What Would You Put on the Ark?

My laptop is having trouble. Actually, it has been having trouble since I got it from my brother a few years ago. You see, up until that point, my brother was letting me borrow the laptop so I could use it for school, but I left it on a table that also had a vase of flowers on it, and evidently, one of our cats got too close. The vase fell over, spilling water on the laptop, which was shut off, but plugged in. As soon as I realized what had happened, I did what I could to hopefully save the laptop, and then made my brother a deal: I would pay him for the laptop in a way of making reparations, and he would let me keep the laptop if it survived the water damage I had unwittingly subjected it to. Luckily for me, the laptop did survive, and I jokingly named it Noah, because it survived "the flood."

Now, my laptop's fan is wearing out. It has had trouble with overheating in the Summer, and I've taken to keeping it on a cooling rack to help it radiate the heat its processors make. So far, it's been working - so long as I don't mind the white noise of the whirring of the fan. But I know that laptops don't last forever. And, now that I'm blogging about this, I realise that my laptop has been sharing a table with another vase of flowers since my dad's funeral. Noting my computer's fan trouble, Mom recommended that I find out if I have any files on this computer that I would like to save, in case my laptop dies sometime soon.

I saved four folders. Two of them have to do with Magic: the Gathering and D&D, admittedly. They include character sheets, rulebooks, and collections of images that would be difficult to replace. I also saved a General Conference folder, which contains my notes from the last few General Conferences, and a folder labelled "Blog," which contains blog posts I wrote when I didn't have access to the internet and images that I either used or thought of using on my blog. I shared one of those blog posts with my family tonight because I felt that it was good enough to be worth sharing, and I certainly think it's good enough to be worth keeping.

Hearing about the natural disasters that have been happening everywhere, including wildfires in my state, has given me cause to think "If I were to lose everything except what I could put in a suitcase or backpack, what would I put in that suitcase or backpack?" I made a similar (though far less wrenching) decision when I looked through my files, thinking "Given the limited space on my storage drive, what files would I most like to keep?" I found some files that were worth keeping and some files that weren't, so I stored some files in a folder named "ARK" on my flash drive, and I moved others into a folder named "Trash" on my computer.

As we examine our lives, as we occasionally should, we will find some things that are worth keeping forever, and some things that aren't worth keeping at all. Some things should be abandoned, and some things should be preserved. So the question for all of us becomes, "If you were going to change over time and gradually lose everything you don't make a conscious effort to keep, what would you choose to keep?" What would you put in a suitcase or a flash drive? If you knew a spiritual flood was coming, and you had to choose only the best parts of you to keep, what would you put on the ark?

These are, naturally, very difficult questions to answer. To even begin to answer them, we need to establish our highest priorities, which is difficult enough. And the fear of losing the parts of ourselves that we may or may not want to keep can be paralysing. For example, I know I'm not going to take my Magic or D&D stuff into heaven with me. Does that mean that I should give them up now? Even if I should, I'm not sure I'm willing to do that.

Thankfully, we all have some time on Earth to enjoy the things that won't last forever, but we should put some thought into deciding what we'll try to keep with us when our time on Earth is over. We'll want to keep our family relationships (at least some of them) and our testimonies and spiritual knowledge. We'll want to keep at least a few precious memories and experiences from our mortal lives. We'll want to keep much of what we've learned about almost everything we've learned about.

But what else? What other priorities should we have? What else should we try to hold on to forever? I hate to be a doomsayer, but the world isn't becoming any more stable any time soon. The floods are, eventually, going to come up. When that happens, what all are we going to try to carry with us onto that Ark?