Do our actions match the company we keep?

When I was in young women's we did a 14  day walk with Christ. Each day as part of a daily devotional we read experiences or stories reminding us the savior wants to be part of our lives. If the savior stood beside me would I do the things I do? It is a good question, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed that he the savior of the universe has time for me.

 However as I work up to that I completely believe elder Holland when he says angels on  both sides of the veil rush to our aid. As I prayed for the help of those heavenly beings today, then started looking for something to listen to while I worked I wondered if my music matched the goodness and vibration of their presence, had my choices of entertainment sent them away right after inviting them to come or could they stay with me. In that moment I realized anew I hope I live in such a way I can be comfortable in their presence and more importantly they can be comfortable in mine.

That is a Very Good Thing Indeed

So I have this sneaky suspicion that what I'll be talking about tonight I have already talked about. Although I have a sneaky suspicion that most of my posts are about things I've already brought up. But we learn through repetition and I needed the reminder this week.

I wanted to bring up two things tonight, the first is that we have a choice in what emotions we feel and in what emotions we feed. Second, what is true of life tonight, will not necessarily be true tomorrow or the next day.

First, we have a choice in what we feel. The world tells us that we have the right to vent our spleen on anybody and everybody, what ever we feel it is our right to share with everyone. We live in a world of twits and tweets, facebook posts and bitter tirades, what comes into our heads should come out of our mouths. This is the cunning work of the adversary, if he gets us so focused and caught up in our emotions and sharing them whether right or wrong we forget to use our minds, analyse our emotions, figure out what is causing them and how to appropriately work through them. Yes I understand that sometimes we can be caught by surprise and we start feeling all sorts of things, but in that moment we have a choice to stop, check ourselves, check why we feel what we feel and choose to be calm and allow the Spirit to direct to truth, to charity, to hope, to kindness. I would be willing to throw out there that the Lord is willing and able to grant us so much more peace than we are willing to grant ourselves. I got some interesting news this week that I had no idea what to do with, I started out a little scared, a little worried, very confused and sort of concerned, yet as I processed all those things peace came into my heart. The Lord sent the Spirit to speak peace and assurance that it would be okay, that things would work out. I was so grateful that the Lord would send His comforter to be with me. But this morning as I thought I about the changes coming to my life, wondering what would come, how we needed to adjust, what would come I scared myself right out of that peace. We do need to be agents unto ourselves, we need to make decisions and act, but sometimes we need to rest in the Lord, let His comfort resonate within ourselves so that we can trust Him that He is in control, He knows where I am and He knows what I need. As humans limited by mortality and time itself we want to be in control and we want a plan, what we need to remember instead is that the Creator of the Universe is in control and has a plan, trusting Him will get us much farther.

Second, another tool of the adversary is to get us stuck in the moment, so stuck that we think the circumstance of today will be the circumstance of tomorrow and the next day and the next. We get so overwhelmed because we think if we are barely holding on today how will we survive the next day, let alone the days and weeks to follow. But though eternal truths are eternal and we can trust them to infinity and beyond, today is not meant to last through eternity, it is just one drop in a bucket full of drops full of days. Today might last a couple days, but the Lord sends His tender mercies, what almost breaks us today, will be just normal tomorrow or might simply fade from our lives all together. The Lord's yoke can raise us beyond our abilities and will bring us to joys it also reminds that dark nights can't last forever and that tomorrow will have some brightness in it and that as life goes on we all learn and grow, progress and improve and tomorrow will be better, even by just a degree it will be better and that is a very good thing indeed.

The Voice that Lies

 You know your personal dialogue, that inner voice in your head that influences your perspective, that makes judgments about your desires, what you think you're worth, how you think you look, how you feel you are being treated and how you feel others should treat you. That inner voice that people tell you you should find and need to listen to, it is your compass and directer. Now I don't mean the Holy Ghost, He will always tell us the truth and is always an excellent guide and we should strive to help our inner voice learn from his voice. What I'm talking about is our spirit and inner self, that voice in our head that we recognize as us, that colors all of our perspective, that makes us who we are and supposedly has our best interest at heart. Well I am here tonight to say that sometimes that voice is wrong, sometimes our inner selves were fed the wrong information. We each have a choice everyday of our lives to choose the good, that which is uplifting, encouraging, hope filled, peaceful and that which brings stillness or to choose the not so good, that which gratifies the natural man inside of us, the side that seeks for that which we think we deserve, that which focuses on what we don't have and that which stirs up hurt and frustration in our relationships. Often these decisions happen in a blink of an eye, we are faced with something we didn't expect, the plans we made and looked forward to fell through without fault on anyone's part, you are browsing Facebook and see that someone you grew up with is really "going places" and in that moment you feel like you aren't, you say something at church that didn't come out right and you instantly feel embarrassed, you react angrily to someone you love and feel ashamed. These are all incredibly human emotions, they come to all of us and are just part of this life we call mortality, but it is what we choose after that instant that determines which voice we feed, are we feeding our inner spirit that longs to commune with the Holy Ghost and receive light and truth or are we feeding that voice that sounds a lot like our voice, but feeds on our insecurities and seems to multiply the injustices and frustrations in our lives, that takes us farther from the Holy Ghost, farther from our divine attributes and deeper down a well of self-pity.


