Lightbulbs are hollow and made mostly of a thin sheet of glass. If you struck a lightbulb with sufficient force to say that you had struck it and not merely tapped it, it would likely shatter. It is perhaps in response to this vulnerability that lightbulbs show their courage. Lightbulbs are often encased in something that diffuses the light and offers some protection to the lightbulb, but even without such protection, a lightbulb will shine boldly. In fact, a lightbulb without such protection shines brighter than the others, as if to say "If you want to take a swing at a lightbulb, here I am! I'm right out here in the open, shining as bright as day. I'm not hiding. Take your shot."

Okay, maybe they're not that suicidal, but they're not shy. Lightbulbs, despite their weakness, don't try to hide themselves or their weakness from others. They stand boldly and brightly, shining their light for all the world to see. It sounds to me like they've got a testimony and they're not afraid to share it.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. 

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. 

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. 

Matthew 5: 14-16

Putting a candle under a bushel is like putting a lightbulb in a lampshade. It'll make the light seem less harsh, and it may protect the lightbulb from a glancing blow, but it also weakens the light and makes it less clear. It's true that we should be kind and sensitive to the feelings and beliefs of others, but we should still be bold in declaring ours. By trying to be non-offensive and politically correct, we hold back many of the truths that may resonate in our friends' hearts - truths that they remember from before they were born.

Not all people have kind opinions about Mormons, and I have to admit that we are pretty different from other Christians. We're so different, in fact, that some people believe that we're not Christian at all. Some people doubt Joseph Smith's honesty or the Book of Mormon's validity. Some people know our church's history or doctrine too well, and at the same time not well enough. Such people might take a swing at us once they find out who we are. That lampshade is starting to sound pretty good to me. Hiding behind the guise of being "Christian, and let's just leave it at that," may protect us from the attacks of others, but it also prevents us from sharing our light with them. Admitting that we're members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints takes the courage of a lightbulb, but it's the only way to "let [our] light so shine."

But let's say our light is limited. Most people's lights are. Let's say our testimonies aren't as strong as they ought to be, or that we don't know Mormon doctrine as well as we'd like to. Let's consider another use of the word Valiant and again consider the example of the lightbulb.

Because of energy-saving practices and regulations, lightbulbs have all but been replaced by florescent bulbs, which produce just as much light (once they finally get warmed up), and use less energy. However, there is one advantage that old lightbulbs have over most new, florescent bulbs: they're dimmable. (I know that, just a few paragraphs ago, I implied that dimming the light is a bad thing, but bear with me.) Lightbulbs generate as much light as they can with whatever amount of electricity they have access to. If they can, they'll shine brightly. If they don't have quite enough energy for that, they'll just shine as brightly as they can.

Not all of us have strong testimonies or eloquent arguments in favor of our beliefs, but that's okay. We all have at least some light in us, and it's our responsibility to share as much light as we have. Another way to say it is that even though our and a lightbulb's capabilities may be limited, we should each make a valiant effort and do as much good as we can.

By shining brightly despite their weaknesses and limitations, lightbulbs prove themselves to be surprisingly valiant, and we should follow their example. We should each try to let our light shine before the world by striving to be as valiant as a lightbulb.

When the Going Gets Tough...

I heard yesterday that stress can rob us of our spirituality - that when we're worried about the concerns of life, we have a harder time focussing on Christ and striving to be righteous. I don't know if this is strictly true, but it certainly makes sense to me. How many times have we gotten angry and lost the Spirit because we were stressed out or frustrated? Which came first - getting angry, or losing the Spirit?

I think that Satan is constantly trying to influence us by putting negative thoughts in our minds. Most of the time, the Spirit keeps him at bay, but life starts to feel like it's too much for us to handle, either we start thinking negative thoughts that drive away the Spirit, or we drive away the Spirit, and then the enemy is allowed to put negative thoughts in our minds. Either way, if we're stressed, we'll have negative thoughts and not the Spirit, but if we have the Spirit with us, we won't have (many) negative thoughts or be (as) stressed.

How we keep the Spirit with us when life is hard is the same as how we keep the Spirit with us normally - it's just harder to do it. We keep the Spirit with us by praying, reading the scriptures, doing good, and striving to be Christlike. This is harder during the trials of our lives because we have more pressing matters to take care of than our scripture study, and we have other things to worry about than how righteous we are or should be. These times are great times to pray, to allow God to calm your heart and mind and help you focus on the tasks at hand, but when we're in these situations, we're normally not in the mood to pray.

God lets trials happen to us for a number of reasons. Sometimes, two of those reasons are to test our spiritual strength and help us grow spiritually stronger. It's sometimes as if God says "You're pretty good at being righteous most of the time, but let's see how righteous you are when you're facing adversity." He does this not to torment us, but to strengthen us. God wants us to be spiritually strong enough to remain righteous no matter what, just as Job did.

The holidays are stressful times for most adults, and those of us who are in school may have noticed that we're starting to get closer to Finals. It'd be fairly easy to get stressed out and let a lot of negativity into our lives right now, which is ironic considering what the holidays are supposed to do to people's hearts. Instead, let's try to keep the Holy Spirit with us, and possibly catch the spirits of thanksgiving and Christmas while we're at it. Life is hard sometimes, and at those times, it can be hard to keep the Spirit with us, but if we can keep the Spirit with us, He can help us get through the hardships of life. It takes spiritual strength to do that, but we'll gain spiritual strength if we try. Let's try to be righteous through the holidays so we can gain the strength we need to also get through the other storms of life.

Fake It 'Till You Make It

"We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day." - Richard G. Scott

I love this quote because it basically gives us an Apostle's permission to "fake it 'till we make it." It tells us that if we're not the way we want to be, we should try to act the way we would act if we were, until we are. Basically, he's encouraging us to role-play as a better version of ourselves until we actually become that better version. After that, we'll continue to act that way naturally, because that'll be the new definition of who we are.

I'm not a paladin, nor will I ever literally be a paladin (unless God pulls a few strings to make my afterlife that much more epic), but I can and should be like a paladin, and the more I act like a paladin, the more like a paladin I'll become. I can become virtuous, noble, just, and chivalrous by practicing those traits - by acting the way I would act if I already possessed them.

While this may seem duplicitous or hypocritical, remember that we're not pretending we're more righteous than we are, we're acting the way we would act if we were more righteous. We should be honest with other people about how righteous we really are if they make a comment about how good we are, and even if we really are that good, we should be humble about it and admit and continually work on our faults. We're not supposed to make a show of being righteous - we're supposed to practice it. That's why I think this practice is especially important when we're not being observed. It seems less hypocritical when no one sees how righteous we're trying to be, and I've heard it said that "What you choose to think and do when you are alone and you believe no one is watching is a strong measure of your virtue." - Preach My Gospel, 118

None of us are perfect yet, but we all can become perfect, and the first step is to try. Let's all try to be righteous, whether others are watching us or not. Let's try to become better people. The more we try to be better than we are, the better we will actually become.

Specifically Thankful - Name Them One by One

This morning, I was taught a lesson on prayer by someone less than half my age, which, in itself, is a lesson. We're never so experienced that there's nothing we can learn from another person, even if that person is much less experienced than we are. The specific lesson I learned this morning is that our prayers are much more meaningful if we pray specifically. Instead of saying "we're thankful for this food," he said "we're thankful for this delicious oatmeal." Also, he had faith that the oatmeal was going to be delicious, which it was. And instead of saying "we're thankful we had fun," he said "we're thankful we had fun..." and then listed a lot of the activities we had done up to that point. It was a good prayer.

