WATER!!!!

It is a generally acknowledged fact that water is good for us and we should make a point of drinking about 8 cups a day (give or take) if we want to be healthy, happy individuals.

As missionaries we are strongly encouraged to drink 64 ounces every day. We have been told that as we make a point of doing this we will not have to worry about headaches, stomachaches, depression, and other ailments (mental or physical).

About 4 days ago I woke up with one of those annoying soar throats along with some even more annoying (for a missionary) fatigue. While chewing on some vitamin c, I contemplated what else I could do to make this annoyance go away as quickly as possible. It occurred to me that I hadn't been drinking as much water as I should have been. So, on the way out the door that morning I grabbed a 20 ounce water bottle and went to town- literally and figuratively.

Since then I have been drinking water like crazy. I'm pretty sure I hit my 64 ounce mark by noon yesterday. Now here's the million dollar question... Am I getting better? The million dollar answer? Slowly but surely. It got a little bit worse initially- but now I'm starting to do better. Water has an amazing capacity to make our bodies run the way they should.

As I was looking at facebook today I saw that one of my friends posted this quote.

 “It frankly does not make sense to occasionally 'fill up' with water, with long periods of dehydration in between. The same thing is true spiritually. Spiritual thirst is a need for living water. A constant flow of living water is far superior to sporadic sipping.”
― Elder David A. Bednar

I immediately cut and paste it into this post because it applies perfectly to what I am trying to say. Just as drinking 64 ounces of water every day is important for our physical health, so is "drinking" just as much living water every day important for our spiritual health. We need to go to the Savior every day and partake of what He has to offer through prayer, scripture study, pondering, and church attendance. When we do that we are promised that we "shall never thirst."

I know that as we faithfully drink from the well of living water every day we won't need to worry about spiritual ailments. So drink up.

GrOwInG pAiNs

Have you ever heard the phrase, "Grant me patience, Lord, but hurry?" 
It is one of those things we hear all the time and chuckle at because it's funny.

Well, it's time for me to admit something, I have been praying for patience for quite a while now. One thing I have learned more than ever is that Heavenly Father answers prayers. He rarely does it in the way we anticipate, but He always answers.

When I made the decision to pray for patience I did not anticipate developing an amazing capacity for patience overnight. I expected to be placed in some situations that I would have to try to be patient with. I knew that God loves me so much that He was willing to bless me with the opportunity to LEARN patience.

One thing I didn't anticipate was how hard it would be....

Yesterday we met as a district* to discuss our missionary work and learn about how we can be better and more focused on the Savior. One of the more experienced missionaries taught us about how true followers of Christ react in times of difficulty. He taught us about a great missionary from the Book of Mormon named Ammon.

Ammon was a missionary who left his country to go teach the gospel. When he got there he volunteered to be a servant for the king. There was a time when he was watching the sheep of the king with other servants and some enemies of the king came and scattered the flocks. Most of the servants of the king began to panic. Other servants had been killed for losing the flocks, so they began to fear for their lives. Ammon's reaction however, was this,

"Now when Ammon saw this his heart was swollen within him with joy; for, said he, I will show forth my power unto these my fellow-servants, or the power which is in me, in restoring these flocks unto the king, that I may win the hearts of these my fellow-servants, that I may lead them to believe in my words." Alma 17:29

Ammon was in a very hard situation, but rather than allowing himself to be overcome with debilitating fear, his heart was filled with joy, he was excited for his trial because he had faith that the Lord would help him get through it and he would come out a stronger disciple of Christ. The Elder who was teaching us asked us to consider if we were like Ammon when faced with a trial or if we were like the other servants.

So as I alluded to earlier, I have been faced with many opportunities to learn patience ever since I began praying for it. Some of these opportunities have been harder than others and I have bounced back and forth between reacting like Ammon and reacting like the other servants. One thing that I have learned through it all is that when I choose to react with gratitude rather than annoyance or fear I am blessed with a sense of peace that everything will work out.

*A small group of missionaries determined by geographic location.

The Pray Bottle

"God will help us see a difference in someone else not as a source of irritation but as a contribution. The Lord can help you see and value what another person brings which you lack. More than once the Lord has helped me see His kindness in giving me association with someone whose difference from me was just the help I needed. That has been the Lord’s way of adding something I lacked to serve Him better." -President Henry B. Eyring

I need to be reminded of President Eyring's above words of wisdom on a daily basis, sometimes on an hourly basis. As a very wise companion of mine once quoted,

"For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." Mosiah 3:19

Because of the fall of Adam we all have some "natural man" in us, the trick is overcoming that by "yield[ing] to the enticings of the Holy Spirit." But the Spirit won't come over and entice us if we are too busy being annoyed, angry, grumpy, or, as President Eyring put it, irritated. That's why I feel like I need a dose of this quote daily (or hourly), because I too often welcome the irritated feelings in to set up shop in my heart rather than getting on my knees and asking for the Holy Spirit to help me evict my unwanted tenant.

