Pages

I very thoroughly enjoy The Office. David and I watched all the previous seasons on Netflix to get caught up before the new season started last fall. It's just really funny. Now, to switch tracks a little, I was reading in Alma 5, when Alma hands the judgement seat over so he can preach full time. I don't know that there was a particular verse or not, but the whole feeling reminded me of this clip of The Office:

Ryan: OK, what's up?

Michael: Yeah, kay. I was just... After the presentation, just wanted to make sure, that vis-a-vie, that everything in the office is business as usual?

Ryan: Well it is business, but not as usual.

Michael: Yeah, I know I understand... we're making great strides and we're updating, but business as usual, no?

Ryan: No. [shaking head] We're throwing out the entire playbook, we're starting from scratch, we're implementing a brand new system.

Michael: Good, so, we're on the same page?

Ryan: No. We're not. Michael, I know exactly how much time and man power are wasted in this branch. This company is getting younger, faster, more efficient. You need to prepare yourself.

If you are all familiar with the show, you know this is very typical Michael. His character is just one of those people who exists in a world different from most people. I wondered while reading Alma speak to his people if we(the general people) are ever Michael to Heavenly Father's Ryan. How often does our Father in Heaven explain it over and over again, all through the scriptures and then over and over through his chosen prophets and apostles? How often are we "not on the same page" but like to pretend like we think we are?

I read the Book of Mormon everyday, I say my prayers and I honestly try to be the best everything I can be, but I still struggle. I doubt and I question. I wonder why me, even though I know I am really not supposed to wonder that. I ask Heavenly Father why I have to get sick right now, again, with everything else that is going on in my life. I ask for a blessing, just knowing that this will be the time that I will get to experience that nearly instantaneous healing relief. But it doesn't happen, and then the next day I read a conference talk that actually says:

Trust in God and in His willingness to provide help when needed, no matter how challenging the circumstance.

and then

With even your strongest faith, God will not always reward you immediately according to your desires. Rather, God will respond with what in His eternal plan is best for you, when it will yield the greatest advantage.

It felt very much like I was being Michael. My Father in Heaven was telling me again what He has told me so many times before, but I still wasn't getting it. I still struggle with accepting the Lord's Will in all things. Ah well, I suppose that is why we have the scriptures and Conference talks, we really do need to be reminded again and again, so that we can get on the same page with the Lord.

Submission

I have never felt like I was the submissive type. Or maybe I was for years and then one day that changed and I have never been that way since. It's all a very long and involved story, my life that is, but suffice it to say that I think I was a fairly submissive child, but have become less so as I have gotten older. I tend to think of it as a negative thing, no doubt as a result of my experiences with it as a young child. But really it's a good thing. I know that and yet I still struggle to embrace it as a character trait I truly desire for myself. I was reading today and this is what struck me:

" . . . yea, the Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease, and they did submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord." - Mosiah 24:15

Like I said, I'm not much of the submissive type, or the patient type and not always the cheerful type. I guess I have a lot to learn (no surprise there!). I am struggling with a medical issue that makes my life unpleasant. I recently, like last week, learned that there will be no change for the better in the foreseeable future. It affects every aspect of my life and for me is a great burden. There may be others who could shoulder it easily and never think twice, but that's why this is my trial and not theirs. I keep looking for what I am supposed to learn from this, hoping that once I learn my lesson something will be able to change. Unfortunately I am smart enough to know that may not be how this works. I don't understand the Lord's will. Frankly it is positively baffling at times. Some things make sense in hindsight, most do not.

I can't say that I have ever been patient or cheerful about submitting to my Father, but I have tried my best to submit my will to His. The best I can do is pray for guidance to know what He would have me do. In a recent talk I shared this thought:

So often in our lives we are asked and sometimes forced to endure trials that we cannot see a solution to. Sometimes even when we can see the end from the beginning we still can't find the connecting road to get us there.

Right now I feel like I am living in the first situation. I am forced to endure this trial with no end in sight. There was a time many years ago when I struggled deeply with depression, not just feeling sad, but dangerous depression. My mother in law loaned me a cross stitch that read: "In Time This Too Shall Pass." And it did. With a lot of effort and a fair amount of therapy I have my depression under control. That was a battle I could fight within myself. That was a mental difficulty, this is a physical difficulty. This is not something I can change or control with pure willpower. This is something else, this is something that will not pass. It's here to stay. And this is what my life will be like for the rest of my life. The thought brings tears to my eyes. So in all this, this desperation, how am I to find it in myself to cheerfully submit with great patience?

