Why We Record Revelations

Now that I'm a month ahead of schedule in blogging about General Conference talks, I should probably focus on the lesson I'm giving this week. This Sunday, I'm going to teach about the publishing of modern revelation, particularly the Doctrine and Covenants. The lesson makes an "Attention Activity" out of borrowing the Primary children's copies and the Doctrine and Covenants and asking them to discuss one of the verses in the that book without looking the verse up. This seems unsporting to me, so instead, I think I'm going to ask them what President Thomas S. Monson talked about in his most recent General Conference talk. I'm pretty sure all of my students were members of the church then (There's only one I'm not 100% certain about.), so they should have all seen or heard the talk, and President Thomas S. Monson is our prophet, so they should have been paying attention. I know that, when I was young, my mother always made sure I was paying attention when the prophet spoke.

Yet, I am fairly certain that none of the children will be able to tell me much of anything about President Monson's last talk because I, myself, can't remember a thing about it, except that it was short. I think it had something to do with the Book of Mormon, but if I'm right, that's only because I looked up the talk a few weeks ago try find out how short it was. I'm only guessing at everything else I might say about the talk because I don't really remember it. And how terrible is that! We have a living prophet on the Earth, a spokesman for God, and I can't even remember what he said two months ago.

Good thing we wrote the talk down and published it in the Ensign.

We need publications like those ones because the messages we receive in General Conference are inspired, insightful, and all too easy to forget. The same problem existed in Joseph Smith's time. Joseph Smith received revelations, but if they hadn't been written down, they all would have been forgotten shortly after they were received. Thankfully, they were able to record and publish those revelations so all the early saints could read them and benefit from them.

And we can do the same. We can read the Doctrine and Covenants whenever we want to, and we can learn from the revelations that were given to Joseph Smith. But, more importantly, we can also read the church magazines and learn from the revelations that more recent modern-day prophets have received, which is almost entirely the reason why I blog about them: So I have a good reason to read them, listen to them, think about them, learn from them and blog about them. It's all about retaining or regaining a recollection of what the prophets have said so we can continue to benefit from their words. And that's just as important in our day as it was in Joseph Smith's, and vice versa.

The Lord's Work

Perhaps because it sounded strikingly similar to another message I had heard recently, a particular passage from President Eyring's talk “Walk with Me” stood out strongly to me as I heard it:

None of us can do the work of the priesthood, and do it well, relying solely on our own wisdom and talents. That is because this is not our work—it is the Lord’s.

 Doesn't that sound familiar? It seems like only yesterday I was blogging about almost the exact same message. But there's a twist on it this time. Yesterday, the message was that, since this is the Lord's work, our task is not to lead, but to follow. This time, the message is that, since this is the Lord's work, we shouldn't expect to do it without His help.

I haven't lived long, but I've lived long enough to learn that things go more smoothly (or less roughly) with the Lord's help than without it. With God's help, we can accomplish miracles. Without it, we're lucky if we can get through the day. Some things, especially seemingly impossible things, are possible only with God's help. Perhaps this is the case with successful church service. Anyone can serve, but in order to be truly successful in church service, we're probably going to need at least some help from God.

The good news is that, as President Thomas S. Monson has taught us, "When we are on the Lord’s errand, we are entitled to the Lord’s help" (Ensign, May 1996). When we engage in church service, we are doing the Lord's work, and, if we let Him, the Lord helps us do it. I am thankful that the Lord offers His help to everyone who is willing to help Him. Life is hard sometimes, especially when church callings add to our already-taxing schedules and stress-inducers, so I'm grateful that the Lord's help is available to everyone who serves others. Without that help, most of us would have a hard time managing our own lives, let alone managing a church calling or two as well. We need God's help. Thankfully, He is willing to offer it to anyone who's willing to use a portion of it to serve Him.

The True Leader

President Uchtdorf's conference talk The Greatest among You focussed on church service and included an insight that I found particularly interesting:

To be effective Church leaders, we must learn this critical lesson: leadership in the Church is not so much about directing others as it is about our willingness to be directed by God.

Sometimes, I think that "church leadership" might not be the right term for it. Strictly speaking, the church leaders don't actually lead the church any more than our prophet, President Thomas S. Monson, is the head of the church. People don't lead this church; God does. He just does so by proxy and delegation through His appointed leaders. Thus, success in church leadership comes not from being a great leader, but from being a good follower and always acknowledging who the True Leader is.

The Preparatory Priesthood

A few months ago, I realized that there are six sessions of General Conference and six months between Conferences. I figured that if I blogged about all of the talks from a given General Conference session in its associated month, I could easily complete the project of blogging about each talk of a General Conference before the next one began.

I am currently ahead of schedule. In fact, I am so far ahead of schedule that I could finish blogging about next month's General Conference talks before next month starts. And that's what I plan to attempt to do.

