A Paladin's Personality

I recently got a shirt that says, in golden-ish yellow-ish writing, "Always be yourself, unless you can be a dragon, then always be a dragon." This shirt has inspired me to make a Dragonborn D&D character, especially a gold one, and picking which class the character should be has been easy. Dragonborn have racial ability score bonuses that make them good Paladins, and Gold Dragonborn are, traditionally, morally-aligned to Good.

What I have been trying to work out about this character is his personality and backstory. What sort of adventurer is he, and why did he become an adventurer? I'm somewhat thinking of basing his backstory on ours. He could be of a noble background, sent out into the world to gain experience, develop a host of divine attributes, and prove his worth. It's an odd custom for royalty to have, but he is Dragonborn, and they likely have different customs than human nobility. But, given that background, I have an important question that will greatly affect his personality and behavior during the adventure: How does he feel about having been sent out?

I wouldn't mind having this character be an ideal Paladin: Chivalrous, Virtuous, and Honorable. Lawful/Good, almost to a fault. As such, he would accept the authority of his royal superiors, and he would go out willingly. But would he do so only out of a sense of duty, or would he have other motivations that would make that choice harder or easier to make? How would an ideal Paladin feel about an opportunity and duty to go adventuring? How would an ideal son of God feel about mortality?

I cannot use myself as a model here. I am not a fan of mortality. I am not eager to face many of the challenges I've been asked to face. In fact, I've shrunken away from a few of the challenges I've been asked to face. A Paladin would not have done that.

However, would a Paladin be eager to face such challenges? He would be willing, of course; but would he be eager? I'm not sure. Paladins aren't stupid. They know that the road will be hard. And they're not crazy. They probably don't enjoy facing hardship just for the sake of facing hardship. Yet, mortality isn't just hardship for hardship's sake. There is a purpose. Several purposes, in fact. A Paladin may not enjoy enduring hardship, but he may look forward to the growth that such hardship would foster. He might be interested in proving to others, and perhaps to himself, that he can rise to those challenges. He might be eager to prove himself.

We might have been. When we heard the plan in the counsel in heaven, we shouted for joy. I think we were excited. And maybe my Dragonborn Paladin was excited at first, but many of us are less excited now. Is that because it's difficult to remain excited in the face of hardship or because we are less-than-ideal children of God? Would an ideal child of God be eager to overcome the hardships of life?

No, he wouldn't. Or should I say, He wasn't. Jesus Christ was, apparently, not excited to face the challenges of life. When Jesus had an opportunity and a duty to overcome all of the world's challenges at once, He didn't necessarily want to do it. Perhaps that's an extreme example. How could anyone be eager to suffer what Jesus suffered? But that experience did prove Jesus' infinite purity and monumental spiritual strength. If Jesus was eager to prove Himself, that was the ultimate test of worth.

But Jesus wasn't trying to prove Himself, perhaps because a desire to prove oneself stems, or at least can stem, from pride. Pride, being the universal sin and great vice, is not a good motivation for an ideal Paladin or child of God. Jesus' motivation was much holier: Love. Jesus serves people because He loves people. He performed the Atonement because of His desire for the welfare of our souls. Ideally, we should be motivate by love in everything we do as well. How can a Paladin show that he is motivated by love?

An adventurer's life is often a violent one. There are always monsters to fight and villains to defeat. Jesus defeated villains as well, but when He faced mortal foes, he usually did so with kindness and rarely with violence. Yes, he cleansed the temple once or twice, but other than those moments, I don't think He ever raised His hand against anyone. Then again, that wasn't His calling. That wasn't how He could best serve others. If the best way a Paladin could serve a group of people is to defend them from orcs and goblins, perhaps that is what he must do. A Paladin should seek out peaceful solutions, but when force is necessary, a Paladin should be physically and mentally prepared to provide it.

So, a Paladin, while perhaps not eager to experience hardship, should be eager to serve others, even if that service requires sacrifice and puts them through hardship and/or pain. We should also be eager to do good, despite the difficulties involved, not because we enjoy facing difficulty, but because we love God and our neighbors and love serving Them, even though it's hard sometimes. So, if my new Dragonborn Paladin is meant to be an ideal Paladin, he should be eager to help others, despite the difficulties and dangers involved.

I'm glad I blogged about this. It helped me figure out a bit of what my new character's attitude toward adventuring should be and what my attitude toward mortality should be as well. While we are here to prove ourselves, proving ourselves shouldn't be our motivation. We should focus on loving and serving God and our neighbors. If we do that, our worthiness and nobility will prove themselves.

Preparing to Blog about Conference

As soon as I finish blogging about one General Conference, it's time to start blogging about the next one. Yet, I'm reluctant to begin because I want to have the text of each talk available when I blog about it. For example, I could launch right into something President Nelson had said, something about each of us being responsible for our own spiritual welfare, but I want to make sure I get the wording right and that I don't take what he said out of context, so I'll blog about the talks themselves later, when the talks have been published.

In the meantime, maybe I'll just go over how I plan to blog about Conference this time around. Taking notes in General Conferences has been different for me for the last few years. Before, I would just listen to the talks, and maybe take notes on paper, notes that I would almost never revisit. Now, I take notes on my laptop, knowing that there's a fair chance that I'll return to these notes when I blog about these talks. As such, I'm leaving myself some possible blog post topics for each talk. Most of them are quotes, doctrines, or ideas that just stick out to me and seem like they'd be easy to talk about or interesting to explore. I look forward to discussing them with you, and I especially look forward to already having some idea of what I could blog about when I revisit the talks. That should help streamline the process and make sure I don't get stuck just blogging about whatever comes to mind on the night I revisit the talk.

