Practicing the Music of the Gospel

I don't subscribe to LDS.org's Daily Messages, but I probably should. Some of them are really good, including this one from about a week ago:

"If you’re not hearing the music of the gospel in your home, please remember these two words: keep practicing." - Elder Wilford W. Andersen, "The Music of the Gospel"

During my piano class, we had to learn to play several pieces. To accomplish that, we learned about the symbols of sheet music and we learned how to identify notes, so when we looked at a piece of sheet music, we would theoretically know how to play what was written. However, for each of those pieces, knowing what notes to play, and even hearing the music enough times to know what it sounds like and to feel its emotions, wasn't enough. In order to play those pieces well, it wasn't enough to merely know what we were supposed to play; we had to practice it.

Living the Gospel is a lot like that. None of us are perfect yet. Each of us have habits we need to break and Christlike attributes we need to develop. None of us have completely gotten where we need to be, in terms of our eternal progression. However, most of us already know what we need to do to improve. The hard part is in actually doing that.

The good news is that there's a way we can improve ourselves, and it's not some faddish trick or complicated series of steps. We simply need to keep trying. As simple as it sounds, and as frustrating as it sometimes is, persistence is the key to overcoming a surprising number of life's challenges, including the challenge of self-improvement. We can learn to recognize and appreciate the music of the Gospel theoretically, but learning to play it ourselves takes practice.

In practicing, we're bound to make plenty of mistakes, but as we keep practicing, we can learn to make mistakes less frequently, and even learn how to stop making certain mistakes altogether. That's how we attain perfection - not through some grand deed of ours or by God waving a magic wand over our heads, but by making gradual progress toward perfection, one imperfect step at a time. With enough practice, a person can learn to play a piece of music perfectly, and the same is true for living the Gospel. None of us are perfect yet, but if we keep practicing, we'll keep improving. With enough persistence, and an eternity of time to practice, we can achieve perfection.