I suppose my usual answer will work. You just do it. I see something that I need to do, I know I am the only one who can, so the only thing to do is to do it. In my mind so many things are that simple, even when really they are anything but simple. I have the choice to submit to the physical, or to submit to the spiritual. It's going to be a very long and very hard road, but I won't be on it alone. I can't promise I'll be whistling the whole time, but I'll see if I can eek out a few smiles along the way. I guess with Christ in my corner, I can conquer anything.

Refiner's Fire

What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how [exact] and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet: Hamlet Act II, Scene II

Man is great and man is dust. Literally we are rather equal halves of both. On the one hand we have bodies that were originally formed from the dust of the earth. On the other hand, our spirits which give life to our bodies are the offspring of the God of the Universe. I have just finished The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara. I must admit great surprise on my part. I never thought I would read let alone like a book about war. Yes, I do thoroughly enjoy books about war between vampires and werewolves, etc, but that's not real! This is of course the major draw for me. I dislike unpleasant things that are real. I understand that war and violence are a part of this mortal life, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. So I don't. All that aside, I really enjoyed this book. Enough that I bought my own copy of it, before I finished reading it. Those who know me well, will understand what that means.

For those who are as unfamiliar with this book as I was before I heard the title at a book club meeting, it is about the battle fought at Gettysburg during the Civil war. It is told from the perspective of several of the men in charge, mostly generals. That aspect was mildly confusing, but I got to know so many different characters on such a personal level that it really brought out what war was like in that time. It's not like movies and fiction books, where there is a very clear evil bad guy and there are a few scrappy good guys who have to pull off a fantastic victory. Both sides believed themselves to be right and it is easy to see both sides of the argument.

The northerners in part were fighting to stop slavery. Some men were fighting simply because there was some excuse and didn't really care what the fighting cause was. The southerners on the other hand were not fighting for slavery. They were fighting to preserve their right to live as they chose. I have never and will never condone slavery in any form, but the concept of fighting to preserve one's rights rings true to the foundation of this country. So essentially everyone was fighting for equal rights for different groups of people.

I have been reading a lot of pre-civil war history in A History of Us, Vol 4, with the kids and the author makes the point several times that one major reason that slavery needed to be stopped was that once it is legal for one group of people to be denied basic human rights, it is that much easier to put restrictions on others as well. Limit the rights of one and you limit the rights of all. In the end that and the grace of God, is why the north won. This country could not continue if the very base of why it was formed was being dismantled one bit at a time. It was a hard lesson to learn, but that, like I tell my kids, is why it is so important to read about history. If we don't know where we've been, how will we know where to go?

At the beginning of the last day of the battle, the Union troops led by Chamberlain are resting and preparing for a day of battle. They notice the fight beginning at the far end of the army more than a mile away, they have been through great trial between exhaustion, lack of food, and long days of marching or fighting. Chamberlain is worried about his men, he is mourning the loss of all the men whose bodies he can see littering the field. He lost almost half of his men during the previous day's battle.

They were dwindling away like the sands in a glass. How long does it go on? Each one becoming more precious. What's left now is the best, each man a rock. But now there are so few. We began with a thousand and so whittled down, polishing, pruning, until what we had yesterday was superb, absolutely superb, and now only about two hundred . . .

I can only imagine that this is similar to how our Father in Heaven has and does feel so often. After the great war in heaven, the first of many refiner's fires, sifting through for those who were strongest, most able. Then continuing as we enter and endure this earth life. War is a perfect symbolism for life. The survival of the fittest. Those who are fastest and smartest survive in war. Those who are strongest and righteous survive in life. I don't want to be pruned away. I don't want to be one of those who is whittled off, one who didn't make it. I want to be faster and stronger and survive the refiner's fire of life.

C, C and C

My understanding of communism is that it is a governmental system in which everyone is forced to share all that they have in order to achieve a situation of social and financial equality. They choose people's careers, etc, for them in an effort to create the ideal society, or to have ultimate control.

Now contrast that with the Law of Consecration, wherein everyone shares and is equal to one another by choice. They want to give and they want to share and lift others.

