Discipline VS Get-It-Now Temptations

I'm having trouble thinking of how to blog about the next Conference talk, and I want to get to school early today so I can take care of some stuff before class. As a result, I decided to just pull something off of Facebook again.

Some of Satan's most convincing temptations involve giving us something we want right then. Smokers and drinkers consume such products to gain quick relief from stress, and ironically add to the stress in their life in the process. When we're fasting, we're tempted to break our fast early to immediately satisfy our hunger rather than waiting to fully fulfill the purpose of our fast. And through peer pressure, young people are tempted to do exceptionally foolish things to gain instant popularity or romance or even just attention. People don't like having to wait for things or do without things they want, and Satan plays on that part of the human condition by offering us things that we want in the moment.

God, however, teaches us patience. Of all the blessings He promises us, the best of them only come long after we've qualified for them. Blessings like eternal families and eternal life have their roots in mortality (that is, we have to work for them here and now), but their richest blessings are only realized long after this life is over.

One aspect of the temptation to get what we want right now is that we don't really know what the future holds. We take it on faith that if we live righteously, the afterlife will be better for us than if we don't. Actually, we take it on faith that there even is an afterlife at all, and many of the people who live for the moment claim that there isn't one. They live for the moment because this moment is all we really have. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," and that'll be the end of it. We know that this world is real because we're experiencing it. The next world isn't as readily apparent.

Yet, for those of us who believe, the next world can seem real enough to look forward to (or fear, for us sinners), and most of all, to prepare for. Earth life has lots of get-it-now temptations that can prevent us from reaching the point where we get something even better later on. Eternal life and eternal families depend on living righteously while we're still living. While other people are "enjoying life" and "having fun," we have to maintain higher standards. It's often not what we feel like doing in the moment of temptation, but we know that it's worth it to resist temptations and choose the more (but later) rewarding path. Discipline is the ability to choose what you'll want later over what you want now, and it's the hallmark of a disciple of Christ.

To Help Us Become Like Him

Now that I've gotten passed the distractions of feminism on Facebook and grounding rods with Dad, here's what I originally planned on blogging about concerning the primary song I shared two days ago (and will share again right now in case it's too inconvenient for you to go back to the blog post of two days ago to listen to it again).





I especially love the refrain, "God gave us families to help us become what He wants us to be." In families, we can learn to develop Christlike attributes, like patience, love, service, and wisdom. Also, as we become better children for our parents and better parents for our kids, we learn ways to become better children of our Heavenly Father, and parents learn skills that'll make them better Heavenly Parents as well. Families seem to be all about education for eternity. Our interactions with our kids and parents help us understand God's interactions with us.

God ultimately wants us to become like He is, but that can be a difficult concept for a lot of people because we're not too sure what God is like. Very few people have ever seen Him, and of those, even fewer are alive on the Earth today. The scriptures show Him both as a merciless god of justice and a freely-forgiving god of mercy. Our own attempts to describe Him don't make understanding Him any easier, claiming that He's large enough to fill the expanse of the universe, but also small enough to dwell within our hearts. The best way to describe Him, not surprisingly, comes from the title He chose for Himself: Father.

We may not see God very often (though some of us have conversations with Him on a frequent basis), so it's sometimes hard to understand who He is and what He's like, but we frequently see other fathers - some of us even become fathers or mothers - so we can begin to understand His love for us, how His love interacts with His justice and mercy, how He feels when we do things that are right or wrong, and other aspects of His character that stem out of His paternal love for us.

As our Father, God loves us and wants what's best for us. He also wants us to grow to become more like Him. Sometimes, He comforts us (fathers can be tender at times), and sometimes, He has to correct us (which is usually the father's job). Just about all that God ever does, He does out of His love for us and His desire to watch us grow, and those two things are better understood when we understand His relationship to us as our Father.

It's hard for me to convey the feelings I had as I heard this song in Primary last Sunday. Mostly, I felt my Father's love for me and His desire for me to grow into just as strong and good of a man as He is. Thinking about how perfect He is and how imperfect I am, I see that I have a long way to go, but that's the feeling any young boy has when he looks up to his father as the ideal man. It's true that I have a lot of learning and growing to do, but God knows that the potential is in me, and that, in time, I can become like Him - a feat which seems impossible to me now.

