Plug In to the Source of Power

In his talk, The Choice Generation, Elder Randall L. Ridd created a link between spirituality and the use of cell phones. Of course, he wasn't the first one to do this. There's an image floating around Facebook that asks the questions:

What if we began to treat our Bibles the way we treat our cell phones?
What if we...
...carried it with us everywhere?
...turned back to get it if we forgot it?
...checked it for messages throughout the day?
...used it in case of emergency?
...spent on hour or more using it each day?

While I think that last one is a bit extreme, I think the rest of those ideas are fairly reasonable, especially since many of us have phones that can hold the words of the scriptures on them. Elder Ridd took this idea a step further when he related plugging our cell phones in to keep them charged to "plugging in" to the source of spiritual power through prayer and scripture study to keep ourselves spiritually charged.

Right in the palm of your hand you have the wisdom of the ages—more importantly, the words of the prophets, from Old Testament days to President Thomas S. Monson. But if you don’t regularly recharge your cell phone, it is useless, and you feel lost and out of touch. You wouldn’t think of going a single day without charging your battery. 

As important as it is to leave home every day with a full charge on your cell phone, it is far more important to be fully charged spiritually. Every time you plug in your phone, use it as a reminder to ask yourself if you have plugged in to the most important source of spiritual power—prayer and scripture study, which will charge you with inspiration through the Holy Ghost. It will help you know the mind and will of the Lord to make the small but important daily choices that determine your direction. Many of us immediately stop whatever we are doing to read a text message—should we not place even more importance on messages from the Lord? Neglecting to connect to this power should be unthinkable to us.

 I don't often go far without my cell phone. It's my calendar, my calculator, my timepiece, and the way I keep in touch with everyone else, especially while I'm on the go. With my cell phone in my pocket, I'm not afraid to bike long distances, because I know I can call for help if I need to.

While we're here on Earth, we've gone an awfully long distance from God, physically, and sometimes spiritually. We can talk to God through prayer, and He can talk to us through the scriptures, but only if we read them. As with charging our cell phones, it takes a bit of time to keep the channel of communication open, and we have to put in the effort every day in order to keep ourselves fully charged. But as Elder Ridd said, "It will help you know the mind and will of the Lord to make the small but important daily choices that determine your direction." When we're spiritually charged, God can send us "instant messages" to give us counsel and guidance and to warn us of danger. These messages can give us vital assistance as we face the trials and temptations of mortality. It's a good idea to put in the effort to keep our spirits fully charged and frequently check for messages from God.

Same Team

Just a little disclaimer - I'm pretty sure what I'm about to post is going to clash horribly with the style and colors of this blog.

Yep. That looks terrible. Seriously, that is an abysmal shade of orange.

But the message is okay. Last Saturday, I played a game where all of the players were on the same team, trying to accomplish the same basic goal. There were times when one player was more helpful than another, and other times when the reverse was true, but we didn't really worry about that. The individual scores didn't matter. We were all working together and, together, we did pretty well.

Contrast that to professional sports. Yes, everyone on a given team is on the same team, but in professional sports, the individual points matter a good deal. The stats of the individual player help that player push for better contracts, land themselves on better teams, and thus make more money. To illustrate, I'm going to prove that I know absolutely nothing about sports.

Let's say that Kobe Bryant and Jamal Johnson both play on the same basketball team, the Oakland Dodgers. Their affiliated team, the Miami Heat, is looking to take on another player - just one. It's a valuable contract, and it'd be a big career step for either Kobe Bryant or Jamal Johnson. All of their stats are tied right now, and there's only one game left before the Heat have to decide who to offer the contract too, Kobe or Jamal.

Kobe has the ball. He tries to make his way to the hoop, but there are too many defenders in the way. He sees that Jamal is open and has a clear shot at the hoop. Right now, Kobe could pass the ball to Jamal, Jamal would score the game winning points, and the - what did I call them? - Oakland Dodgers would win the game. BUT! That would mean that Jamal's individual points would go up rather than Kobe's, and he would probably get the Heat contract. Alternatively, Kobe could try to make a shot from where he was. Odds are, he'd miss, and his team would lose the game, but if he managed to score, then not only would his team win, but more importantly, his individual score would go up and he would likely go on to play for the Miami Heat.