To that end, tonight's blog post will be about Bishop Gerald Causse's talk, Prepare the Way, which focussed on the Aaronic Priesthood. He said that the role of the Aaronic Priesthood is to "prepare the way," and it accomplishes this in two ways.

First, holders of the Aaronic Priesthood prepare the way for the holders of the Melchizedek Priesthood to do their jobs. For example, Aaronic Priesthood holders baptise people and Melchizedek Priesthood holders confirm them. John the Baptist notably used his Aaronic Priesthood authority to baptise Jesus Christ and prepare the way for Him.

Second, the Aaronic Priesthood prepares its holders to receive and use the Melchizedek Priesthood. The service the holders of the Aaronic Priesthood do helps them develop a habit of doing service for the Lord and His children. It also helps them feel and follow the Spirit and purify their hearts. These traits enable young men to become effective Aaronic (and eventually Melchizedek) Priesthood holders.

Whether they're preparing for their own future service or preparing the way for the service of others, holders of the Aaronic Priesthood are frequently in a state of preparation, so holders of the Melchizedek Priesthood have a responsibility to help the holders of the Aaronic Priesthood prepare well. The Aaronic Priesthood holders of today are the Melchizedek Priesthood holders of tomorrow and are the future leaders of this church. So it is important for any of us who have any influence over these Young Men to help them prepare to serve.

Many Messages

I first blogged about Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame on November 16, 2014. On May 17, 2015, I blogged about it again, saying that there were "at least a dozen blogworthy quotes and moments from the movie," an assertion which I intend to prove. I've blogged about it twice since then, once on September 11, 2015, and again on October 1 of the same year.

More than a year and a half have passed since the last time I blogged about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I still have to blog about it at least another eight times. (This time doesn't count.) To that end, I bought a copy of the movie two days ago, and tonight, I watched the film with my family, with a clipboard in hand, determined to list at least a few more blogworthy thoughts. With the help of my family members offering their insights, I was able to fill the entire page with potential blog topics, generating far more than the mere eight ideas I needed to eventually prove my previous claim.

I'm not sure how many of these ideas I'll actually blog about beyond the eight I need to complete my dozen, but I'm glad I have a good list of potential blog ideas. (I actually now have several lists of blog ideas, scattered in various locations, which I should compile, consolidate, and occasionally turn to.)

This list of ideas came to me as I intentionally looked for them. Unlike the hamburger I blogged about on Saturday, very few of these new insights came without some pondering. But as long as I was pondering and kept my mind open to new ideas, I found many new blogworthy messages in a movie I had seen at least three times already, proving that there were more blogworthy messages in the movie than I had caught in the first, second, and third time I watched it.

This is probaly part of the reason why we're encouraged to read and reread The Book of Mormon many times. There are many important spiritual messages to find in that book - far more than can be found in only the first few readings. My family just finished our umpteenth reading of The Book of Mormon recently, and we've started reading it again. I'm fully confident that, over the course of this reading, I'll find many insights in The Book of Mormon that I hadn't caught before, and I'll try to blog about a few of them. As with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, there are countless insights to find in The Book of Mormon, and to find them, we have to search for them  over the course of many repeated readings.

This Season and Always

Today is, if my estimations are accurate, one of the two days that are farthest away on a calender from Christmas, making this the perfect time to share this particular thought.

Wise Men Still Seek Him

And I might add: This Season and Always.

Christmastime is a time in which we are especially reminded of Jesus Christ and what it means to be a Christian. At Christmastime, and shortly thereafter, we usually pledge to try to be more Christian and to draw ever closer to Jesus Christ. Yet, drawing closer to Jesus Christ is something we should do all year round. Seeking Jesus is something we should always do, regardless of the time of year.

Christmas was roughly six months ago, and it's about six months away, but we should still keep some form of the Chirstmas spirit in our hearts. We don't have to sing Christmas carols or exchange gifts, but we should always seek out ways to follow Jesus Christ. We should all continually strive to draw closer to Jesus Christ like we do around Christmastime, whether it's actually Christmastime or not.

I Had a Hamburger

I had a hamburger for lunch today. The burger was simple - just a cooked hamburger patty between two slices of bread with some ketchup and mayonnaise. Yet, despite the burger's simplicity, it had an unusually strong effect on me.

As I ate the burger, I thought about the sacrifice that had gone into it, and I felt a little bit guilty enjoying a sandwich that a creature had died to produce. This reminded me of another sacrifice, and as soon as I began to think of this burger as representing the Atonement of Jesus Christ, I suddenly saw almost everything about the burger as being symbolic.

The meat and the bread fairly clearly represented Jesus' sacrifice mostly by representing Jesus Christ Himself. The meat of the sandwich was clearly a sacrifice, and the bread represented Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, and it also reminded me of Him by reminding me of the Sacrament, which, itself, is a symbol of Jesus Christ and His Atonement.

