Short-Term and Long-Term Wants

Before Gary E. Stevenson got to the "playbook" part of his talk about Your Priesthood Playbook, he briefly discussed other spiritual lessons we can learn from sports, including the lesson of setting aside short-term wants in favor of long-term wants.

Most of us find our short-term wants rather compelling. We want to sleep when we want to sleep. We want to eat whatever we want. We want to do what we feel like doing in any given moment. It takes discipline to do otherwise. To get what we want in the future, we often have to set aside some of the things we want now.

This is as true for Eternal Life as it is for skill in sports. To become skilled at a sport, one has to give up rest and other forms of recreation in order to practice and train. In order to gain Eternal Life, we have to forgo many temporal many temporal wants, or at least hold them as a lower priority. To become the best athlete, we have to give it our best effort. To achieve Eternal Life, we have to put the Kingdom of God first.

This can be difficult, as the natural man doesn't much care about the future and is concerned mainly with the desires of the present. In order to act with discipline, we need to learn to keep the natural man in check and make our bodies subject to the will of our minds and spirits. This is easier said than done, but it can be done, and thinking about our future desires can help us. It's easier to give up our short-term wants when we focus our minds on our long-term goals. Making our long-term wants more compelling than our short-term wants isn't likely to happen without conscious effort.

That's why it's important to continually remind ourselves what we really want, what we'll want in the future, so we don't get too distracted by what we want now. Our short-term wants are very tempting, but our long-term wants are far more noble and important. Our long-term wants are the ones that really matter. We should learn to behave accordingly.