And I know that the feelings He has for me are the same feelings that He has for everyone. We are all His children, and He wants each one of us to become more like Him, and since we can understand that "like Him" roughly means "like an ideal parent," it gives us a better understanding of what kinds of attributes and traits we should try to develop, and in our own families is the perfect place to develop those traits. I'm going to try to be a good child to my Heavenly Father by trying to be a good child to my parents, and I'm going to try to be like my Heavenly Father when I become a father myself. It's not going to be easy, no worthwhile endeavor ever is, but it's something I can shoot for, and since I can understand this goal, I'm more likely to achieve it.

The Grounding Rod

Yesterday, Dad and I went to Home Depot to get a grounding rod. We were going to use it to ground some wires that needed to be grounded in order to comply with some city code or some company's policy. Honestly, I wasn't sure why we had to drive the rod into the ground, but Dad seemed to know what he was doing, so I didn't question it.

I started hammering the rod in, which wasn't too difficult since the ground was pretty soft, but after a few feet, the rod wouldn't go any deeper. We thought maybe we had hit a pipe, so we moved the rod and tried again. It got stuck again, at about the same level. Trying a third spot, we decided that we had probably hit hardpan, which Dad said meant that there was a layer of clay to get through, so I kept hammering at the rod (making absolutely no progress) while Dad went inside to find out whether we were actually doing this right.

We weren't. It turns out that you can't just hammer in your own grounding rod. The city, or some professional-type people, have to do it. So instead, we're going to run a wire from one side of the house to the other to connect the grounding rod we already have to the wire that needs to be grounded. In the meantime, the grounding rod we got at the Home Depot was useless to us, so I tried to pull it out.

It wouldn't budge. The same difficulty that I had trying to get it to go any deeper also prevented me from pulling the rod back out. I tried jiggling it. We tried getting the ground wet. I put all of my strength into pulling the rod back up, but it just wouldn't move.

So now Dad has a grounding rod stuck fast in his yard, which we never really needed in the first place.

The moral of the story is to make sure you know what you're doing before you do anything stupid, or at least make sure the person you're listening to actually knows what they're talking about. There are lots of people that give advice, and some of them have their own TV or radio shows, like Dr Phil, Dr Oz, or Dr Laura, but just because they're popular and widely-believed, that doesn't mean that they actually know what's best.

My dad knows a good deal about electricity. At least, he knows a lot more about it than I do. So I was pretty sure he knew what he was talking about when he said we needed to drive a grounding rod into the ground - but he didn't. I followed his lead because I figured that he knew what we were doing, but we were both wrong, and it ended up costing us the better part of a day and a lot of frustration. So try to make sure that the people whose counsel you take are actually dispensing good counsel.

In our church, we listen to our teachers and our Bishops, our Apostles, and our Prophets, and almost all of them are inspired people giving heaven-sent advice, but we don't have to take their word for it, as I had taken Dad's word about the grounding rod. We can (and should) go directly to the Source. In our church, we're encouraged to not just take our leaders' word that what they're saying is true. We're encouraged to pray about it and ask God if it's true.

I'm often guilty of not doing that. I follow my leaders' and my own advice often without stopping to ask God if that's really what I should be doing. I followed my dad's directions yesterday without questioning them, and all we have to show for it is a metal stick stuck deep in some mud. I want to get more than that out of my eternal progression, so maybe I ought to take a moment every once in a while and make sure I'm actually headed where God wants me to go.

I trust the Prophets and Apostles. I trust my Bishop. I trust the teachers in my ward. They all seem like wise, intelligent people. Then again, I trusted my dad, too. Maybe it wouldn't hurt to ask God if the advice we're getting is actually good advice, just to double-check. It might save us the trouble of trying to pull a rod out later on.

Feminism and the Family

So, feminism is on my mind right now, partly because of a mini-rant I had on Facebook just now, and partly because of the song I was planning on blogging about this morning and because of one individual's opinion of that song. This is the song that I mentioned.




When I listen to this song, I tear up a little bit because it teaches me how love in families is a reflection of God's love, and how our roles in families help us understand and fill our roles in Heavenly Father's family. I'd like to blog more about that later, by the way. It's beautiful. Yet, as strange as it seems to me, some people don't like this song because it too simplistically states the gender-based stereotypes of the roles of fathers and mothers in families.

I want those people to understand that this is just the ideal. I know this isn't how it works for many families, and all God asks of us is to do the best we can with what we have. For example, my Dad never took the lead in family prayer, as he probably should have, so my Mom stepped up to the plate and made sure we had family prayer and scripture study every day. She still does. It may not be the way an ideal family should work, but it works. And how often does anyone or anything live up to the "ideal" anyway? Seriously, just do whatever works best for you and your family.