This kind of competition within teams can lead to teams working less effectively. Apply that scenario to a family, or to the workplace, and you're going to have the same problems. As long as people are more concerned with how they're doing as individuals (compared to other individuals in their group) than how their team is doing collectively, there's going to be friction in the group, causing the team to not work so well together, which will be bad for everyone on it.

We need to understand that we're all on the same team here. We're all trying to have a happy family, or to sell a lot of vacuum cleaners (or whatever your company does), or take the Oakland Dodgers to the Playoffs. It doesn't matter who scores more points, who sells more vacuums, or who adds more to the general happiness of the family. As long as the team wins, the whole team wins, and that includes everyone on it. Everyone on the winning team is a winner, no matter who scored the winning points. So we don't need to get compete against each other; we need to help each other. We need to pass the ball to each other, build each other up, and teach each other better vacuum cleaner selling techniques. The better we work together, the better our team will do, and that'll be better for everyone, including ourselves.

The Choice Generation

Right in the middle of the Priesthood Session of Conference, Elder Randall L. Ridd gave a terrific talk about technology and how we choose to use it. He said that "with the click of a button, you can access whatever your heart desires. That’s the key—what does your heart desire? What do you gravitate toward? Where will your desires lead?"

In the age of the internet, we can access nearly any information or entertainment we want. You can pick from dozens of news sites to get up-to-date information and social and political commentary. Online dictionaries and encyclopedias give free access to information on any subject you could want to study. On youtube alone, your options are virtually limitless. There are funny animal clips, science videos, how-to videos, Let's-Play videos, music videos by both professional and amateur artists, and even some TV show episodes. I recently watched a youtube video of a man "carving" pumpkins with a machete (by chopping them to pieces). On the internet, you can find almost anything you want. So what do you want?

That's a question you need to answer for yourself, because if you don't answer it, the world, and more especially Satan, will try to answer that question for you. For all of the good things there are on the internet, there are also a lot of bad things, including things that have some positive aspects, but that take up too much of our time.

There is more to life, and this message, than the internet. The internet is a great vehicle for delivering us whatever we want to read or watch, but there are other things we spend our time on. There are things that we buy and things that we do. I think Elder Ridd was on the right track when he said that "never before in history have individuals been blessed with so many choices." If you want a fresh banana, you can go to the store and get yourself a fresh banana. That's not an option many people had one or two centuries ago. Many people today still don't have that option. We are very richly blessed.

But with those blessings come responsibilities - namely the responsibility to make good choices. Elder Ridd asked us to consider where our desires will lead us. "Remember that God 'granteth unto men according to their desire' and that He 'will judge all men according to their works, according to the desire of their hearts.' " God has given us the ability to get virtually whatever we want, but we will be held accountable for what we do with our many choices. 

More choices mean more opportunities; more opportunities mean more potential to do good and, unfortunately, evil. I believe that God sent you here at this time because He trusts you to successfully discern among the mind-boggling choices available.

It's a lot of responsibility. A lot of trust. We must frequently evaluate ourselves to make sure that we remain worthy of that trust and that we use our time, our talents, and our blessings, including the internet, wisely. There is a lot at stake here, including each of our own souls. Let us be careful to make sure that we are making wise choices, as we certainly have many choices to make and many options from which to choose.

An Inch Underground

Carrying on with the two-day-old theme of things we don't notice, yesterday, Mom, Joe and I set out to find a cleanout pipe we could use to clear out a block in our sewer line. They had searched the grounds extensively the day before, but found nothing. Now, armed with a borrowed metal detector, we searched again, and found a cleanout pipe buried only one or two inches underground.

Though the pipe was so close to the surface that it took hardly any digging to find it, it was completely undetectable without the metal detector's help. So it probably is with a great many things. Perhaps the insight that we need to answer our life's most pressing question is in the scriptures, right under our noses, waiting for us to read the right verse. Maybe the spiritual strength and wisdom we need to overcome the trials in our lives are already within us, and we just need a small dose of adversity to bring that power to the surface. Whatever you're looking for in your life, it may sometimes feel like it's hopelessly beyond your reach, but maybe it's right at your fingertips, if you know where to look.

I don't want to pin this analogy down with anything too specific, but I'd bet that whatever it is you feel you're missing, God can help you find it, and it may not be as inaccessible as it feels. There are a few things I've been working on, and it often feels like what I want must be buried miles underground, but it could be that it's just an inch or two beneath the surface, and all I need to do is borrow a metal detector and find out where it is.