If these assertions are correct, then the only difference between communism and consecration is the desire behind it. With one you have the desire to do it and with the other you don't. When people are forced to share and be the same, they naturally rebel. I don't know of anybody who wants to be told what to do and how to live all the time. It goes against the root of why we came to this earth. After all, if we are here to make choices, what's the point if we aren't allowed to make them!

Now add to the mix customs. The customs of a people are the general belief and standards that people choose to live by. In ancient days, the customs of the people were often based in religion.

When to this natural basis of a custom a supernatural sanction is added by religion, and the ways of one's ancestors are also the will of the gods, then custom becomes stronger than law . . .

When the "modes of thought and action" became intertwined with religious and in turn familial beliefs, they became the law by which people lived. We still have customs in other countries today that seem strange to us, but are part of their everyday life. We also have customs here that are are thought to be strange to others. Wherever you choose to live, their are customs to be followed or ignored. However if they are ignored, the persecution a person would encounter could be fierce. Doing something that is outside the "norm" can bring ostracization from our fellow men.

So how does this all tie together? hmm, that's a good question . . .

Here's my thought. If customs are what we choose to live by and laws are what we are told to live by, and if communism is us being told how we must live, and consecration is living the way that we know we should live . . . then we will find our "Utopian" society of consecration when the laws become the customs. When we start choosing to live they way we are told because we know we should and we want to do what's right, we will achieve what communism never could. Unity.

Civilization

Define civilization. Sounds simple right? I don't think it is. In our day we think of civilization as lots of people, lots of technology and lots of conveniences. But for thousands of years it has meant something entirely different. The word has referred to a group of people choosing to live and work together towards a common goal, usually survival.

Yes, I have found something new to drown in. An eleven volume set of books called the Story of Civilization, by Will Durant. I bought this massive set of books, most of which near 1000 pages each, for David one year when he was really into history. Well, apparently he wasn't THAT into history, so they have sat on the shelf until I felt like I was mentally prepared for them and now to my joy, I am. So we begin.

With early people, i.e., Adam and Eve and descendants, the main occupation was hunting to provide food for the family. It was completely necessary to sustain life, as opposed to current times when Walmart hunts for us:)

We do our hunting by proxy, not having the stomach for honest killing in the fields; but our memories of the chase linger in our joyful pursuit of anything weak or fugitive, and in the games of our children-even in the word game.

Makes sense, doesn't it? Our society, at least here in the US, is so focused around games. Football, baseball, video games, etc, seem sometimes to hold a greater priority in people's lives than actually living. I have never really understood that. Probably because I grew up listening to my dad talk about how sports are just men(people)acting out their violent and warlike tendencies. You guessed it, he's not a sports fanatic. He is about staying healthy and encouraged us to go outside and play games, but organized publicized sporting events were not his thing. After having been married to a college football loving man for eleven years, I am still stumped. I watch my 10 year old son, while he watches football with his dad, throw his arms up and holler at the tv when something good happens, or something bad. He isn't mimicking his dad, they are like a synchronized team, who just happens to never have practiced their moves, but still are perfectly in sync. I'll be honest. I just don't get football. I know they are trying to get the ball from one end to the other. I even check a book out of the library from the kid's section to read and hopefully understand better as a way to show interest in what my husband loves. To no avail. Why is this play so great, but that one, which looked the same to me, so not great? Wow, so off track, the point is that there seems to be some kind of deeply subconscious ingrained need in some men/people, not all, to be a part of or watch the "hunt". Does that come from thousands of years of ancestors who lived and survived by hunting prey and occasionally enemies? Or is there some deeper spiritual need to survive, to endure and make it through and this is the only way they know how to express it?

I really don't know. Physical or spiritual? I would guess that it is a physical thing, though that would necessitate a very strong genetic indicator of good hunter versus lousy hunter and I don't know if there is any evidence to back that up. However since this is my own little world and I don't need to prove anything, I don't need evidence. :)

Conclusion

Such a simple word to sum it all up. It's a little more refined than "That's all folks!" I have finished Walden. This was my second journey and this time I made it through. There was a lot to learn and a lot that I missed. I admit I definitely lost interest some in the sections about the depth of the pond, though from a naturalist point of view, that would be good information.