That said, this is the ideal. God knows what's best for His children, and through His servants, He has stated that:

By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.

While He admits that "disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation," He also tells us that "happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ." That is, if we follow His teachings, including what He taught about the roles of parents in families, we're more likely to have happiness in our families than if we don't. (These quotes were taken from The Family: A Proclamation to the World.)

The roles of men and women are different. Men and women were meant, "by divine design," to do different things. Men were made to be bread-winners and women were made to be home-makers, and the only reason why anyone would be offended by that - actually, the only two reasons, as I've just remembered another one - are if one job was seen as more important than the other, or if we want to make it clear that there are some people and circumstances that break the mold.

Without repeating my mini-rant, I want to make it clear that, in my mind, neither men's jobs nor women's jobs are more important than the other. The work men do in society isn't any more valuable than the work women do in it, or vice versa. They're both pretty much vital. Asking whether it's more important to breathe air or to drink water is silly, because if you neglect either of them, you're dead, no matter which one you thought you could live without. Sure, you might die faster if you stop breathing than if you stop drinking, but it's only a matter of time either way. It's the same thing with families. We need bread-winners and we need home-makers. You won't find a good family that doesn't have both of them. Both fathers and mothers are important.

About the mold-breakers, I think I've said before that all people have some masculine traits and some feminine traits. Granted that men tend to have more masculine traits and women tend to have more feminine traits (which is how we came to identify those traits as being masculine or feminine), but we each have at least a little bit of both. Women can be bread-winners and men can be home-makers. It's been done before and there's nothing wrong with it. Versatility is great, and some situations require a little bit of versatility and mold-breaking.

I'm just thinking that if a person has a choice between acting in a traditional role for their gender or defying gender stereotypes, they should play to their strengths and not be ashamed of being who they are. Some roles are more masculine, requiring masculine traits, and some roles are more feminine, requiring feminine traits, and, as a rule of thumb, men tend to be more masculine and women tend to be more feminine. So am I saying that some roles are better suited for men and others are better suited for women? Yes, because men and women are different. We each have different sets of strengths and weaknesses. Most people have traits that cross gender lines, and that helps make each of us unique, but by and large, men are more manly and women are more womanly. It's not sexist. It's just the way it is.

Echoing a little bit of my mini-rant, I know that there are some women who think society sees masculine traits as being more desirable than feminine traits, so they attempt to develop and display more masculine traits than feminine ones. Usually, those women succeed in making themselves more masculine, while inadvertently under appreciating the value of being feminine. They show the world that they, despite being women, think that it's more desirable to possess traits that are traditionally held by men. They're so sick of women being undervalued that they begin to undervalue womanhood themselves. It's one of the most backward things I've ever heard of, and it's why I don't think modern feminism makes any sense.

In contrast, if feminists identified and embraced feminine traits (that is, traits held by more women than men) and celebrated those traits instead of neglecting them in favor of developing masculine traits, then womanhood would probably get a lot more respect, at least from other women. Most men think that it's a good thing to be masculine. Do as many women think that it's a good thing to be feminine? If they did, then there might be more women who love themselves for who they are, more women who appreciate their divine traits and God-given virtues, and less women who think that they need to be more masculine in order to have value.

I'm not sure what feminists are trying to accomplish. Do they want to make men and women the same? They're not. It's a biological and psychological fact, and no amount of social pressure can change that. Do they want women to be equal to men? They already are! Do they want women to be seen as being equal to men? Then why do they undervalue everything about themselves that makes them more like women while overvaluing the traits that make people more like men? You don't have to be manly to have as much value as a good man has, and you'd think a proud woman would know that. Heck, I know that, and I don't have a woman's clear insight and personal intuition (and if I do, it's one of my more feminine traits). There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a woman, and I have no idea why so many feminists seem to think there is.

A Courageous and Painful Sacrifice

I just checked my notes from Elder W. Craig Zwick's talk, and was reminded that I had had a much better insight than "you should ask for other people's opinions," and now that I've been reminded of that insight, I'd like to share it.

At the start of Elder Zwick's talk, he related an experience he had had while driving a big rig down a mountain road. Suddenly, the truck's engine started emitting a great deal of smoke, and Elder Zwick worked frantically to safely stop the truck. His wife, thinking that the truck's engine was on fire and likely to explode, held their infant son closely and jumped out of the truck. She risked her life and suffered personal injury, but fortunately both she and her child survived the incident. When she was later asked "What in the world were you thinking? Do you know how dangerous that was? You could have been killed,” her response showed what her motivations were. “I was just trying to save our son.”