Even the condiments had symbolic meaning. The white mayonnaise was symbolic of Christ's purity, and the red ketchup represented His blood. Together, the condiments reminded me that Jesus suffered agony and death, even though He didn't deserve it, primarily so His blood could wash away the blood on our sin-stained hands.

The more I thought about it, the more symbols I saw. My mom cooked the burger in much the same way as our Heavenly Father prepared the plan that involved the sacrifice of His Son. I regret to admit that I didn't put any vegetables in my hamburger, but if I had, they could have represented the new life we gain through laying hold of the Atonement of Jesus Christ. And the act of eating the hamburger reminded me again of the Sacrament and that we must internalize the Gospel in order for it to have any effect on us.

So, I'm thankful Mom decided to cook some hamburger patties for lunch today, and I'm thankful for the Spirit opening my eyes to the symbolic meaning of what I was eating, because eating my burger turned out to be a strangely religious experience. I hope that my experience at church tomorrow will be at least as religious as eating a hamburger for lunch.

The Wherever Whenever Mission

In his talk Called to the Work, Elder David A. Bednar unsurprisingly spoke of missionary work. In particular, he spoke about how one is "called to serve as a missionary" and then, secondarily, "assigned to labor" in a specific area. In fact, he shared a historical account of a pair of early missionaries who were told to go "to the north or to the south, to the east or to the west, it mattereth not, for ye cannot go amiss" (D&C 80:3).

The core of Elder Bednar's message seems to have been that the exact location of our missionary service doesn't matter as much as the actual service does, with the implication being that we can give missionary service basically anywhere. Not all missionaries are called to serve in exotic, foreign lands. In fact, if "every member [is] a missionary," as President David O. McKay said in 1959, then most missionaries serve their missions right at home.

Yes, full time missionaries are called to serve in specific areas, just as I was called to serve in the Canada Winnipeg Mission, but we don't have to go to distant places, or even go door-to-door, to teach the Gospel. We can teach our friends and acquaintances by example, and occasionally open up opportunities to discuss the gospel in casual conversation. We are all "called to serve," but, not being assigned to any particular area, we are to serve God and His children wherever we happen to be. I don't think it matters much where we offer the bulk of our service. What matters is that we actually open our mouths and serve.

Kindness in Politics

President Monson didn't say much last General Conference. Even considering both of his talks, he only spoke for about seven-and-a-half minutes, which is about half the length of a normal, single General Conference talk. Given how little time President Monson had to say what he wanted to say, what he  said during those seven-and-a-half minutes should be considered with an especially high weight of importance. Also, he's the prophet, so we should probably give his words extra weight anyway.

Then, it should be considered significant that President Monson spent the first four of his seven-and-a-half minutes telling us that we ought to be kind. "Kindness," he said, quoting Elder Wirthlin, "is the essence of a celestial life. Kindness is how a Christlike person treats others. Kindness should permeate all of our words and actions at work, at school, at church, and especially in our homes." And also, I would add, in our political discussions.

As a writing tutor, I get frequent opportunities to help college students with their papers, which sometimes contain political messages with which I disagree. Yet, I try not to challenge these students' viewpoints. That's not my job. My job is to help them become good writers, no matter what they choose to write. Essentially, my job is to be kind and to help them convey their messages well, even if I disagree with those messages.

Kindness is, according to my observations and opinion, unfortunately rare in our political discourses. People don't seem interested in considering the perspectives of their "political opponents," and they seem to listen to each other only so they can find ways to refute each other. People seem more interested in winning arguments and getting their way than they are in having conversations and learning what would truly be best for everyone.

It's hard to imagine how much nicer the world would be if people were kind rather than contentious, if people listened to each other rather than talking and shouting over each other, and if they tried to understand one another rather than trying to label each other. If people were kind in their political discussions, we'd be able to solve more problems. I'm sure we'd still have disagreements, and plenty of them, but we'd be able to talk about them rationally and get to the roots of the matter instead of trying to convince each other that they're wrong. Political arguments rarely go anywhere productive, yet if we discussed the issues respectfully, we'd all understand the issues a little better, even if we don't quite manage to resolve them.

I don't expect, or even dare hope, that our political leaders will ever learn to be kind to one another, but we can, no matter where we stand on the political spectrum. We can disagree, strongly, on matters of great importance to us without having to be unkind to each other. I may be wrong, but I currently believe that we can always choose to be kind. The prophets have told us that "Kindness should permeate all of our words and actions," including, in my opinion, our political ones.

Strength Doesn't Come From Winning

I came across a good quote this afternoon:

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strength. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger

This is an important quote, and it helps explain why life is the way it is, especially for the righteous. We all struggle, some more than others, and that's true because God wants us to grow, and growth doesn't come when life is easy.

Sometimes, I wish life was easier. I'm sure we all do. It would certainly be nice if spiritual victories weren't so difficult to secure, but that may not actually be good for us. God doesn't need weak winners; He needs strong soldiers. It is our struggles, not our victories, that help us become strong soldiers. So we need to struggle.

