"Commitment is doing the thing you said you would do, long after the mood you said it in has left you." George R. Zalucki
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Put the Lord First
I have a friend that has been trying to come to a temple tour for about a year now, but due to different interferences she has not been able to attend. This last weekend she told me that she was really going to go this time so I packed up and drove an hour and a half to Orlando on Friday night so I could attend the tour with her on Saturday. Little did I know that our horses had torn down a portion of the fencing and my father and I would be spending all day saturday and some of sunday getting the "ox [out of] the mire". When it came time to leave for the temple tour I had been working on the fence all morning; I was freezing, exhausted, stinky, and there still was a lot of work to be done and I felt horrible at the idea of leaving my dad there to do it by himself. I teetered back and forth to decide if I should stay and help my dad, or go to the tour with Emma. I decided that I would choose to build up the Lord's Kingdom first. Even though I felt guilty about leaving my father, I knew that he would continue to work regardless and progress would be made. I went to the tour a little ashamed of my appearance, but trying to focus on my friend and the words being spoken by the "tour-guide". After the tour, the missionaries invited us into the foyer of the temple and began to talk to us about the tour. Because I had chosen to put the Lord first, I was able to witness my friend accepting to be baptized into Christ's true church.
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When I was 14 or 15, I had a teacher that prided himself on being a thinker. We had some enlightening discussions in his classroom. He helped me ask some great questions that led to tremendous answers that still guide me today. We agreed on many things, but were at odds on a few. One of them was religion. I had a lot of respect for this man, but it amazed me that someone who claimed to be open minded was blind to just how closed minded he was when it came to God. He was always challenging my faith. He considered my beliefs to be a sign of my weakness. His claim was that unless it could be acknowledged by the 5 senses, there was no proof that God existed. I struggled as a young person to help him understand that he was limiting his understanding to what he had personally experienced, cutting himself off from other possibilities. The best that I could do was to try and help him understand how I knew; that things of the spirit could only be understood and perceived by the spirit. Years later, I still don't have a better answer to this one fundamental question, but I face the same dilemma. This blog is dedicated to preserving stories and experiences of missionaries in the Arizona Mesa Mission both during and after their formal missions. Some stories are fun and light hearted, but others are of a spiritual nature. The blog forum is so convenient, yet the format is limiting. There is more to these words than letters on a page. To truly understand the messages requires not only an open mind, but a soft heart.
After all, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a Heaven for?- Robert Browning"
After all, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a Heaven for?- Robert Browning"
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2 comments:
Thanks for the inspiration Steff. Tell Emma congratulations and how happy we are for her. She is lucky to have such a wonderful friend.
Emma has since chosen to get baptized into her own church. But she and another friend are still planning on attending the Gladys Knight fireside the first week in March. We will see how she feels after that.
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