Sometimes, when I hear that we should pray specifically, I think "But God already knows all that stuff." But do we? Do we realize that God has, fairly miraculously, provided the many blessings we enjoy? Do we really appreciate that the instant oatmeal we take for granted is a blessing that's unavailable to many? Do we know how blessed we are? By thanking God specifically for the food we have and for the energy and opportunities we have to do things, we're reminding ourselves of something that we frequently forget - those blessings come from Him.

We should strive to be grateful and express gratitude for all our blessings. Only then can we realize and appreciate just how blessed we are. I'm going to practice praying specifically and being grateful for everything. It'll take much longer than my prayers usually do, but time spent thanking God for our blessings is time well-spent, especially if it draws us closer to Him.

Leisure vs Idleness

One of the insights from Pathway last night is that there's a big difference between leisure and idleness. Leisure can be a good thing. It sort of resets your mind, giving it a break from its usual work, so that when you get back to work, you get back fresh and ready to concentrate and work effectively on the matter at hand. Idleness, on the other hand, is never a good thing. It wastes time and can distract you from your work. Rest is important. Idleness is important to avoid.

But here's the tricky part: Some activities are almost always idleness, while other activities could be leisure or idleness. The difference is in what the activity does to your mind. When you're done with the activity (assuming you're ever "done" with the activity), are you ready to focus again, or has your mind kind of shut down? Remember that a short break should invigorate your mind. And there's the key: duration. Many leisurely activities become idleness when you spend too much time on them. Taking a quick nap is sometimes a great idea. Taking long naps is rarely effective.

The idea is moderation. Work is vitally important, but if you work yourself too hard for too long, you can burn yourself out. Taking breaks can help you work more effectively and maintain balance, but resting too long can throw you out of balance again. We must be judicious about how we spend out time, including our leisure time. Some activities are more refreshing than others, and the amount of time you spend on any activity has a strong influence on whether the activity is beneficial to you or not. Make some time for leisure - but just make sure it's not too much time.

You Choose Who You Are

While I was still playing Dungeons and Dragons semi-regularly, I stumbled on a Druid spell called Reincarnation, which can bring a character back from the dead. It's cheaper than the standard Resurrection spell that you can have a cleric cast to bring your character back to life, but Reincarnation has a catch: When your character awakens, they'll have taken a new, randomly-selected, humanoid form, meaning that your character probably won't be human anymore.

This "drawback" is actually something that appealed to me. I decided that if my character died, I'd want to have him reincarnated as an orc or a goblin - some race totally unsuited to being a Paladin - just to make it more interesting (and more heroic) when he goes on being a Paladin anyway.

In life, there are a lot of circumstances that we can't do much about. We can't choose our race, gender, or family. We have only a limited amount of control over where we work, who we work with, and how much money we have. We can't choose what our natural talents and weaknesses are, though through a great deal of effort, we can develop new talents and overcome old weaknesses, if we really want to.

Though our circumstances may not be completely in line with the kinds of lives we want to lead, we can still choose what kinds of people we'll be. We can't choose many of our circumstances, but we can choose how we respond to our circumstances. We can't choose much about the outer part of who we are, but we can make almost every decision about the inner part of who we are. Just as my character could have chosen whether to remain a Paladin or to adapt to his new form, we can all choose whether we adapt to our circumstances or whether we stick to our own course, despite the hardships. While there's much to be said for adaptability, we should ultimately make our own choices and not let our circumstances define us.

You may not be the way you want to be right now, and there may or may not be a few things you can do about that, but even if you can't decide anything else about your life, you can decide the content and character of your heart. I can't ride a horse, wear armor, or learn to use divine magic (other than the real kind of divine magic), but I can still be a Paladin in my heart. I can still be bold and courageous. I can still be virtuous and good. I can choose to see and carry myself as a Paladin, even though I look just like a regular college student to everyone else. And importantly, the outside doesn't matter, but the inside does, "for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." - 1 Samuel 16:7

Pathfinding for the Blind

Reading through some General Conference talks, I found this little gem: 

"We are not obedient because we are blind, we are obedient because we can see." -President Boyd K. Packer

Some people see those who belong to a church and strive to keep God's commandments (even when we don't understand them) as being "blindly obedient." They think that we don't know what we should do, so we just do whatever the big guy upstairs says. And actually, they're partly right.

We don't always know what's best for us to do, so we do frequently rely on God for guidance. But we choose to follow God and the teachings of our church, not because we picked their names out of a hat, but because they've proven to be trustworthy sources of sound advice.

The way I see it, we're all pretty blind, whether we blindly follow trustworthy guides or whether we blindly blaze our own trail. Either way, we don't really know which way our path is taking us, so we need to have a little faith. The question is whether we'll put our faith in ourselves or whether we'll put our faith in God.

Now, those who don't know who God is, how good and wise He is, and that we can trust Him, would consider it foolish to put their faith in an unknown and possibly imaginary being rather than in themselves, and there is some wisdom in that. We live in a world where we have a lot of choices, and the welfare of our souls depends on the choices we make. And to make matters much more difficult, not all of the voices that pop into our heads come from God. Some of those thoughts come from the devil, and some of them come from our own imaginations. When you don't know which voice is whose, it would seem insane to listen to the many voices in your head, and it very well might be. Logically, it would be wiser to shut out all those voices and make decisions for yourself.

However, for those of us who know God, or at least are acquainted with Him and know that He exists and that He's wise and good, following Him makes much more sense than trying to find our own way. He knows of the things we need to seek or avoid, and He's kind enough to share that wisdom with us. By following Him, we can avoid the pitfalls we might have blindly stumbled into, and find the gems we otherwise would never have found.

We don't follow God because we're too blind to find our own path. We follow God because we can see that His path is better than ours.

How to Gain Infinite Wisdom

Option One: Live Forever

In yesterday's blog post, I barely mentioned God's infinite wisdom, and then I thought "how could God's wisdom be truly infinite?" Wisdom comes with experience. Experience comes with time. Theoretically, by that logic, God would have to have existed forever for His wisdom to be infinite. But if God is just like us (only a lot farther along in His Eternal progression), then He must have been created by His Heavenly Father, just as we were created by Him. Before that time, He wouldn't have existed, at least not as a sentient creature, so the time He has spent having experiences and gaining wisdom is finite. Absurdly enormous, but still finite. How can God have infinite wisdom, assuming that I'm correct in thinking that He has only existed for a finite amount of time? I've thought of at least two ways.

Option Two: Get a (Few) Mentor(s)

Let's say that a young man is twenty years old. He has twenty years of experience, and the wisdom of a twenty-year-old. That's not all that impressive. But let's say his father was twenty years old when he was born, making the father forty years old now. The father has forty years of experience and the wisdom of a forty-year-old. That's better. And if the young man follows the counsel of his father, he'll still have only twenty years of personal experience, but he'll act with the wisdom of a forty-year-old. And let's say that this young man has a grandfather who's twenty years older than his father is. By gaining wisdom from him (perhaps through his own father), the young man can gain some of the wisdom of a sixty-year-old, and so on.

For us, this model has to stop somewhere, because great-great-grandfathers don't live forever. Eventually, they'll depart, and when they do, they'll take their wisdom with them. That's exactly what God did after His mortal experience, and exactly what His Heavenly Ancestors did after theirs. However, if our Heavenly Father still gets guidance from His Heavenly Father, and His Heavenly Father gets guidance from His Heavenly Father, and so on, then our Heavenly Father has a possibly infinite number of mentors with a collective, nearly-infinite number of eons of experience and wisdom between them. (Incidentally, we can link ourselves to this chain of wisdom by hearkening to the counsel of our own Heavenly Father, thus enabling us to make decisions inspired by the wisdom of a counsel of Gods.) That is an incredible amount of wisdom, but it's still possibly finite. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of having no beginning, and if there was a beginning, that means that there has only been a finite amount of time in which the creatures of the universe could gather wisdom, so only a finite amount of wisdom has been gained.