I am very grateful for a loving God who is always there, ready to help me out as soon as I'm willing to ask.

"The pray bottle"... Do you ever feel like
Heavenly Father is trying to send you subliminal messages?

The Sword in the Stone!

We were walking past a tree the other day (a common occurrence here in Tennessee) when I heard a loud rustling sound coming from leaves up top. I look up just in time to see one squirrel chase another squirrel down the trunk and then back up again. I chuckled to myself and suddenly and song from my childhood popped into my head.

Left and right

Disney, Walt, Prod. The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Disney, 1963. Film.

Like day and night

That's what makes the world go round

In and out

Thin and stout

That's what makes the world go round

  

For every up there is a down

For every square there is a round

For every high there is a low

For every to there is a fro

To and fro

Stop and go

That's what makes the world go round  

From, That's What Makes the World go Round

From "The Sword in the Stone"

Composed by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman

I proceeded to do what I've been doing a lot lately, I applied what I was thinking about to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If Lehi, a Book of Mormon prophet, had been writing this song, it would have gone something like this...

"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my first-born in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.

"Wherefore, it must needs have been created for a thing of naught; wherefore there would have been no purpose in the end of its creation. Wherefore, this thing must needs destroy the wisdom of God and his eternal purposes, and also the power, and the mercy, and the justice of God.

"And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin. If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness. And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness. And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery. And if these things are not there is no God. And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away."

2 Nephi 2:11-13

Merlin and Lehi are making the same point, opposition must exist in order for the world to "go round." We have to have bad days in order to appreciate the good days. We have to have hard times in order to grow and have good times. Evil exists because if it didn't then Good would be meaningless. 

I know that it is because of these opposites that surround us that we are able to grow. I am grateful for a loving Heavenly Father who trusted me* enough to put me in a position where I can experience the bad and the good and grow so much from both. 

*(and all of His children who chose to come to earth)

Walking around with rocks in my shoes

Over the past 4 months, I have walked a lot. Every other week my companion and I don't have a car so we walk practically everywhere we need to go.* Mostly though, we walk.

Something that happens all of the time when I walk is I get rocks in my shoes. Occasionally I'll ask my companion to stop so I can empty my shoes of the annoying little bits of earth, but most of the time I just deal with them. Usually I can adjust my foot just so the rocks are underneath or in front of my toes so they can sit in those open spaces and not irritate me. By the end of the day I'll take off my shoes and socks and notice that those tiny little pebbles have nearly worn a hole in my socks or have created a strange blister under my toe. I think to myself, I'll make sure to clean out the rocks next time so they won't cause damage like this again.

I once heard a story about a girl who was running a race with a rock in her shoe. As she was running the race she discovered that a pebble was in her shoe, but rather than stopping to remove it, she kept running. She didn't want to waste precious time removing a little pebble from her shoe. So she kept running, over time the pebble moved around in her shoe to a spot in the arch of her foot. Rather than being bothered by the rock she began to appreciate it. It was hitting on just the right spot to be comfortable.

The storyteller went on to describe unresolved sin as a pebble in our shoe. Sometimes in our lives, each of us will sin and not repent quickly, before long we forget the sin is even there or we become comfortable with its presence. Forgetting about the sin or becoming comfortable with it does not remove it's effects. As it is explained by the prophet, Nephi, "no unclean thing can dwell with God". So if we hope for Eternal Life with our families and with God we need to take our shoes off often and dump the rocks!


* There are many amazingly wonderful members of our congregation who offer us rides. But they can't chauffeur us around all of the time (neither do we expect them to). 

The Pride Monster & Sister Anderson

Imagine, if you will, getting dressed and ready for the day. You don't have a lot of time to work on your appearance. You are clean and the clothes you are wearing are clean and (relatively) wrinkle free. Your hair is troubling you though. It is one of those proverbial "bad hair days" and you are about ready to make the decision to lop it all off. You are staring critically at yourself in the mirror when your roommate walks in and says "you look nice today." 

Suddenly your mind is full of negative thoughts and annoyed feelings. You don't like it when someone disagrees with you, even if they don't know their doing it. You're getting yourself worked up into a state of grumpiness when you remember what you were taught when you were young. Never refuse a compliment, it's rude. So you swallow your pride and say, "Thanks."

There he is again, the pride monster rearing his ugly head. I have to admit, that the instance described above has happened to me more than just once. Many times throughout my life I have struggled to accept compliments given to me. Then I watched a movie that had the quote below in it,

“We ask ourselves, ‘who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’

“Actually, who are you not to be? YOU ARE A CHILD OF GOD. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

“It's not just in some of us; it's in EVERYONE. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

“As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." –Marianne Williamson (emphasis added)

I love this because it reminds me WHO I AM. I am a child of God and He wants me to know that as well. When I get those feelings of inadequacy I know they are not coming from Him. They are coming from the adversary, the father of lies who wants me to hide my light under a bushel. He encourages my pride and makes me feel less than I am.


The fight with the pride monster is ongoing, but as we remember our Divine Nature, we can win.