The metal detector in this analogy might be the scriptures, a Conference talk (which I should really get back to pretty soon), your Patriarchal Blessing, or any other form of guidance or inspiration from God. Divine inspiration can come from many sources and it can help us with any kind of problem we face, even the problems that seem to be unsolvable. We may not be able to find the solutions to our problems on our own, but God knows all the answers, and with His help, we can find them. We might be surprised to learn how close to the surface the solutions to our problems really are.

Update: The crummy thing is that the pipe we found wasn't the one that we needed after all, and the plumbing problem we have is going to require a costly procedure to solve. I don't know who thought it was a good idea to make sewer lines out of tar-coated paper or to plant an orange tree directly above that line, but whoever they were I think they were mistaken. The good news is that our leaky sewer line has fed and watered our orange trees for decades, which might explain why our orange trees are so huge and why their oranges taste so good. There's probably an analogy in there somewhere, too, but I'll save that for another day.

I wonder if it would be possible/a good idea to drill small holes into the new pipe so we could keep watering and fertilizing our orange trees every time we use the restroom. Then again, that sounds like it might be exactly the same kind of "good idea" that the other guy had when he planted these orange trees in the first place. I think I'd better get a second opinion before I search our garage for a power drill.

No Blog Post on Mother's Day Morning

Almost forgot to blog today. Spent my morning washing dishes and making orange juice for Mom. Good use of a Mother's Day morning, but it didn't leave any time for blogging. Sorry everyone.

Maybe I'll blog this afternoon, after church. I should have time then.

The Sourdough Sandwich Experience

Yesterday, I ate a sandwich that someone else had made for me. It was a really good sandwich - peanut butter and honey - one of my favorites. But there was something different about this sandwich, though I didn't notice anything odd about it until I was half way into the sandwich. It was made using sourdough bread.

Peanut butter and honey on sourdough sounds like a strange combination, but it actually tasted pretty normal. With the sweetness of the honey overpowering the sourness of the bread, I didn't even notice that the bread was sourdough until after I had taken several bites. (By the way, the person who had made the sandwich wasn't trying to pull a prank on me. It was the only kind of bread they had.)

Thinking about the sandwich and how long it took me to realize it was made with sourdough, I thought of a few spiritual applications we could take from my experience.

1) Perspective Influences Your Experience.

As I started eating the sandwich, I already knew that the sandwich was peanut butter and honey, one of my favorites. As I took my first few bites, I was expecting to taste honey and peanut butter, and I did, and it tasted great. When I realized that the sandwich was made with sourdough bread, and that I hadn't noticed it before, I tasted the sandwich carefully, trying to notice the sourdough bread, and that time, I did, and it tasted kind of weird.

I think it's true that people with positive attitudes see more good in the world than those with negative attitudes. If you look for the good in the world, you'll see it. If you look for the bad, ditto. Whether I was expecting to taste peanut butter and honey or sourdough bread, that was the part of the sandwich that stood out to me, and it affected the way I thought the sandwich itself tasted. The sandwich itself hadn't changed, but my perspective and expectations had.

Practical application: Look for the good in the world. Keep a positive attitude, and your view of life will improve. Your life may not change at all, but the aspects of your life that stand out most to you might.

2) Satan Will Often "Sweeten the Deal."

I normally don't like sourdough bread. It tastes funny to me, so under normal circumstances, I don't consider myself likely to eat a sourdough sandwich. But when I ate that sandwich yesterday, I didn't notice the sourdough bread at first, because the sweet taste of the honey distracted me from the strange taste of the sourdough.

Satan often "sweetens" temptations so we won't see them for what they are. He makes temptations seem harmless and desirable, so we sometimes partake of them without even realizing that we're being tempted, and sometimes, even when we know that what we're doing is against God's commandments, we justify it by saying, "It isn't really that bad. When you think about the honey, you hardly notice the sourdough at all." That's how he gets us sometimes - by offering us something we want badly enough that we're willing to accept a "barely noticeable" amount of sin to get it.