Life has to be hard for everyone, because if it isn't, we don't grow. The trials and hardships and difficulties of life are essential to our spiritual development. God knows what He's doing. By making life hard for us, especially for those of us who are trying to follow Him, He is helping us develop the spiritual strength we need to win.

We can win. We have to win. But for our spiritual well-being, we cannot afford for those victories to come easily.

 

Strength d We oes not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/arnoldschw116694.html

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/arnoldschw116694.html

Water

We've started a little bit of a heat wave where I live, and as I went to get my umpteenth glass of water today, it struck me that a few of Christ's titles (thinking particularly of the Living Water and the Bread of Life) make symbols of things we can't live without. We can't go long without eating, and we can survive even less long without drinking. The symbolic meaning is fairly obvious: Just as our physical lives depend on food and water, our spiritual lives depend on Jesus Christ.

Also notable is that we need to eat and drink regularly in order to stay healthy. One cannot parch themselves for several weeks and then drink a month's worth of water to make up for it, and even if one could drink a month's worth of water without exploding, that wouldn't mean that they could then go weeks before having to drink again. Drinking water should be a regular, multiple-times-daily experience, especially when we exert ourselves and/or when the weather's warm. Similarly, we should come unto Jesus Christ regularly and frequently, especially in times of trial.

Considering how frequently and how much we need to drink water, it makes sense for God to have chosen such a symbol for Jesus Christ. And the symbolic symmetry doesn't stop there. The purity of drinking water can represent the spiritual purity (sinlessness) of Jesus Christ. Water can also remind us of the many times water was used prominently in the scriptures: The waters of Noah, the parting of the Red Sea, Christ's baptism, that time when an Old Testament prophet (I forget which one) challenged the priests of some other God (baal, I think) to call down fire from heaven, the washing of the Apostles' feet, and the calling forth of water from a rock, just to name a few. Perhaps the ubiquitousness of water in the scriptures and in our daily lives is meant to be somewhat self-referential, with each story linked to each other using water as the common theme, and giving us a necessary reminder of all those stories and moments when we drink our umpteenth daily glass of water.

I don't have much reason to be thankful for this heat wave, but I am thankful for water and all it does and represents. Water is one of the most wonderful substances in the world. With its power and purity and essentiality for life, water makes an excellent symbol for Jesus Christ.

We Can Return and Receive God's Blessings

My favorite part of Elder M. Russell Ballard's talk, Return and Receive, is when he testified that we can return and receive:

Despite our mistakes, shortcomings, detours, and sins, Jesus Christ’s Atonement allows us to repent, prepared to return and receive the matchless blessings God has promised—to live forever with the Father and the Son in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.

God has prepared great blessings for us, and He is eager for us to receive them, but to do that, we must become worthy to return to the Celestial Kingdom. This is challenging because we all have made sins that disqualify us from being worthy in our own rights, but mercifully, God has prepared a way for us to repent, to turn away from our sins and return to His presence so we can receive all the blessings He has in store for us.

I am thankful for God's mercy and for His gracious plan that allows us, through repentance and the power of Christ's Atonement, to become clean from our sins so we can return to our heavenly home and receive the blessings that are waiting for us there. We truly are blessed that God and His Son, Jesus Christ, have made it possible for us to return and receive.

A Lot of Forgiveness

Looking ahead at next week's Primary lesson, I saw that the title of the lesson is "Joseph Smith is Tarred and Feathered," and the purpose of teaching that little history lesson to eight and nine years olds is "to help each child desire to develop a forgiving attitude."

That is a lot of forgiveness, but I know Someone who has an even more forgiving attitude, Someone who even forgave the people who were torturing Him to death while they were doing it.

Don't get me wrong; Joseph Smith is an excellent example of forgiveness. But Jesus is a better one. Which is fortunate for us, since if Jesus wasn't so forgiving, pretty much all of us would be doomed. We all rely on the Savior's mercy and forgiveness. Thank goodness He's the most forgiving person who ever lived.

Study AND Prayer

Did you know that Joseph Smith studied Egyptian? Apparently, some friends of his bought four mummies and their scrolls from a man named Michael Chandler in the Summer of 1835. So, according to the Primary lesson manual, "Joseph Smith studied the letters and grammar of the Egyptian language and then, with the help of the Holy Ghost, he translated the writings on the papyrus rolls." The funny thing is that, before taking the mummies to Kirtland, Ohio, he had tried to get the scrolls translated by educated men in Pennsylvania, "but even the most educated of these men were only able to understand a little of the writings." Clearly, education alone was not enough to translate those scrolls. One also needed inspiration. Even so, I think a little bit of education may have been necessary.

This story reminds me of Sydney Rigdon, who, if I recall correctly, attempted to do almost the exact opposite of what the educated men Chandler had spoken to had done. Rigdon had once attempted to translate part of a sacred record by revelation alone, perhaps thinking that the right words would just flow through him, if he had enough faith. As the story goes, he failed because he "took no thought save is was to ask" (D&C 9:6).