I think a large part of the Lord giving us His Sabbath day every seven days is because it is so easy to listen to that other voice that sounds so much like our own, but takes us so far away from who we truly are.  The Sacrament can strip away the lies we've heard all week and sometimes told ourselves, it can strip away our pain and frustration and help us see with clearer eyes. Because as we come before the Lord, our Savior Jesus Christ and remember His example and the gift He gave to each of us, as we remember that before we came to this life we lived in His presence and in the presence of our Heavenly Father and we chose them, we chose to have faith in their plan, a plan that would involve growing pains, feeling lost, feeling frustrated and ultimately becoming like them. The more we spend time in their spirit we learn to hear more of the divine nature of our spirit. We learn to say no to the voice that sounds like our voice, but isn't quite us, it appeals to us because that voice is the adversary and he knows us very well, he was there with us as we learned and grew in the spirit world, he knows our weaknesses and our desires, both righteous and slightly less righteous, he knows how keenly we feel our inadequacies and where we feel we fall short he knows all of these things and he knows how to play upon them, that's why those voices inside us can sound so similar. But there is a third voice in the mix, the voice of the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, inviting us to look past the limitations that loom so large before us and remind us that we are bought with a price, that we are loved beyond measure, that we are beautiful to Him, that the very people here that can cause so much pain or frustration are also so very loved. The Sabbath day is a day apart, where we can be tutored by the love of our Savior Jesus Christ, where our spirits can be renewed and reminded of the powerful beings we are inside, that we are divine spirit children of the most high, we are in fact children of the creator of the universe and that our lives are purchased with the blood of the Son of God because He thinks we're worth it, mothers think of what you would do for child and the love that drives that desire, then remember Christ did that for you because of love even greater than that.

There is a voice that sometimes sneaks up inside us, that wants us to feed our frustration, our anger, our self pity, that tries to convince us that we are vindicated in our spite and sadness; these emotions are part of being human, but it is one thing to feel them, it is another to get a hotel room and stay a long while. The Sabbath day can anchor us to the light, can anchor us to truth, to who we are and who purchased us with a price. It can help us shun the voice that would drown out the light and instead help us find the divine voice that tells us we matter, we are worth it and we have power. I hope we can use the Sabbath and daily devotion to learn to heed the voice that helps us focus on the light, that we will choose to heed the voice that shuns the natural man and helps us look past what is holding us back and see instead who we can be.

this post is for my sister, whose quote and post earlier in the week got me thinking

It is not yet the End

It's been a bit of a week, one of those weeks that went by so fast and seemed like it took forever. Vulnerability is a hard thing to tackle in a public sphere, that's why you have lots of comments in

Relief Society that are really vague, not because sisters don't have insights to share but because personal experiences that shape our insights and perspectives are just that, personal and usually involve other people. It is hard to find that balance between what is yours to share and how much to say without making other people awkward.

So today I'm trying for vulnerable, I hope that I do not share what is not mine to share and I hope I don't hit all new levels of awkward.

 Its been a tough week, one where I've usually spent every night trying not to crumple into a ball because I feel so isolated, confused, lonely and having no idea what to do in my life and what direction I should take. Being so frustrated because I felt so unvindicated, that no matter my efforts what I did didn't really matter and that I was all alone. Looking back from today I have a feeling I was really just murmuring and as Elder Renlund says murmuring is really just childish whining we do when we feel distant from God. I was so caught up in unfulfilled expectations and hopes I thought for sure that things would never be okay. I let myself count up every unreceived effort, every slight real or imagined and let myself focus on all I didn't get and I let it brew in silence. I let my dissatisfaction grow and let my emotions grow. Then one night I couldn't take it anymore, I went to the Lord and instead of laying out why I was feeling bad and explaining why I was vindicated in those feelings I instead said "Father I am so miserable, please help me figure out what I should do instead." Things weren't miraculously better, but I woke up the next morning feeling much better equipped for life and I learned two things, one sleep does wonders and two having gratitude allows me to see the good and pushes the adversary's influence farther away from the  heart. The more we focus on the negative, the more the adversary feeds us the negative and excludes our view from the positive.

Today I decided that I didn't want to be a whiny little child always complaining at what I didn't think I had or those supposed slights that gave me an excuse for poor attitude, I realized anew today that it isn't just poor behavior that draws us away from the spirit, it is what we choose to focus on. There is a quote I heard from a fun indie movie this week that hit me like a ton of bricks this morning "it will all be alright in the end, if it isn't alright then it is not yet the end." I was so focused on what I thought I deserved and that life wasn't fair that I forgot it wasn't the end and this week was just another step in my progress in this life. Elder Renlund says he is glad that this life is not fair for if it was then we would not return to our father, but because life isn't fair and our sins were paid for by our Savior we can return to our Father in Heaven. The adversary gets us so focused on what we don't have or what is happening in the moment that we can forget that the current experience is teaching us skills for Godhood. This life is meant for learning and growing, we don't grow in our comfort zone and we don't have comfort in a growth zone. It is the discomfort that forces us beyond ourselves. When we focus on the Lord we allow Him to expand our efforts and desires and His desires for us beyond our own capacity.

It is so easy to focus on what isn't alright and what isn't fair and to distance ourselves from Heavenly Father, the adversary uses that tendency against us. But perhaps we just need to focus more on the fact that it is not yet the end so it is okay that it isn't alright just yet.