Fortunately, there's another way to gain wisdom, besides personal experience and word-of-mouth, and it is by this method that God has gained infinite wisdom in His own right. Even if there's no one guiding Him or given Him advice, and even if He has only been around for a few short eons, He still has an infinite - that's right, infinite - amount of wisdom. Here's how:

Option Three: Become Omniscient

In his message, Converting Knowledge into Wisdom, President Marion G. Romney defined knowledge as "acquaintance with, or clear perception of, facts," and wisdom as "the capacity of judging soundly and dealing broadly with facts, especially in their practical relations to life and conduct." President Romney also said that part of the reason we don't have infinite wisdom is because we don't have all the facts.

When I said that we gained wisdom from our experiences, I forgot an important piece of clarification. In truth, we gain wisdom from learning from our experiences. Experiences give us knowledge, which we can then convert into wisdom. If a person gains knowledge another way, such as by reading a book or becoming omniscient, they will have gained knowledge that they can convert into wisdom without having to have gained that wisdom by personal experience or by being given advice. Since God knows everything, He knows the wisest course of action in any given situation, and thus He has infinite wisdom.

Omniscience is, as I understand it, part of the package deal with Godhood. When we become Gods, we'll become omniscient, and we'll gain infinite wisdom. The "when" part of my previous statement might be optimistic, but part of what I meant to say was that we won't gain omniscience before then. Until then, we can gain wisdom by the previous two methods. We can learn from our own experiences, and we can learn from God. God will often share wisdom with us, and when He doesn't, it's probably either because He thinks we have enough wisdom to make good choices on our own, or because we think we do. Trusting in our own wisdom is foolish because our wisdom is very, very finite. God, on the other hand, has infinite wisdom, and He's usually willing to share. That's why "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Psalms 111:10); because being wise enough to listen to God grants us access to an infinite supply of wisdom. God does have infinite wisdom, and by being wise enough to follow Him, so can we.

Then Fauna Helped Kill Maleficent

One thing that I couldn't quite cope with as I was blogging about Fauna feeling sympathy for Maleficent was that Fauna actively contributed to Maleficent's death. She didn't give Prince Philip the sword that slew Maleficent, but she did contribute some magic to it before he threw it straight into her heart. That wasn't exactly a loving thing to do. Yet sometimes, such actions are necessary. War was a necessary evil many times in Nephite and Israelite history, and at one point in particular, God told Nephi that sometimes wicked people have to die so that God's righteous purposes can be accomplished. Maleficent had to die in order for there to be a happily ever after for everyone else, but I'm still having a hard time wrestling with Fauna's decision to help Prince Philip kill her. She was, in my opinion, the most caring of the three good fairies, having initially suggested that they try to reason with Maleficent, noting that "she can't be all bad." In fact, no person who ever lived on the earth was 100% evil. And yet, some of them were evil enough that they had to die.

Part of my justification for Maleficent's death was that she was, at that moment, trying to kill Prince Philip, who was loved by his father and probably his kingdom, too, and who was the only hope of awakening Princess Aurora, who was loved by her parents and her whole kingdom. If Prince Philip had died in his fight against Maleficent, a lot of people were going to be upset by that - many of them heartbroken. And once Prince Philip lost his shield, either Maleficent would die (or at least be defeated) soon, or he would. Since Maleficent was too powerful to subdue in any non-fatal way, the fairies, including Fauna, had only one choice. Still, that must have been a hard choice for Fauna, who had probably never harmed a living soul before in her life.

I hold on to the belief that Fauna had a great deal of sympathy for Maleficent (at least, she had a great deal more sympathy for her than anyone else had). I'm trying to gauge what her feelings were at the time she enchanted the sword, but I can't see her face very clearly on our copy of the video, and from what I can see, the artists had left her expression blank. I guess they thought that no one would try to dig into the emotional conflict of a character who mostly keeps to the background and contributes more to the comedy of the movie than to the plot. Silly them. But still, I imagine that Fauna felt a little bit torn when she helped enchant the sword for Maleficent's death. Or maybe that slightly-sad on her face is Fauna's resting facial expression. I'm sure I would have been torn if I had as much sympathy as she had.

God has far more love for His children than Fauna had for Maleficent, but sometimes, in His infinite wisdom and eternal perspective, He sees fit for some people to suffer and die. And yet, I still believe that everything He ever does, He does because He loves us. How can He kill someone out of love? Partly, He could kill one person out of love for others. That's what happened to Laban, whom God commanded Nephi to kill. And that's also what happened with Maleficent. Sure, it's tragic for Laban and Maleficent, but they kind of had it coming to them, and it would have been far worse for everyone else if they hadn't died.

It's still kind of hard to accept that a being so pure and good could be even partially responsible for the death of anyone, no matter how evil they were. Re-reading my blog posts from the last time I blogged about this battle, I was reminded that there is Always hope for people, even after they lost their virtue, so it's tragic whenever anyone dies before they change their hearts and choose to repent. But any being who is committed to the cause of good has to be committed to the greater good, and sometimes that means ending the life of someone who theoretically might have repented later, had they lived. It's a tough judgement call for anyone. Luckily, the final judgment is the Lord's. For the rest of us, hopefully we'll never be put in the position that Nephi and Fauna were put into, but if we ever are, I pray that we'll have the Spirit with us to help us make the right decision, whether that means sparing a life or ending one.

The Maleficent Quote

I'm terribly sorry that this is so late! I ran out of time to finish the blog post this morning, and I forgot all about the blog post by the time I got home. Fortunately, I was reminded before the end of the day. Better late than never, right?

While the three good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Meriweather, were discussing what to do about Maleficent's threat to kill Princess Aurora, Meriweather complained that they couldn't come up with a plan that Maleficent wouldn't have anticipated, because she, Maleficent, "knows everything." Fauna responded by saying that she didn't.

"Maleficent doesn’t know anything about love, or kindness, or the joy of helping others. You know, sometimes I don’t think she’s really very happy.” – Fauna, Sleeping Beauty

There are at least two good insights we can gain from this, and I probably only have time to share one of them. Luckily, the first one is obvious and you already know all about it: Love, Kindness, and Helping Others brings joy into our lives. Doing good makes you happy. Inversely, "wickedness never was happiness" (Alma 41:10). Since most of us are familiar with these principles, I'll only touch on them lightly, which I already have.

The other insight to be gained from this quote stems from one word of the quote, and it's probably not the one that you're thinking of. The word is "sometimes." "Sometimes I don’t think she’s really very happy.” This implies two things. The first implication is that sometimes Fauna doesn't think Maleficent is happy, and sometimes she does. I doubt that. The other implication is much more logical, and much more in tune with Fauna's nature. The word "sometimes" in this quote implies that Fauna has thought about this before.

Is sometimes difficult to consider the feelings of others. Thinking of others requires a certain amount of sympathy, which we usually reserve for our friends and families. We may care about their feelings, and that's good. But what about others? Many of us meet countless strangers over the course of our lifetimes. Do we really care about them? Do we consider their feelings and want them to be happy? Not often. It's sometimes hard to care about the feelings of others, especially when you hardly know them or don't know them at all.

But Fauna did know Maleficent. She knew she was an evil-doer and an enemy, which made her sympathy for her even more impressive. Jesus said to "love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (Matthew 5:44), and Fauna did. She considered the feelings of villain of the story, and expressed sympathy for the villain's lack of happiness. Jesus Christ had an attitude like that. The rest of us aren't quite so Christian.