I love the way Thoreau ended this book. He summarized with a reminder that things are really not as they seem and there is so much more to people and life than appears on the surface.

The universe is wider than our views of it.

So it is. It is comforting to know that while my view is so limited, I have access to a source that is omnipotent. So many things happen in the world in general and in my own life personally that I really do not understand, that it is of great comfort to know that Someone does have the master blueprint. There is a reason for each and every triumph and each and every disappointment. Each one is an opportunity to learn and to grow. Every individual on this planet has the same chance to explore the last undiscovered frontier: ourselves. Self examination and introspection is one of the scariest and most enlightening endeavors. It's hard to do at first, but it can change your life if you really try and enlist the help of the Holy Spirit. For me, when something goes badly, I spend time having a conversation in my head with myself to figure what went wrong. It helps me to know what I need to change, and when I need to apologize occasionally. When we begin to understand ourselves, we are on our way to controlling ourselves and getting closer to our potential as sons and daughters of God.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly light.

We are children of God. We have the option to become like him if we choose. Sometimes I think I am not sure if I want to become like God. Simply put, great power has great responsibility. It frightens me the level of responsibility that is attached to even a fraction of God's power. One more reason I am glad to be a woman, I'll never hold the priesthood. I am so thankful that God's power is available to me, but I am also glad that it is not my lot in life to be accountable for how it is used. There is another quote by a woman who wrote a great book on teaching children self government. She said, "Be like the Moon." I love that. The moon reflects the light of the sun and adds beauty and order. People used to mark the passing of time by the cycle of the moon. I want to reflect Christ. I want to bring consistency and beauty to my little sphere of influence. If I can do that and a few other things in my life, I will consider it to be a successful experiment.

Elysium

Isn't that just a really fun word to say? E-lee-see-um. It flows and it sounds pretty which is probably related to the fact the the actual place was supposed to be beautiful, and well, heavenly. So I just finished rereading Percy Jackson, the Lightning Thief, and I still love these books. It is nice sometimes to read something that is not as challenging, but still imparts great basic truths. So One of the biggest things that struck me this read through was this part when the heroes are in the underworld on their quest to put things right.

"There's a court for dead people?"

"Yeah. Three judges. They switch around who sits on the bench. King Minos, Thomas Jefferson, Shakespeare--people like that. Sometimes they look at a life and decide that person needs a special reward--the Fields of Elysium. Sometimes they decide on punishment. But most people, well, they just lived. Nothing special, good or bad."

Ok, now personally I can draw about a hundred comparisons between Greek Mythology and the Gospel, but this one is a little bigger. They just lived. How sad. I realized after I read that, that I don't want to just live. I want to do something! I want to make a difference and change something for the better. When my time of judgement comes as it must for us all, I want to be symbolically deemed Elysium Fields material. I want to live a good life.

But what does that really mean? I make lots of mistakes everyday. Some of which I continue to make for years at a time. For the most part, my heart is in the right place. In part my mistakes are made out of ignorance, or stupidity. Sometimes they are intentional, I just don't realize that I subconsciously meant to do something until after I have done it when it is naturally much harder to fix it. I have been through dark times in my life, bouts with depression and many of the same type of struggles that so many others face. Thankfully, the Lord has guided me through it all and led me to one simple truth of how to live that good life.

One day at a time.

Each and every moment of each and every day is a new chance to do it right. Many if not most trials and struggles carry over through many days, but every night I have the chance to go to bed with a good attitude and every morning I have the chance to look at the day with a positive outlook. It's a choice I make everyday. Sadly sometimes I choose wrong. But more often these days I am choosing right. I choose to be happy and calm. In my opinion despite my imperfections and mistakes, I think I am living a good life. Now things will be fine if I can just survive the next twenty years . . . .

As a side note, if you know anything about Greek Mythology, take a moment, if you haven't and compare things like Hercules with true history. Or the three different places you can end up when you die. Or the idea that there are children of god.

So yes, I love another kids book. I read the whole series with my 10 year old son. He loved them. The action is nonstop and the characters are faced with tough choices, and almost always make the right one. It's a great ideal for a young boy: a child of a god, with great potential and powers, who is constantly under attack from evil forces and fights for the right through all of it. Each child on this earth is a "demi-god", so let's teach them what that means and train them to fulfill their destinies.