Thus we see that one needs to both study and pray to receive some revelations. God rarely speaks to educated atheists, and He rarely gives answers to those who don't look for them. Thus, if we want answers, we have to look for them and have faith that God can help us find them. Doing only either is rarely enough. Joseph Smith was able to translate the scrolls because he had studied some Egyptian and done some praying, and that is what we also need to do. If we want guidance or answers or inspiration from God, we have to seek it through study AND prayer, or we probably aren't going to get it.

The Best Apology

I just saw an inspirational picture quote on Facebook which says "The best apology is changed behavior," and, now that I think about it, that is also the best (if not the only) way to repent. Repentance means change, and, ideally, it means changing for the better. And that's all God really wants from us. God didn't give us the commandments so He could boss us around or punish us for breaking them. He gave them to us so they could help us become better people. If we break them, God doesn't want us to suffer, and I'm not sure how much He cares whether or not we even apologize; mostly, He just wants us to change. So, when we sin, we should pray and apologize and ask for forgiveness, but more importantly, we should vow and strive to change our behavior.

The Bible is Important

In a few days, I'll be teaching a Primary lesson on Joseph Smith "translating" parts of the Bible. I put "translating" in quotation marks because it wasn't a traditional translation, changing a message from one language to another. Instead, what he did was read the parts of the Bible that had been mistranslated and, under the direction of the Holy Ghost, record what the translation actually should have been.

(Oh, and he also received a vision that he wrote down, which became the Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price, and he actually translated some Egyptian scrolls which became the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, but I'm mostly here to talk about the Bible.)

As I'll explain to my students on Sunday, Joseph Smith's "translation" of the Bible was necessary mostly because is and was so important to any and every Christian religion. The importance of the prophecies and stories in the Bible were important enough for them all to be preserved and complied into a single book in the first place, and then to be translated from their original languages into more common languages so they could be read and appreciated. This is just my ballpark estimate, but I'd say that, at the very least, hundreds of millions of manhours were put into preserving, compiling, and translating the Bible. This would not have happened if the Bible had been just some old book. This book is important enough to preserve and translate and mass-produce so everyone can read it.

But anything worth doing is worth doing right.

Having passed through so many hundreds of hands and so many translations, some of which were not necessarily inspired by God or free from the influence of the opinions of men, many of the Bible's important messages got lost in translation. Yet, since these messages were so important, God saw fit for many passages of the Bible to be "translated" again, one last time.

Joseph Smith was a busy man. Between running the church and running from persecution, he didn't have a whole lot of time for reading, let alone retranslation. Yet, God knew that the lost truths "which are plain and most precious" (1 Nephi 13:26) were "precious" enough to be worth taking up some of the prophet's limited time. As a result, we now have corrected versions of Bible passages that reveal important eternal truths that had previously been lost to time.

Given that the Bible was and is important enough to compile and translate and distribute and correct, you'd think we'd read it more often. Perhaps I should only speak for myself, but I sometimes see the Bible as being somewhat outdated. Yes, there are many truths in it that are eternal, but most of those truths also show up in more recent scriptoral works, such as the Book of Mormon and the words of the living prophets. But God knew that we would have the Book of Mormon and the words of living prophets, and He still saw fit to correct the mistranslations in the Bible. It would seem that, in His opinion, we would need those corrected passages, even though we already have so many other sources of spiritual truths. Those passages were not only important enough create, collect, and translate, they were important enough to retranslate despite the other sources of light and knowledge we already had.

All in all, the truths found in the Bible must be pretty darn important. Maybe I should read them one of these days.

What Makes a Person Themselves?

One of my students came in with an interesting assignment this afternoon. The assignment was to deconstruct the factors that go into defining an individual's identity. We had a fascinating conversation, discussing factors including physiology, heritage, personal experiences, and preferences in food and recreational activities. However, there is one factor that we didn't touch on in that discussion: souls.

Souls themselves are difficult to define. I consider them something like the innermost part of oneself. The souls houses one's personality and preferences, in my opinion. However, even that simple definition gets a little murky. One's preferences may be influenced by physiology, as seeing or hearing or doing something may cause the creations of certain chemicals in one's brain, triggering a sensation that the body will want to experience again later. For example, when I eat chocolate, there is a chemical reaction in my brain registering the sensation, which may be the cause of the good feeling I get when I eat it. So, if I like chocolate, does that preference reside in the body or in the soul?

The distinction may be unimportant. My body and spirit are connected now, and they are both part of me. Any preference I have may be personal or physiological, and it will still be part of me. I will die at one point, at which time, my spirit will be separated from my body, so I'll be able to experience what my souls is like without the influence of my body, which will be really trippy, but then, when I'm resurrected, I'll get my body back, and I'll be myself again: spirit and body combined, both playing their part in making me me.