Practical application: Pay attention to what you're doing. If any part of it feels wrong, it probably is. Make sure that you only do things that are 100% approved by God. Of course, that's much easier said than done, and we often end up partaking of small amounts of sin by mistake. When that happens, our job is to realize our mistake and start repenting as soon as possible, then to find out how we were fooled  in the first place so we can avoid being fooled in the future.

3) God Does the Same Thing.

Just as the fact that I didn't notice the sourness of the bread because of the sweetness of the honey could be applied to not noticing the bitterness of a sin because of the sweetness of the temptation, the same principle could be applied to living the gospel. There are some occasional difficulties to keeping the commandments. There are parties we can't go to, movies we can't watch, beverages we can't drink, and other things that it might be fun to do, but we know we can't, or at least shouldn't. At the same time, we're also asked to do some things that we may not want to do, such as giving service, teaching lessons and giving talks in church, and fulfilling other church callings. These things can seem bitter (or perhaps sour), but they yield the sweet blessings of the gospel.

The practical application to this principle is much the same as the first: Focus on the good. While it may not be fun or convenient to give service, the blessings you receive make the experience worth it in the same way that the sourdough bread certainly wouldn't have tasted good on its own, but with the honey, it actually tasted pretty good. If we focus on feeling the spirit and developing Christ-like love as we serve in the gospel, any sourness we experience in the process will be "swallowed up in the joy of Christ" (Alma 31: 38).

There is some good and bad in almost everything. Sometimes we have to endure the bad to enjoy the good, and sometimes we have to see through the good to avoid the bad. As always, it's best to have heaven's guidance as we choose what to partake of and what to focus on. For example, I could have focussed on the unique culinary experience and seen it as a gateway to trying new and different foods and food combinations, but instead, I reflected on the potential spiritual meanings that could be found in a peanut butter, honey, and sourdough sandwich, and I ended up with at few spiritual principles that may bless my life and will hopefully also bless yours.

I wonder what other good, valuable, spiritual lessons may be hiding in seemingly ordinary items and experiences. Since starting this blog, I've developed a "taste" for those kinds of lessons, and I've been picking up on them much more frequently. I'm coming to learn that it's true that "all things bear record of [Christ]" (Moses 6: 63), even something as simple or as strange as a peanut butter, honey, and sourdough sandwich.

From "Just The Way I Am" to "Even As I Am"

I've skipped over a few General Conference talks already, but I really want to skip over another one. It's not that Elder Dalin H. Oaks' talk, The Keys and Authority of the Priesthood isn't blogworthy. It really is! It's just that I'm not sure I understand it and I'm not sure what to say about it. And the talk after it, Elder Donald L Hallstrom's What Manner of Men? looks very interesting and much, much easier to blog about. I guess there's a difference between blogworthiness and blogability, so something can be very blogworthy while not being very blogable. Elder Hallstrom's talk looks like it's both.

In his talk, he talked about our ability and need to change our characters to better match the character of Jesus Christ. He spoke of a conversation with a man who had a vice and concluded "That's just the way I am."

Once this man decided—once any of us conclude—“That’s just the way I am,” we give up our ability to change. We might as well raise the white flag, put down our weapons, concede the battle, and just surrender—any prospect of winning is lost. ...

Well, we meet in this priesthood meeting because who we are is not who we can become. We meet here tonight in the name of Jesus Christ. We meet with the confidence that His Atonement gives every one of us—no matter our weaknesses, our frailties, our addictions—the ability to change. We meet with the hope that our future, no matter our history, can be better.

I know God has the ability to help us change our hearts, but I'm not sure how fully I've extended that belief so that it includes His ability to help us change our natures. Right now,  I have a host of flaws and vices I'd love to be rid of, and that's just the way I am, but in the future, I know I can be rid of those vices. I can become more like Jesus Christ.

Elder Hallstrom said "who we are is not who we can become," and I believe that. I know that I can become better than I am now. When that happens, I'll be able to say "I am free from the sins of my past. I am a righteous, virtuous, and wholly good son of God, and that's just the way I am." Many points of my very nature will have changed.

We all struggle with various vices. Some of us have struggled with ours for a long time. Some of us may have come to believe that those vices are irremovable aspects of our natures - that "that's just the way I am," - but God knows better. He can change us. He can give us the power to change ourselves. With His help, we can remove any aspects of our natures that we'd be better off without, and add Christ-like attributes to our hearts until being righteous, Christian people is "just the way we are," even as He is.