I would relate this mother's courageous and painful sacrifice, as well as the pure love that motivated it, to that of the Savior, who courageously suffered great pain and even death to save us. Both acts were very heroic, and both were inspired by the deepest level of love any human being can feel.

We are rarely called upon to do anything as perilous and painful as that, but God frequently asks us to make sacrifices of a different nature - sacrifices that, while not life-threatening, can still be painful in their own ways. Will we have the courage to make the sacrifices God asks us to make? We can, if we have the proper motivation.

We can keep the commandments and abandon sin out of a love for God and a desire to please Him. We can forsake our sins out of a love for Jesus and a desire to not add any more suffering to the sacrifice He had to make for us. If nothing else, we can keep the commandments out of a love for ourselves and a desire to land our souls in heaven rather than hell. With a sufficient amount of love motivating our actions, we can have the courage to do whatever God asks us to do, however painful it may be.

"Fill Your Life With Service..."

This morning, I'm going to volunteer at Girl's Camp. Not sure exactly what I'll be doing there, but they asked for helpers, and I signed up. Knowing that I wouldn't have much time to blog this morning, I looked around last night for something I should blog about this morning (looking for something is usually the part that takes the most time) and I found this.

We could all use a little help resisting temptation, and we're each given many opportunities to serve others. Elder Richard G. Scott, in this quote of his, has suggested that those things are connected - that "as you lose you life in the service of Heavenly Father's children, Satan's temptations lose power in your life." That makes sense to me. The more you fill a container with anything, the less room there will be in the container for anything else.

This is especially true with spiritual matters. Consider my recent blog post The Shadows Flee. The more we fill our souls and our lives with good things, the less room there will be in them for bad things. Satan knows he's not welcome in the hearts of those who are doing service to God and His children, and he won't be able to linger in them long.

I'm grateful for the opportunity I have to do service today. I hesitated to sign up, but now I'm glad I did. Today is going to be a good day - A day filled with service to God and others.

Thanks For Telling Me What You're Thinking

First, a quick update. Thank you for your positive thoughts and opinions. I plan on going ahead and making that other blog, but I won't be doing it just yet. I have more than three full sessions of General Conference talks to blog about, and I'm sure I'll gain other blog-worthy insights along the way. I have a list of potential posts for the other blog, when I make it, but they can wait a few days (most of them already have). Plus, I didn't want to leave you with the impression that I would be cutting loose from this blog immediately and permanently. I have more work to do here first.

Now for the official blog post. There's not much to blog about from Elder W. Craig Zwick's talk, What Are You Thinking? (at least, not that I picked up on), except that we should try to consider other people's thoughts and perspectives before we get into arguments with them. I did that when I asked for your opinion on my thought about creating a second blog, and I'm glad your response was positive. If it hadn't been, I would have had to consider that, and taken the matter to the Lord. Actually, I should probably do that anyway.

I suppose, if the Lord encourages me to make a separate blog, your opinion, or even mine, wouldn't really matter very much, but if your response to the idea had been a negative one, I would have tried to spend as many days as possible blogging here rather than on the other blog. It might have been only a slight difference, but I think there would have been a difference in how I thought about where I'd be blogging on any given day. And I'd probably only blog on the second blog when I had something that truly had to be shared and could only have been shared there. Now, if I think a particular blog idea would be better put in a more specific context, I'll probably share it there, even if it might have worked on this blog instead. It all depends on the specific blog post idea, and where I think that blog post would be more effective. My goal is to do good in the world, and if a particular thought would do more good on one blog than on the other, that's where it'll go.

Granted, this blog still has a lot going for it in terms of how much good it can do. There many be certain topics that I wouldn't go into in as great detail here as I would on the other blog, but the other blog won't be shared on my or my mother's Facebook pages. This blog has already gotten a fair amount of publicity and a few followers. In essence, it reaches more people than the other blog will reach, and with it taking all the general blog posts, it's more likely to do good for more people, whereas the other blog would mostly only be helpful to people in a certain niche.

I need to be careful about how much I say about the other blog. I don't want to give too much away.

Anyhow, I'm glad I asked for your opinion, and I'm especially glad that you (at least, those who commented) are okay with me doing what I think I ought to do. It's going to be weird not blogging here every day anymore. Plus, I'll need to think of a layout and color scheme for the new blog. I like this one, but I don't want them to be too similar. I want them to be different blogs, you know? Anyhow, I'll work on it later. I have other productive things to get done today. Thanks for reading my blog and for giving me your opinions. I'll talk to you all later.