The good news is that we can be. God never gives us a commandment that we can't keep. Loving our enemies is difficult, but not impossible. Fauna could do it, Jesus could do it, and so can we.

The Great Kings of the Past

On Facebook, my mom shared a link to a list of "Super Deep Disney Quotes." Following a link from there, I found "Super Deep Disney Quotes, Part 2." Many of these quotes are blogworthy, especially the one about Maleficent, but the last quote on Part 2 really resonated with me. A more full version of the quote says:

“Simba, let me tell you something that my father told me. Look at the stars. The great kings of the past look down on us from those stars. So whenever you feel alone, just remember that those kings will always be there to guide you. And so will I.” – Mufasa, The Lion King

I don't know about you, but this strongly reminds me of God. In fact, a lot of what Mufasa says reminds me of God, but more especially, this scene in which Mufasa assures Simba that he'll never be alone and the scene in which Mufasa appears to Simba in a vision and essentially calls him to repentance. I see a lot of God-like traits in Mufasa, and especially in his love and wisdom as he gives Simba comfort and counsel.

I can't speak for the church, but those who could are quoted as having said "As man is, God once was; and as God is, man may become," and I personally believe that. Joseph Smith is quoted as having elaborated on that thought, "God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did." If this is true, this means that our God, having once been a mortal being, must have had a Heavenly Father as well. And if the pattern follows, His Heavenly Father must have had a Father as well, and so on.

Now, this probably doesn't matter a whole lot. It's beyond ancient history, by human standards, and even by God's standards, it's in the past. Other than remembering lessons He had learned from His Heavenly Father, having one probably doesn't affect Him much now. Or does it?

In Pathway, we're learning about Self-Reliance, an element of which is developing spiritual strength. The general idea is that God wants us to become more like He is. He wants us to become more wise and capable, and less dependent on His wisdom and strength. It's a long process, but I now wonder whether or not it's an eternal one. Will we ever fully outgrow our need for God's help? Has He outgrown His need for help from His Father? Do the "great kings of the past" still guide their children, even now that many of them have children of their own? Mufasa said that he would always be there to guide Simba. Will God always be there to guide us?

Another quote says that "in truth, every man is a potential god in embryo." An embryo, completely dependent on his or her parents, grows into a child, and eventually grows into a fully independent adult. Does that pattern hold true for our spiritual development? We are much like children now. Will we later reach a state of spiritual adulthood, no longer needing any help from our Father, on whom we are wholly dependent now?

I honestly don't know which thought I find more appealing, that God will always be there to guide us, or that one day we'll no longer need that guidance. On the other hand, those concepts also mean that either we'll eventually outgrow our father/son relationship with God, or we never will. Both thoughts are kind of wonderful, and a little sad, in their own ways, yet one of them is true and the other is not. I doubt that the church has made any official, doctrinal ruling on speculation this obscure, and either way, it's not going to matter for a very long time, so I guess I'll leave this question as a mystery for now. But at the very least, it's comforting to know that God will be there for me for as long as I need Him to be, whether that's until I become as He is, or until the end of time.

Multi-Element Morning Therapy

Do you know why warm water feels so good? Me neither, but it does. Do you know why cleaning things feels so good? It's a feeling of accomplishment, coupled with a feeling similar to what Jesus must feel as He helps us purify our souls. Do you know why music, especially worshipful music, feels so good? Because it attracts the presence of the Holy Spirit.

I recently got a really good piece of advice, and now I'm glad I followed it. It didn't give me anything insightful to blog about, as I was expecting it to, but it did help me feel the Spirit, so that's a good thing. I blog much better when I have the spirit than when I don't. I also learned that "Nearer, my God, to Thee" doesn't go too high to be played on a recorder, so that's great. I should compile a list of hymns that can be played on a recorder, then practice them in the park. I don't suppose I've told you that I've taken up the practice of playing the recorder in the park near the school between classes sometimes. It's been pretty nice, except that I don't know enough recorder-playable hymns to add sufficient variety. I should compile a list. In the meantime, I can just sing the hymns I know, whether they're recorder-playable or not, even when my hands are full.

I'm grateful that God has blessed me with a love of reverent music, and some skill at performing it. It enriches my life and helps me to have the Spirit with me more consistently. Mix that with warm-water therapy and the feeling of being productive, and you've got a pretty good way to begin a morning.

Three Morals Before my Bus Ride

Bad News: I haven't prepared anything to blog about this morning.
More Bad News: Since I'm planning on taking the bus today, I'm leaving in ten minutes.

The Moral of the Story: Prioritize. Today, I washed dishes, which, while it was a good use of my time, took up time that I could have spent finding something to blog about, helping me to fulfill my spiritual obligation to blog. Though washing dishes was a good thing, it was a lesser priority, and I should have treated it as such. I did get the garbage and recycling out, though. That was pretty critical.

Another Moral: Look ahead and plan ahead whenever possible. I knew that it would be rainy today. I could have figured that that would mean that I'd want to take the bus. And I already knew that if I took the bus, I'd have to leave early. I could have spent some time last night thinking about and perhaps even pre-writing something I could blog about this morning, but instead, I figured that I'd think of something this morning, as I usually do, not accounting for the amount of time it would talk - time I wouldn't have.

Can I think of another moral before I go in two minutes?

Buses run on specific schedules. You can't just say, "I'll leave when I'm ready." You have to leave on time so that you'll catch the bus while it's there at the stop. It won't wait for you. Same with God's commandments. You can't change them to suit your wants and needs. Just as I have to adjust my schedule to match the bus schedule, we have to adjust our priorities to match God's, or we may find that the bus that goes to heaven has left the bus stop without us.

Wielding the Sword of Justice

In Second Nephi chapter 13, verses 10 and 11, Nephi writes,

Say unto the righteous that it is well with them; for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. 

Wo unto the wicked, for they shall perish; for the reward of their hands shall be upon them!

In these verses, he is quoting Isaiah chapter 3, verses 10 and 11, which actually reads:

Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be well with him: for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. 

Woe unto the wicked! it shall be ill with him: for the reward of his hands shall be given him.

I share both quotes not to point out any translation errors that may have occurred, but so I personally can be as accurate as possible. I'd hate to misquote someone, even if the differences are slight.

The real reason I'm blogging about this is because, as pointed out in these scriptures, justice is a double-edged sword, which isn't really a problem, if you know how to wield it. With justice, God both blesses the righteous and curses the wicked. This can work out well of ill for you, depending entirely on what you deserve. If you've been righteous, the sword of justice will swing in your favor - if not, it hangs over you, ready to cut you down.

Since justice is an eternal principle, we can't get rid of it. God can't just "forgive and forget," as much as I'm sure He'd love to. At least, He can't forgive us until and unless the demands of justice are met. If evil has been done, the sword of justice has to hit someone. That someone will be either you or Jesus, and whom justice strikes for your sins depends entirely on your repentance. If you sin, you'll get hit, unless you repent, then Jesus will. Either way, the sword will draw blood. Thankfully, there's another option.

By being righteous and refraining from sin, you can keep the sword of justice from swinging at either you or your Redeemer. If you do good, it wouldn't be just to punish you, so the sword of justice won't strike at you. In fact, good works merit good rewards, so if you do good, justice demands that you receive blessings for it. Whether those blessings come sooner or later is mostly up to God, but as long as you're righteous, justice demands that they come.

So, justice can be either a dangerous enemy or a powerful friend, depending on what actions you take. Do good and blessings will come. Do evil and punishments will come. As long as you can control your actions, you can choose how justice will affect you. Control yourself, and you can control the sword.