So, I think one's body should be taken into account when considering the aspect of one's identity. The body is material, and is subject to change, but it's not as temporary as I sometimes think. My body wasn't always part of me, and my current body won't be part of me forever, but I should probably consider my body as being part of me, as being embodied is an aspect of my eternal identity.

People are complicated, partly because there are so many factors that go into making them who they are. I think that some of those factors, like heritage, many only matter in mortality. In the afterlife, we will all recognize our true heritage as children of God. But we will still have bodies, we will still remember our experiences, and we may even hold onto some of the preferences we had in mortality. It's hard to say, exactly, which parts of us are part of our eternal identities, but I would say that our bodies probably count.

Light Pollution

You can't see the stars as well in the city as you can out in nature. This is because of an effect called "light pollution." I'm not sure exactly how it works, but somehow, the lights from the city make it harder to see the stars.

I think that many people have the same problem, spiritually. They've gained so much of the knowledge and the wisdom of the world that it makes it harder for them to see the knowledge and wisdom of God. They don't turn to Him for guidance because they think they get enough guidance from the world, never mind that it's leading them in the wrong direction.

Of course, not every intelligent person has this problem. There are also many people who know a lot, but still trust that God knows more. We should be like that. As we gain knowledge and wisdom here on Earth, we should be careful to not let it blot out the knowledge and wisdom we have gained and can yet gain from God. Learning is good, but we should never make the mistake of thinking that we've learned enough that we don't still need God to teach us. Earthly light is fine, so long as it doesn't make it harder for us to see and follow heavenly light.

Patient Without Excusing

Elder Neil L. Andersen spoke of Overcoming the World. In his conclusion, he said "May we each try a little harder in our efforts to overcome the world, not excusing serious offenses yet being patient with minor slips and falls." I wanted to isolate this part of his talk because I feel that it's important to find a way to be patient without making excuses.

God cannot tolerate sin. He has said that He "cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance" (D&C 1:31). Yet, God can tolerate us. Imperfect and sinful and human as we are, God is patient with us, even though His patience and even His forgiveness do not excuse our behavior. We must become sinless, no exceptions, no excuses.

Of course, Elder Andersen wasn't talking about God when he said that. Elder Andersen was talking about us. Christ has told us "I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men." (D&C 64:10). God may not be able to tolerate "minor slips and falls," but we should. Even so, Elder Andersen warned us not to excuse serious offenses.

This may be a case where we must hate the sin, but love the sinner, or, in other words, we must be patient with the sinner, but not excuse the sin. The behavior may be inexcusable, but the people are not, and we should tolerate people, even if we cannot tolerate their behavior.

There's a thin line in there, and it's hard to find it, but it's worth searching for. If we don't learn how to do as Elder Andersen asks, many sinners may continue in their ways when they otherwise might have been persuaded to repent. However, if we can learn how to love people and be patient with them without accidentally giving them the impression that sin is okay, we might be able to persuade more people to abandon sin and seek Christ's love through the Gospel instead. I admit that this may be difficult, but if being patient with sin without excusing it helps sinners to repent, it might be worth figuring out how to do that.

Fixing Bad Situations

One aspect of my testimony that was reaffirmed at church today is that God can take bad situations and events and make good things come of them. One such example was when Ammon, a Nephite missionary, ran into the king of the Lamanites. The king was not at all pleased that Ammon was in his country, so he attacked Ammon, and a sword fight ensued. Either one of them easily could have been killed, resulting in either the death of a missionary or the apparent assassination of the Lamanite monarch at the hands of an invading Nephite. This was a bad situation, but God was able to turn it around. Ammon won the fight, but spared the king's life, and the king was so impressed at Ammon's mercy that he wanted to learn more about the gospel Ammon was preaching.

Of course, I've left some key elements out of that story, but similar stories happen in our lives from time to time. One of the speakers at church today (or maybe last night) shared the story of a time when he and his sons got lost when hiking. They prayed for guidance, and they were lead to some others who were also lost, and eventually they were all found together.

I, myself, had a mistake turned into a miracle. A few years ago, God took a bad situation that I had accidentally caused and used it to do some good. At the time, I wrote briefly about how God's plan really is foolproof, in that He has plans for either every possibility or the one possibility that He knows is actually going to happen. And His plans always work out for our good, even if we have to go through some rough patches to get there.

I am thankful that God always knows what's happening and what's going to happen, and that He uses that knowledge to help us. His influence frequently turns mistakes into miracles and disasters into masterpieces. With His help, even we bumbling humans can have a hand in shaping events that turn out to have good results. So, when we find ourselves in bad situations, let us try to be patient with God and faithful to Him. We may find that He miraculously turns our bad situation into a good one.