General Conference is a fantastic spiritual resource, but just as water that overflows out of a bucket falls wasted to the ground, so too do most of my thoughts about Conference slip away from me almost immediately afterwards. However, as I keep notes and revisit both the notes and the talks they refer to, I might be able to recapture of the thoughts and impressions I had the first time I heard the talks. At least, that's the plan.

This Conference has been really good so far. I can't wait for the text to come out so I can blog about each talk individually.

Pressing On

In President Nelson's concluding remarks last Conference, he quoted a verse of "Let Us All Press On," stating that it "summarizes our renewed resolve, our challenge, and our charge going forward." Of course, he's right. For those of us who have already accepted the Gospel and are already striving to live it, our challenge and our charge consists almost entirely of "pressing on" or, to use a more scriptural term for it, "enduring to the end."

So much of the gospel depends on persistence. One great act of service isn't enough; we must form a life-long pattern of service. Repentance isn't something that happens only once, but continually as we keep finding areas to improve in and keep finding ways to improve ourselves. And God doesn't expect us to keep each commandment once; He encourages us to keep each commandment consistently throughout our lives, or at least to keep them as consistently as we can, starting from the moment we learn about them. Clearly, we have a long way to go.

However, God seems not to be terribly concerned about where we are now or how long it takes us to get where we're going. What He cares about is that we're heading in the right direction. Remember, we will be continuing to make progress for all eternity, if we develop a habit of making progress now. We must "Press On," and keep putting one foot in front of the other. They say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but it also consists of steps. The journey may seem daunting, but we can take it one step at a time. All we need to do is keep taking those sometimes small steps toward becoming like our Father in Heaven. It may take us an eternity to make it to that point, but we will make it, so long as we keep pressing on.

Urgent Preparation

Elder Quentin L. Cook titled his most recent talk "Prepare to Meet God." In his talk, he spoke of several things we can do, individually and as a church, to prepare to meet God, but I don't think he adequately stressed the importance and urgency of doing so, at least as individuals. The church will be fine. It won't be destroyed prematurely, and it'll live through the Second Coming, guaranteed.

We individuals, on the other hand, might die. In fact, we will die. The only question is when. We can hope to live through the Second Coming, but we have no idea whether we'll live long enough to even see it. So, knowing that meeting God is inevitable, we would do well to make sure that we're ready at a moment's notice, because we may not even get that much. We have no idea how soon we can expect to meet God, which is why it is urgent that we prepare for it.

This Post is Late Because of Internet Politics

This evening got away from me, mostly because I spent too much of it on Facebook. Political conversations are sometimes important, but most of these are not, since they're unlikely to change minds, and even when they do, they only change one vote at a time. It's probably not worth it, especially when one's personal habits suffer as a result. I should stop, or at least cut back on the amount of time I spend engaging in arguments on Facebook.

The Process of Baking Bread and Building a Relationship

Today, I helped a student use baking bread as an analogy for forming and maintaining relationships, and it went remarkably well.

The recipe she found started us off with sugar, yeast, and warm water. The sugar and warm water could represent the warmth of friendship and the sweetness you might expect from a dating couple or newlyweds. The yeast was harder to place, but we decided that, since it would have to be active yeast, it could represent activities like dating and courtship.

The recipe then called for salt, which represented emotion. Strong emotions, especially sadness and happiness, can lead to the shedding of salty tears. The recipe also called for oil, but we couldn't think of how to use oil in the analogy, so we might skip that part.

One especially tricky but essential ingredient was the flour. I knew we needed flour, but I had a hard time thinking of what flour could represent in a relationship. We determined that, if the flour is "whole grain," it could represent being open and honest enough to show our partners our "whole selves," not just the parts we show off on social media.

The dough needing time to rise easily represented the time relationships take to develop, and the yeast became useful again in this later part of the baking process. This time, the yeast represents hardships, including the mere passage of time. Hardships can eat up the sweetness in a relationship and, if I'm right about what makes sourdough sour, potentially sour a relationship. That's why it's so important to work through our relationships, like kneading the bread.

Relationships take a good deal of time and effort to form and maintain, just like bread does. There are a handful of gaps and stretches, but mostly, it's a fairly decent analogy. I'm glad my student had that idea and shared it with me so we could develop it together.

The Holiness of the Home

Near the end of one of the last few General Conference talks of the most recent General Conference, Presiding Bishop Gérald Caussé said the following:

Ours is not just a Sunday church. Our worship continues each day of the week, wherever we are and in whatever we do. Our homes in particular are “the primary sanctuaries of our faith.” It is most often in our homes that we pray, we bless, we study, we teach the word of God, and we serve with pure love. I can testify from personal experience that our homes are sacred places where the Spirit can abound—as much as, and sometimes even more than, in our formal places of worship.

Personally, I've felt the Spirit stronger in nature and near the Temple than I've felt it at home. Maybe home is too normal to me. Still, I have to admit that Bishop Caussé makes some excellent points. Perhaps it's mostly due to the sheer amount of time we spend at home, but I can't think of any place where we pray, bless, study, serve, or love more than we do at home. Home is the location of our regular personal and family prayers and scripture study. Homes are the dwelling places of those we frequently bless and serve and love. In general, I'm not surprised that, of most of the things we do that are sacred, we do them most of all at home. Home may be an ordinary place where we do ordinary things, but it is also a holy place where we do holy things. Perhaps that's part of the reason our homes can compare with Temples in sacredness; like Temples, our homes are also dedicated places where holy things happen frequently.