Striving for Happiness

The other day, I was looking at Elder Eduardo Gavarret's talk, Yes, Lord, I Will Follow Thee, but I didn't really feel like blogging about it then. I did, however, find a quote that I liked, and I had the thought that if I didn't copy the quote down somewhere, I'd forget all about it. So, I copied it into a word document and saved it on my desktop, then mostly forgot about it. This morning, I opened the file, reread the quote, and decided that I'd like to blog about it now.

As you strive to come to Him, you will gain the power to relieve life’s burdens, whether physical or spiritual, and experience a positive inner change that will help you be happier.

 I guess I didn't really need to give it a quote block, did I? Oh well. This helps it stand out more.

What I love about this quote is that it promises some very desirable blessings in return for striving to come unto Christ, whether you actually succeed in coming unto Him or not. All of us, or at least almost all of us, are striving to come unto Christ. Many of us have sins, habits, or weaknesses that hold us back from following Christ's path perfectly, but that's okay. There's only one human in the history of this universe who managed to go through life perfectly, and that was Jesus Christ. The rest of us have to struggle, some more than others, but thankfully, many of God's blessings aren't contingent on how righteous we actually manage to be, but on how hard we strive to be righteous.

Look at the blessings Elder Gavarret has promised. "You will gain the power to relieve life's burdens, whether physical or spiritual." I take this to me that as we strive to follow Christ, we will be given the strength and/or wisdom to overcome the challenges that are holding us back. Some of us have bad habits to overcome before we become as perfect as Jesus Christ was and is, but as we strive to follow Him, we'll gradually be given the power to overcome those bad habits and come unto Him more fully. Being given the power to overcome our obstacles, many of which are internal, may be how we "experience a positive inner change that will help [us] be happier." And who doesn't want to be happier?

God wants us to be happy, so He sent His Son to set the example for us, to show us the path that leads to ultimate happiness. That path can be difficult to follow sometimes, so God has promised that He will help us follow the path, as long as we're at least trying to do so. Gaining the power to relieve life's burdens, change our hearts, and become happier seem like great blessings to be offered in return for striving to come unto Christ, but that's because they are. God wants us to be happy, so He wants us to succeed in following His plan, so He offers us all the strength and wisdom we need to do so, so long as we're at least trying. I want to consistently strive to follow Jesus Christ so I can receive the power I need to change my heart and become more like Him, and fortunately, all I have to do to qualify for those blessings is to try.

Real-Life Divine Magic

When I blogged about Super, Human Abilities a little more than a month ago, I purposefully spoke only of things we could do without God's help and related our abilities to super-powers, leaving alone the concept of magic. I did that because I knew that some time soon after that, I was going to want to blog about divine magic and what we can do in real life with divine help.

Now, when I talk about "divine magic," I specifically mean good divine magic, the kind that clerics and paladins use for their healing and defensive spells, not including nature magic or unholy magic, which are sometimes put under the same category of "divine." I also am not talking about arcane magic, the kind used by wizards and sorcerers. Today, I'm focussing solely on holy magic - magic from a good source to be used only for good purposes.

The primary use of holy magic is healing. With it, clerics and paladins can cause themselves and their allies to regain HP quickly, and overcome diseases, poisons, and even some curses with relative ease.

Similar to that, the blessings of God, extended through Priesthood Blessings, are most often used to heal the sick, injured, or afflicted. Most members of the church who find themselves in the hospital receive a Priesthood Blessing in addition to their medical care, to promote healing. There are many stories of such situations that had miraculous results. Sometimes the doctors are inspired to try something slightly out of the ordinary, and it works, and sometimes people are miraculously healed in ways the doctors can't explain. In both real life and fantasy fiction, divine magic most often results in healing.

Another good use for divine magic in fantasy stories is to ensure divine protection. Clerical and paladinic abilities include a strong repertoire of defensive spells that shield themselves and/or their allies from taking too much damage, especially from those with evil intentions.

Real life divine help can protect us from evil, too. Many of those who were in physical peril have said prayers for protection, and many of those people were spared, sometimes by miraculous means, even though sometimes, God in His infinite wisdom, withholds such blessings from others. While we're not often in any physical peril, we are almost constantly in spiritual peril, and the guidance of the Spirit can help to keep us safe. Through His influence, we can gain the strength to resist temptation and the wisdom to avoid it. And when we do occasionally fall into temptation, the Spirit can help us repent. I relate this to "spiritual healing."

One thing that real-life divine power is used for most frequently, and fantasy divine magic is sometimes used for as well, is revelation, or as the fantasy realms call it, divination. Whatever you call it, divination or revelation can inform you of things you could not have otherwise known. In both fantasy and reality, this is used for discovering hidden truths you could not otherwise have seen, discerning the truth of things you already observe, and sometimes even predicting the future.

Prophets sometimes tell of future events, and they often share with us the truth of things, both things we know about and things we didn't know about until they told us. The Spirit can give us personal revelation, too. Members of our church often receive promptings giving us advice and warnings of what we should or shouldn't do. Sometimes, the Spirit helps us learn new things and retain the information and wisdom that we've learned, especially when we ask for that kind of help.

The help that we get from God through His prophets and His Spirit really is magical, when you think about it, and it really is divine. It's the power by which we are enabled to become successful followers of God. It helps us to survive the world we live in, and it helps us be better Christians. For me, it helps me be a paladin.

But for any divine magic, either in the fantasy world or the real one, certain standards must be met. Paladins must maintain high standards or they'll lose their paladinic powers until a proper atonement has been made. In real life, we must strive to keep God's commandments to be worthy of His greatest blessings, and we must repent as frequently as we fall short (which is pretty much daily, if not hourly, for almost all of us, so don't feel discouraged if you fall short frequently. We all do. Just apologize to God, learn what you can from your mistake, and try to do better next time. That's all God really asks of us).

I love magic, both the real kind and the imaginary kind. I love that God is always nearby, ready to give us all the help that we need. I love that healing, protection, and revelation can come through God's Holy Spirit, and that once we all received the Gift of the Holy Ghost, we received a promise that we may always have that Spirit to be with us. We really do have 24/7 access to real-life divine magic, as long as we strive to be worthy of it, and I think that's fantastic.

Exceeding Expectations

The last several times I went to the library, I got more than I expected. The first time I went to the library in recent memory, was The Night I Was a Paladin. I went to return a library book I found on the ground to its rightful owner or borrower, only to find that the book had been taken out of circulation, meaning that it belonged to whomever it was given, and there was no way of finding out who that was. I left a note near where I had found the book, but I got no responses. While I was at the library, I lent my bike lock to someone who didn't have one, and picked up a book called Quest by Aaron Becker. It turned out that Quest was the sequel to a book called Journey, so I went back to the library to pick that up. When I did, I also found a pair of movies I wanted to borrow. Yesterday, I went back to the library to return all of those, knowing that I'd find at the library more than I was expecting to find. As it happened, I found even more than that, borrowing a few books about the architecture of castles PLUS a book on how to draw horses.

I wonder if our heavenly reward will be like that. We strive to be righteous, expecting to receive a few blessings for our efforts, but God often gives us more than we feel we deserve. Of course, it's entirely possible to expect more from God than He's willing to give, especially if we're not being righteous or if what we expect to receive from God isn't actually what's best for us, but if we're even trying to be righteous, God will give us as many blessings as He can justify given to us, which is far more than we actually deserve and more than we usually expect.

I expect heaven to be a wonderful place. I expect that if I get there, I'll be happy there, but I also believe that it may be impossible for us to fully imagine how wonderful heaven really is. No matter how good our mental image of heaven is, heaven is actually even better. I can't say that for certain since I haven't seen heaven myself, that I remember, but I'm pretty sure heaven will exceed my expectations, just as God's mercy and patience already has. God has great things in store for the righteous, greater things than we could possibly imagine. It's worth it to be righteous. In fact, I expect that being righteous will prove to be far more worthwhile than we expect.