Crossroads Everywhere

We sometimes talk about crossroads as places where we can make a choice, and we can choose one path or the other, but life is actually a lot more complicated than that. We are constantly facing choices, and there are far more options to choose from to list them all. Picturing life as a series of trails and crossroads with sets of two to four branching paths may help us understand the concept and importance of making choices, but it glosses over the fact that we are making choices literally all the time. And the choices we make are a lot more detailed than just choosing option A, B, or C. To continue with the pathway analogy, we choose not only which pathway to follow, but how far to follow it. We choose how quickly or slowly we walk. We choose how we walk. We choose exactly where to place our feet every time we take a step. If we make each choice we face its own crossroad, we soon find that there are crossroads everywhere, and they each have an infinite number of options. It seems a bit overwhelming to me that I have so many options, but I also find it liberating that I'm not stuck on some linear path with only a finite set of options. I can choose my own path, and I choose it with every step I take.

Digging for Inspiration

I just spent well over an hour digging through my Facebook page for something I could blog about. I scrolled down passed pictures of nice scenery, a few inspirational picture quotes, and dozens of past blog posts, none of which really grabbed me as something I could blog about. Eventually, I realized that I was looking in the wrong direction. Inspiration isn't something you find by scrolling down a Facebook page, but by looking up to God. So often, I come to the end of the day without any ideas for that day's blog post, and I end up looking for ideas in the wrong places. Tomorrow, I'm going to try to be a more active and proactive blogger by searching for inspiration before the end of the day. And when I look for inspiration tomorrow, I'm not going to look down at my laptop; I'm going to look up to God.

It's Okay to Be Human

I am, once again, grateful that God is patient with our imperfections. God's patience is especially fortunate because imperfect is all we can be right now. Again, with only one exception ever in the entire history of mankind, no human being has ever been perfect. In every case but one, to be human is to be imperfect. And God is very okay with us being human. In fact, His entire plan hinges on it. In a sense, His goal for our eventual perfection requires us to go through a period of imperfection. So it's not surprising that God is very forgiving of the imperfections our human nature cause us to have, even more so than we are. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm confident that God's far more forgiving of my follies than I am. God's okay with me being human and imperfect, even when I wish I wasn't. And actually, my desire to overcome the affliction of being human is probably a crucial element in God's plan for me. God knows we're not perfect now, but He wants us all to eventually become perfect, and that's not going to happen unless we really want it to. We have to want to become perfect, even though there's almost no way we can be perfect now. The key word is "eventually." God wants us to eventually become perfect, though it's not practical, and likely not even possible for us to be perfect right now. Right now, we are imperfect, and God is in the process of changing that, but for now, it's okay that we're imperfect, and it's very, very okay that we're human.

Learning from a Little Accident

I witnessed a little miracle today, when I crashed my bike into a pole. I was unhurt. The position of the brake handle was "adjusted," but it still worked. The bike was still ridable, I got home safely, and with the right tools, I was able to reposition the brake handle quickly and easily. What was "damaged" in a moment stayed "damaged," but still functional, for well over an hour, but was fixed in minutes. Kind of like us.

When we sin, it hurts our souls. It "damages" us, you could say. But it doesn't destroy us. We can get back up and keep moving forward, despite the damage. And when we have the right tools and use them correctly, we can have the damage undone.

Another lesson we can learn from this is that having the right tools is important. I don't have an allen wrench as small as the one I needed to fix my bike, so I had to rely on another person to provide me with the tools I needed to get myself out of the mess I had gotten myself into. Similarly, we all rely on Jesus Christ to use our repentance and His Atonement to give us the power we need to become clean and free of sin. We can't do it without Him.

I'm thankful for the little accident I got into this afternoon. I'm thankful for the lessons I've learned from it, and I'm especially grateful that the wreck wasn't any worse. One final lesson is that God can turn almost anything into a good thing, even a small accident like crashing my bike.

Patient with Imperfections

In Elder Valeri V. Cordon's talk, The Language of the Gospel, one particular sentence toward the end of his talk stood out to me: "Just as a mother is compassionate with her little children, our Heavenly Father is patient with our imperfections and mistakes."

This was a good reminder for me, as I need frequent reminders that God will not be overly-critical if and when we struggle in our attempts to keep the commandments. God knows that life is difficult and filled with strong temptations. God knows that we're only human. God asks that we try to keep the commandments, but He doesn't demand that we always succeed. His perfect plan accounts for our shortcomings and weaknesses, and while we must always strive to overcome our weaknesses, there is a backup plan for when we occasionally fail.

Of course, God is far less forgiving of deliberate sin, and forgiveness for any sin, deliberate or not, can only come through repentance, but it's nice to know that God is as merciful as He is just, and that He is more patient than He is perfectionistic. With only one exception, no human has ever been perfect, and I am very grateful that God has learned to be patient with us about that.

A Reason to Study

Yesterday, I read a General Conference talk, not because such talks are generally filled with spiritual insights and light, but because I had to give a message from a Conference talk that evening. When we have to give lessons, we study the lesson material, and are blessed by the act of studying it. That may be part of the reason we're asked to give lessons occasionally: to give us a(nother) reason to study.

