Practical Repentance - the Problem, the Plan, and the Promise

I'm falling behind in blogging about Conference. Even if I blogged about a Conference talk tonight, which I'm not doing, I'd still be falling a few days behind schedule.

But at least I know why.

I'm not blogging about a Conference talk tonight because it's late and I'm tired. I no longer have the mental energy needed to listen to a Conference talk and expect to gain any spiritual insights from it. I'm not in a good state for blogging about Conference, or even blogging at all, really.

So, how did I get here, and what can I do about it? Well, it got late and I got tired because I was doing other things first, things which, in hindsight, should have been bumped to later, since the don't require as much mental energy and aren't actually high priorities in the first place. In the future, I should endeavor to blog earlier, perhaps starting at 10, or immediately after Family Prayer, instead of leaving it to 11, only 1 hour before my deadline. Better yet, blogging during the day would yield the best results, assuming that my scheduling works out.

So, I know the problem, and I have a plan. Now what I should to is commit myself to execute my plan. Tomorrow, I will begin blogging earlier than I began blogging today. Tomorrow, I will begin blogging by 10pm, at the latest, and I will begin by watching and reading the next Conference talk and concurrently consulting my notes. I don't intend to make promises beyond tomorrow because, if there's one thing this blog has taught me, it's that open-ended promises can get out of hand. However, I can promise to blog earlier tomorrow, and I can declare my intention to make a habit of beginning to blog by 10pm at the latest regularly. That's not a promise; it's a goal.

And this, I have learned, is repentance, practical repentance. This isn't just "I did badly; I'll try do better next time." This is considering exactly what went wrong or is going wrong, what can be done different, and what promises I can both willing to make and able to keep. This is identifying a problem, formulating a plan, and making a promise.

This works. I have gained practical experience with this method of repentance with regards to a matter to personal to relate in detail. Suffice it to say that, since I applied practical repentance to the problem, I have been doing fairly well.

I don't want to go back to the way I used to repent. I used to just beat myself up for failing and try to bring myself to promise to "try harder," without any clear idea of what I was actually going to do differently. This time, I have an actionable plan specifically designed to counteract the specific problem I've run into, and I've willingly made a commitment to follow through on my plan. It's a simple, yet sufficiently sophisticated system, and so far, it has gotten me results.

I like practical repentance, and I plan (though don't quite promise) to continue implementing it going forward.