Wealth

This image was drawn by Randall Monroe. You can find more of his work here.

The question of the day is "Which couple is richer, the one with the kids, or the one standing next to a large pile of money?" The couple on the left has doubtlessly spent a great deal of money having and raising their kids. Not to mention that at least one of those two people would have had to stay home with the kids while the others earns the money that supports the household. They probably manage to make ends meet, most likely by living simply within their means, but I'd be surprised if they had loads of dough leftover.

The couple on the right has no kids, and thus, few required expenses. At the same time, they both have more free time that they can spend on work. I've heard one man describe this kind of people as "DINKs" - Double Income, No Kids. You can accumulate a lot of money this way, then either save it up, or spend it on whatever you want. On the other hand, isn't that kind of what the other couple is doing?

One of the two adults on the left (because I'm a sexist bigot with deeply ingrained gender-biases, I'll assume its the father) goes to work to earn money, which he/she/they then spend on their family. The other (presumably female) partner does something similar, but with their time. Rather than spending time working, she spends time with her kids. Assuming that this couple wanted to have kids (which is a safe assumption, since birth-control doesn't seem to be difficult to acquire), it follows that this couple is already spending their time and money on something they want.

So, to ask another question that is solely a personal question (but an easy one for a family-centric religious fanatic like me), are children worth more than the time and money they cost their parents? Most people (thankfully) would say "yes." Others, like the couple on the right, might say "no," and that's their decision. But some would argue that what children cost in time and money (and energy, and occasionally frustration, and other costs) is less than what children are worth in terms of the love and happiness they give us.

God certainly agrees with that assessment. Given the power to create and command the universe, He could have made anything He wanted to - and He made us. Despite the heartache we cause Him, which He must have seen coming because He's omniscient, He felt that it was worth it to Him to have children. I hope He was right.

I'm not a father yet, but I plan on becoming one someday. I know that once I become a father, that title will define me for the rest of my life, possibly for all eternity, but I have a Heavenly Father who doesn't mind that one bit. Money can't buy happiness, nor can you take it with you when you pass on, but you can still be with your family after death, and they can bring you happiness that will last forever. In that light, there's not much comparison. I'd rather be a father than a billionaire, and I'd rather be good than rich. Then again, "he that hath Eternal Life is rich" (D&C 7:6), so in a sense, I guess you could say that I one day hope to be a very wealthy man.

The "Correct" Way to Make a PB&J

Studio C, a comedy show put on by Mormons, recently produced a sketch about the proper way to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Enjoy.




The part I like best about this video is one of it's comments. A person whose username is LamanKnight posted:

Here are the advantages I've found to each style: 

Matt's way - As he says, if you want to have equal proportions of peanut butter and jam/jelly, this is the best way to do it. It also allows you to stir the two ingredients together a little, whi*ch makes for a nice texture. And last of all, it removes the chance of you making a mess when you flip over one of the slices of bread in your sandwich. 

Whitney's way - This is the most intuitive way of doing things, so you will likely do this by nature - thus, you will develop the greatest skill and dexterity with this style. Also, you can ensure that every square centimetre on both slices of bread is covered. 

Jason's way - If you are packing out a PBJ, this is the way to do it (well, one of two ways, but we can get back to that). If you are going to make and eat a PBJ in only moments, then there's nothing wrong with having peanut butter on one side and jam on the other. But if you will be carrying it for a picnic or for lunch at work, you will want peanut butter on both slices of bread so that the bread doesn't get soggy and the jam losing some of its flavour. This is good protection against that. It's also good for people who like having more peanut butter in their sandwich. 

Mallory's way - Who doesn't love toast? ...Well, ok, a lot of people. But if you have the opportunity, toasting the bread gives it a nice texture. Also, if you are packing out the PBJ in a container with an ice pack, this is another way to counteract sogginess; after sitting in the container for hours, the jam makes the toast soggy, which makes it seem just like normal bread. Ingenious! 

Stacey's way - Bless the person who came up with the product Goober's; he's right! I mean, unless it's not your style. But you should try it. 

Bonus: PBG's way - Combine Peanut Butter Gamer and Kyrak Jellyman, and you get PB & J, also known as the Gaming Dudes. Much hilarity will ensue. But you don't get to eat this version.

This comment proves to me that there are multiple ways to make PB&J sandwiches, and each of them have their merits. This is also what I like about parables. There are multiple lessons you can learn from any of them, and each lesson may be more appropriate to different people at different times. I believe that there is no one "correct" way to interpret a parable that renders all other interpretations incorrect. What's important is that each person receive the message that they need to hear at that time, and the flexibility of parables can accommodate that.

Personally, I toast my bread and then spread Peanut Butter on one slice and Jelly on the other, but that's just what works for me. Feel free to make sandwiches and interpret parables in whatever way works best for you.

"Who is the man?"

I have never seen The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and unless I borrow it from the library sometime, I probably never will. But that hasn't stopped me from memorizing the opening song of that movie, The Bells of Notre Dame. The music is powerful, the story is gripping, and some of the rhymes are extremely clever. But the real reason I want to share that song this morning is because I finally figured out the answer to Clopin's riddle.

I'm sorry that this was the best video I could find to share with you. I wanted a version that showed the video with the audio, but the only video-included versions I could find were painfully incomplete, and I wanted to give you the full story. Enjoy the lyrics.

By the way, "Kyrie Eleison" means "Lord, have mercy" in Greek. Don't ask me about the rest of it. I thought it was all Latin.

The "monster" was, of course, Judge Claude Frollo, who, as I understand it, is the villain of the film. That would make Quasimodo the man, right? That was what I thought until recently, but no, he couldn't have been "the man." He was only an infant at the time. No, "the man" was the Archdeacon. His timely and surprisingly semi-effective call to repentance saved Quasimodo's life. I don't know in Judge Frollo's heart was ultimately changed by the end of the movie, because again, I've never actually seen it, but I'm pretty sure the movie has a happy ending for Quasimodo at least, and the Archdeacon is mostly responsible.

What qualities did the Archdeacon possess that made him "the man?" He had strong convictions and he acted according to them, but then again, so did Frollo. Perhaps the biggest difference between the Archdeacon's convictions and Frollo's was that the Archdeacon's convictions included mercy and Frollo's didn't.

Judge Frollo was more interested in dealing out justice, and he probably wasn't actually all that just about it either. According to Clopin, he "saw corruption everywhere..." including places where there was no corruption, like in the deformed infant. Also, Frollo refused to see any corruption in himself. Otherwise, he might have tried to "purge [himself] of vice and sin," and become more forgiving and merciful - more like Jesus Christ.

The Archdeacon, on the other hand, recognized the innocence of the child and even gave Judge Frollo a second chance. I'm sure he hoped that raising the child would soften Frollo's heart, and though that seems to have failed, since Frollo was still a villain by the time Quasimodo was an adult, at least the Archdeacon had given him a chance.

There are a few lessons we can learn from this. One is that we shouldn't judge others too harshly, especially since we're not perfect ourselves. Another is that sometimes we need to undertake more self-reflection and find out what vices and sins still need to be purged from our hearts. None of us are perfect, and God knows how we need to improve. If we're humble enough to seek His guidance on how to improve ourselves, He'll show us our flaws and give us counsel on how to remove them. Self-reflection and self-improvement is sometimes a painfully difficult process, but it's necessary to our eternal progress. We have to acknowledge and strive to eradicate our faults in order to become better people and ultimately become more like God. In the meantime, we should try to be patient and understanding with the faults of others. Anyone can condemn others. It takes a real man to forgive.