There are many reasons to study the Gospel. Doing so can give us the answers to some of life's most important questions and concerns. Gospel study can give us guidance for our personally lives and can help us form a closer connection to the Spirit. Studying the Gospel is the only way to gain the essential knowledge we'll need to learn how to qualify for the greatest of all the gifts of God. Yet, those reasons don't seem to be compelling enough to convince us to study the gospel. At least, not for me.

I am thankful that I occasionally have to teach lessons and that I have to post a daily blog post because these things help me study the gospel far more frequently than I would otherwise make time for. I should study the gospel for more intrinsic reasons. We all should. But, thankfully for those of us who wouldn't study the gospel much otherwise, having to teach the gospel occasionally is one of the ways God gives us some extra incentive to study it.

Bearing Light

The world is full of darkness, but a little bit of light can help drive it away. We draw in light as we study and pray, and that light can help us repel darkness, not only from ourselves, but also from the people we care about. Some people carry less light or face stronger darkness than others. We can help those people by bearing extra light to them, and when we are those people, we can seek help repelling the darkness by seeking out places and people with light. As we all draw in light and bear it to each other, we can all make and find places of refuge where we can, together, fend off the darkness of the world.

Not That We Deserve It

An hour or so ago, I set down a dish with tasty dinner scraps for our unhelpful and often-in-the-way dog, thinking to myself "not that you deserve it." This unrighteous thought made me think about how undeserving we humans are of the blessings we receive.

We, too, are often less-then-helpful, and sometimes our actions get in the way of God's plans for us and for the rest of His children. Yet, God blesses us. God gave us this beautiful earth and these amazing bodies and the moral agency which we frequently misuse, not because we deserved any of them, but because He wants us to be happy and to have the opportunity to gain all the blessings He has.

Those celestial blessings, we do have to earn, but even if we "earn" them, we can't truly say that we deserve them. To qualify for such blessings, we have to be sinless, and we're not. To help us become sinless, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to provide an Atonement for us, at great personal cost to Himself. Through His Atonement, Jesus Christ offers us mercy in place of justice, so God can offer us blessings in the place of the penalties we actually deserve.

I am grateful that God is more generous than I often feel like being, and that He cares far more about mercy than He cares about justice. I'm grateful that He doesn't ask Himself whether or not someone deserves something as often as I do. I am not much like my Heavenly Father, which provides further reasons why I don't deserve the blessings He gives me. I am grateful that He still blesses me, as He blesses His other children, whether we deserve it or not.

Waiting at Home

Whenever I stay out late, as I did tonight, my mom asks me to come into her bedroom as soon as I get home, wake her up, and let her know I'm home. It's very touching for me to know that Mom wants me to let her know that I'm alright, and that I got home safely, even if I have to wake her to do it. It's also touching to know that we have a Father in Heaven who is also anxious that we get home safely (though He's in no hurry for us to come home early). He knows that this life is full of physical and spiritual dangers, so He watches out for us, waiting in heaven to see that we've successfully navigated the trials of life and that we've made it home safely. So, let us be careful as we make our way through life, and try to make sure we become and remain worthy to return to the Celestial Kingdom. Our Parents are waiting for us.

Broken Windows

There's an idea called the Broken Windows Theory. If I recall correctly, it basically means that crimes, like vandalism, are more likely to happen in places where crimes like vandalism have already been committed. It's almost as if people think "Well, that window is already broken, so it's not as much of a shame if someone also broke that other one." I don't know if this mindset really exists in the world of criminal psychology, but I know it exists in me.

There have been times when I, having given in to temptation, say to myself "Well, I already messed things up. I might as well give up for today and try again tomorrow," but that kind of mindset doesn't make any sense. Not for windows, and not for sin.

One window may be broken, but the others are still fine. The broken window can be replaced for the cost of replacing one window. But if more windows get broken, to cost of repairing the building rises. Each broken window adds to the cost of repairs, so each window that we manage not to break matters.

The same goes with sin. One sin can be forgiven for the cost of repenting of that one sin. The more sins we commit, the more sins we need to repent of, and the greater the cost becomes. Each sin we commit increases the cost of repentance (though the value of forgiveness is always great enough to be worth the cost of repentance, FYI), and each sin we manage not to commit helps us keep the cost of repentance down.

Breaking one window, especially by accident, or even by choice, does not justify breaking another. Having one broken window doesn't make the whole building worthless, and breaking more windows can only make things worse. It's better to board up the broken window until it can be replaced and take care not to break any more.

Similarly, committing one sin doesn't mean our entire lives are ruined, and it certainly doesn't give us license to commit more sins. One sin can be repented of with minimal effort, but each sin adds up. Rather than giving up an giving in to temptation because we've already slipped up, we should repent as quickly as we come to ourselves and try not to slip any further. I have broken some windows, both literally and figuratively, but I still have some windows intact, and I intend to keep them that way.