Acknowledging Weaknesses with Humility

There's a link on LDS.org right now which says "The First Step Toward Potential Is Acknowledging Weakness." If you follow that link, it'll take you to President Uchtdorf's Priesthood Session talk, "Lord, Is It I?" This morning, I'd like to share a few quotes from that talk and maybe a scripture or two to expand on the topic of why acknowledging weaknesses, not just having them, is essential to making progress toward overcoming them.

Near the end of his talk, President Uchtdorf said:

Being able to see ourselves clearly is essential to our spiritual growth and well-being. If our weaknesses and shortcomings remain obscured in the shadows, then the redeeming power of the Savior cannot heal them and make them strengths. Ironically, our blindness toward our human weaknesses will also make us blind to the divine potential that our Father yearns to nurture within each of us.

God doesn't really change people; He helps people change themselves. Because of this, He can't remove our weaknesses unless we want to have them removed - and not only that; we need to put forth the effort to remove our weaknesses ourselves. This is sometimes difficult because, as President Uchtdorf said, "none of us likes to admit when we are drifting off the right course. Often we try to avoid looking deeply into our souls and confronting our weaknesses, limitations, and fears." We don't like having to acknowledge our weaknesses, and sometimes, we don't want to try to overcome them.

You may have heard the phrase "favorite sin" before. It refers to anything that God has commanded us not to do that we enjoy doing. Examples for some may include drinking coffee or alcoholic beverages, playing violent (or semi-violent) video games, playing or watching sports on Sundays, or anything else that's "fun" or enjoyable that God has commanded us to avoid. A person's "favorite sin" may be a bad habit that they don't want to admit is "bad" or a "habit," or that they know is a bad habit, but don't think it's worth the effort of trying to overcome. For these and other reasons, sometimes people don't want to change the way God tells us we have to. Yet, the desire to change is necessary because God will not change us against our will.

A popular, Book of Mormon scripture to use when talking about overcoming weaknesses is Ether 12:27.

And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.

To help God turn our weaknesses into strengths, we need to be humble enough to admit that we have weaknesses and that they are weaknesses, and we need to have enough faith in God to know that we'd do well to overcome them, and have faith in His directions on how to overcome them.

Often, people let pride get in the way. We don't want to acknowledge that we have weaknesses, and even when we do, we usually want to overcome our weaknesses our way rather than God's way. Through His prophets, God has given us advice on overcoming nearly every vice known to man. We can follow His advice, or we can work out our own methods. It's up to us. I'll admit that since everyone is different, what works well for one person may not work well for others, but it's still wise to let the Lord help you find the methods that will work best for us. He knows us better than we know ourselves, and He knows our weaknesses, and how to overcome them, a lot better than we do. Some truths are universal; they're true for everyone, so we should look to the prophets and scriptures for those universal truths. Meanwhile, God may have some advice that's specifically for us, and we'll need to obtain that by personal revelation. Whether through personal revelation or prophetic counsel, God will give us directions if we're humble enough to receive and follow them.

Ask anyone: the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting that you have one. The second and less well-known step is having a desire to overcome the problem. Then, your success in overcoming your weaknesses may depend on how well you follow God's directions for how to do that. Each of those steps requires humility. We have to be humble in order to change.

Definite- and Indefinite-Time Tasks

Remember that Rocks-in-a-Jar object lesson I told you about two days ago? There's another insight from it that I'd like to share. Rocks are definite in there size and shape. They each only take up so much room in a jar, and exactly that much room. Water, on the other hand, is more versatile. Assuming you have a working tap available, you could easily fill a jar with as much or as little water as you want, and the water will fill up all the space you give to it.

Some activities are like rocks in that they only take up so much (and exactly that much) time to complete. These activities include doing a specific homework assignment, doing a certain chore, or watching a movie. Each of these only takes up so much time, and when it's done, it's done. Other activities are more like water (or maybe sand would be a better substance for this example), in that they can take up as much time as you let them consume. These activities include studying, doing chores, and watching TV. Yes, if you limit yourself to one or two TV shows, watching them takes up only a finite amount of time, but once you've turned the TV on, it's easy to not turn it off, and it can keep playing for an indefinite amount of time.

The wisdom of performing definite-time tasks before indefinite-time tasks has nothing to do with priorities, so it's not always the wisest course of action. However, it does involve the number of tasks you can get done, which can put a lot of check-marks on your To-Do list, which is good for morale. If you do perform the definite-time tasks first, you can accomplish a good number of them, and then fill your remaining time with tasks of less-definite duration. One way, you'll get a good number of rocks in, plus a decent amount of sand, and the other way, you'll get a lot of sand in, but only a few rocks. Depending on your priorities, rocks first may be better, and in most cases I face regularly, it usually is.

Morality with Calvin and Hobbes

Yesterday, while at my sister's house, I pulled a Calvin and Hobbes comic book off the shelf and started browsing. Many of the comics took place around Christmastime and reflected on the subjects of such good and evil actions as might be expected of a mischievous young boy. One particular comic stood out to me in which Calvin asked, "Hobbes, do you think our morality is defined by our actions, or what’s in our hearts?" To which Hobbes answered, "I think our actions SHOW what’s in our hearts."

There's a lot of truth in that. The way I see it, we wouldn't take a certain course of action unless that action was already in-line with what's in our hearts. This echoes a sentiment I made ages ago, that we are the kind of people that do the things we do. If we steal our neighbor's favorite doll and hold it for ransom, that says something about the content and character of our hearts.

Of course, there are surely some things in our hearts that don't show by our actions. If we're filled with a strong desire to pelt our neighbor with a slushball (which is a snowball made with slush), but hold ourselves back by remembering that Santa may be watching, the intention to throw the slushball was still there. On the other hand, it was another feeling of Calvin's heart that prevented him from throwing the slushball, so it could be said that his inaction was a reflection of another aspect of the character of his heart. Unfortunately for Calvin, that aspect was probably greed, and I'm afraid that Santa is not so easily fooled. At least, I know that our True Judge isn't.

Our True Judge is, however, very fair. He knows about the wars that go on in our hearts - one desire struggling against another. He knows that we all have both good and bad desires in us, planted there by our own natures, our human natures, and the influences of the devil and of the Holy Spirit. The motivations behind throwing or not throwing slushballs may be mixed and complex, even though the action itself seems fairly straightforward. Either you did it or you didn't do it. The real question is why you threw the slushball or held yourself back, and that question is much more difficult to answer.

It's often considered fair to judge people by their actions, and it's certainly true that their actions reflect the character of their hearts, but like all reflections, it may not be a perfect mirror-image. Calvin counted not throwing the slushball as a good deed, and it was certainly a better choice than throwing it, but if his choice was motivated by a desire to fool Santa into thinking he was a saint who deserves a mountain of awesome presents, perhaps the choice wasn't as much of a good choice as Calvin thought it was. "Good" choices can be made by those with less-good intentions, and less-good choices can be accidentally made by those whose intentions were totally good.

At the same time, a truly good person would not do something totally evil, and a truly evil person (if such a being exists) would have a hard time doing something purely good, and each would have at least a brief internal struggle before the choice was made, so perhaps it could be said that our actions reveal the content of our hearts. At the very least, one indicator of our character is how long and hard we wrestle against ourselves (or our consciences or inner demons) before we make our choice.

"This is Important"

Most of the blogworthy images I find on Facebook were shared by my sister, Sariah, including this one.

Yesterday, I posted a list of suggestions to improve happiness, but I wasn't trying to stress anyone out by it or suggest that you had to do all ten of those things all the time to be happy. There are lots of people, even within the church, that tells us about things that we "need" to do. Some of those things actually are important. Others, you don't really need to worry about.

I mentioned an object lesson in my blog post yesterday. I think I'll share it now. The instructor had a large, glass jar, several small rocks, a jar of dirt, and a jar of water. He put the rocks in the glass jar and asked us if we thought the jar was full. Then he added dirt, and then water to the jar, so that all the space in the glass jar was filled. This was at the beginning of a lesson on time-management, following a lesson on priorities, so almost everyone thought of the moral that if you do the important things first, you'll still have time for all of the "good" things, plus all the other things that you actually want to do.

But there wasn't. There wasn't enough room in the jar for all of the dirt the instructor had brought. One student interpreted this to mean that it doesn't really matter how many "good" things don't get done as long as we do all of the important things. I'll take the thought one step further by saying that it doesn't really matter if some of the important things don't get done, as long as we take care of the things that are most important.

But here's where things get tricky. The world, the church, and even this blog talk about a lot of things that are "important." There are so many things that are "important" that we can't possibly do them all. So, what then? Are we failures because we can't do all of the important things that we're supposed to do? I don't think so. I think that the world, and maybe sometimes even the church, puts too much importance on things that are actually only "good." The church gives us lots of good ideas of things that we "should" do. Are we bad people for not doing all of them? Or, to rephrase the question, would God want us to feel like we're bad people for not doing all the things that we're "supposed" to do? I personally don't think so. I think that God would be patient with our limited human abilities, and He'd be encouraging, as long as we're trying to put the most important things first.

But again, we come to the question: What are the most important things? I think that the answer to that question is mostly up to us. There are a lot of things we could be doing, and God certainly has some idea about what would be best to do, but He lets us choose where we place our priorities, and I think that as long as they aren't totally against His plan for us, He'd give our efforts His blessing. We probably aren't able to do ALL of the important things right now, and I think God will let us choose which of the important things are most important.

God doesn't want us to stress out about all the good things that we can't do. It's up to us to follow our hearts, do what we feel is most important, and not worry about everything else. There will be lots of good things that we can't get done, and there may even be some "important" things that we don't get to. But we decide what's most important in our lives. After that, the other things don't matter quite as much.

Ten Habits for Happiness

I found this in an article in LDS church news, called The Surprising Science of "Supremely Happy" People.

Kate Bratskeir, a happiness researcher, took data from multiple happiness studies from the past 40 years and put together a list of what she called “The Habits of Supremely Happy People,” Ten things that supremely happy people do.

1. Happy people surround themselves with other happy people. Joy is contagious. People are four times more likely to be happy in the future with happy people around them. 

2. Happy people try to be happy. When happy people don’t feel happy, they cultivate a happy thought and smile about it. 

3. Happy people spend money more on others than they spend on themselves. Givers experience what scientists call the “helper’s high.” 

4. Happy people have deep in-person conversations. Sitting down to talk about what makes a person tick is a good practice for feeling good about life. 

5. Happy people use laughter as a medicine. A good old-fashioned chuckle releases lots of good neurotransmitters. A study showed that children on average laugh 300 times a day versus adults who laugh 15 times a day. 

6. Happy people use the power of music. Researchers found that music can match the anxiety-reducing effects of massage therapy. 

7. Happy people exercise and eat a healthful diet. Eating a poor diet can contribute to depression. 

8. Happy people take the time to unplug and go outside. Uninterrupted screen time brings on depression and anxiety. 

9. Happy people get enough sleep. When people run low on sleep, they are prone to feel a lack of clarity, bad moods, and poor judgment. 

10. Happy people are spiritual.

This is an awesome list and I'd like to go into each of these items in a little bit more detail, and I'd like to encourage you to pick one, just one, of these habits, and practice it for one day, and see if it makes a difference.

1. Happy people surround themselves with other happy people.

While it's true that misery likes company, that's also true of joy. Smiles and laughter are contagious, and good friends can help cheer you up when you're feeling sad. Spend some time with some good friends and just be happy (or at least not miserable) together.

2. Happy people try to be happy.

This is the one I plan to work on, and I chose the word "work" specifically. It sometimes takes a conscious effort to be happy, or at least pretend to be, and that can take a lot of work. The good news is that if we make a conscious effort to be happy, to force a smile and look for the good in our circumstances, we can trick our brain into releasing some of the chemicals that tell us we're happy. I'd guess that it's literally possible to make ourselves happy, and I intend to try.

3. Happy people spend money more on others than they spend on themselves.

I try this every once in a while, but usually I'm too frugal. Fortunately, or unfortunately for those of us who aren't quite ready yet, Christmas is right around the corner, so we'll all have an opportunity to spend some money, or at least some time and effort, on getting or making or doing something nice for someone else. Maybe the feelings generated by the giving is part of what makes Christmas the "Happiest Season of All."

4. Happy people have deep in-person conversations.

This one's hard for guys like me, but for some reason, it's easier for gals. I guess it's because girls are more social and boys tend to be more reserved. Anyhow, having a heart-to-heart with someone can get a load off your chest, and being the shoulder a friend can cry on is a form of service that can generate the "helper's high" mentioned in Habit 3.

5. Happy people use laughter as a medicine.

Some people (or at least, some Reader's Digest Magazine sections) call laughter the best medicine. While I don't know the exact medicinal properties of laughter, besides a vague idea of releasing chemicals in your brain, I know that laughing at a cute video of a kitten jumping in and out of a box can have wonderful effects on your mental well-being.

6. Happy people use the power of music.

I might add good music. Several genres of music are uplifting, encouraging, and inspiring. I'm particular to celtic music, but you may have your own favorite already. If so, listen to it. Inspired by this suggestion, I just opened Pandora in another tab, and while I wasn't unhappy before, I can say that I'm a little bit happier now.

7. Happy people exercise and eat a healthful diet.

I really struggle with this one. While I'm physically semi-active, I know I don't eat very well. I need to learn how to make myself healthy lunches and breakfasts, but I'm choosing not to stress out about it right now. Stress is bad for your happiness, and it's hard to stress out when you've got celtic music playing anyway.

8. Happy people take the time to unplug and go outside.

This is hard to do when so much of the work we have to do involves computers, but fortunately, Sacramento has many trees and parks that I can enjoy on occasion. I suppose it'd be wise of me to enjoy those things more often, when I can spare the time. I'm sure some of my work can be taken outside, as long as there isn't too much wind, and those of you with laptops can take your work outside even more frequently as long as we can keep our electronics and papers dry.

9. Happy people get enough sleep.

Another challenge of the modern adult. With our many responsibilities, it can be hard to have enough time to get enough sleep. If you can manage it, great. If not, you may need to find ways to give yourself more time. I've been learning about priorities and responsibilities for the past few weeks, and one of the lessons I've picked up is that as long as the most important priorities are being taken care of, the less-important priorities are, well, less-important. I have an object lesson that I could share on that topic, but I'll save that for another blog post.

10. Happy people are spiritual.

The article didn't elaborate on this one, but I will. Doing spiritual things, even something that takes no time at all like singing or humming a hymn while doing something else, can attract the Spirit, and the Spirit gives us feelings of peace and joy. Because God wants us to be happy, and His commandments are designed for our happiness, we can gain more happiness by doing the things He wants us to do.

As it turns out, there are a lot of things we can do to improve our happiness. I present these suggestions not because I think we need more things to do, but because I believe we could all use a little bit more happiness. If you don't have enough time or energy to follow some of these suggestions, find one that won't take as much time or energy, like listening to music. I think you may find it worth your time to make some effort to make yourself happy. God wants you to find happiness, and so do I.