School is back in session! And with it comes back all of the feelings I had before about myself and my school work. Fear, excitement, anticipation, frustration, and everything I have addressed so far in my blog. I know that this semester is going to be essential in my eternal progress.
I was able to fly home for about a week right before school started so I could see my family and spend some time with them. The night before we left to drive to Utah, my Dad gave each member of my family a Priesthood blessing. My Dad is one of my favorite people on this earth. I love him so much and was so thankful that he was able to give me this blessing from Heavenly Father. My Dad knows what is going on in my life, but not so much about the struggles that I am feeling right now. In this blessing he addressed every single aspect of the trial I am going through right now; my lack of confidence, my desire to acquire better time management skills, my doubts in my abilities, my desires to put the Lord first in my life, and so much more. After my Dad gave me this blessing, I felt so thankful for him, the Priesthood, and my Father in Heaven. I really felt like He was aware of me. I felt like I was ready to finally face this trial and overcome it.
I previously wrote about how I plan to put the Lord first in my life. I have decided to revisit this topic with a new light. I think it goes hand in hand with this talk I read by Dallin H. Oaks: Focus and Priorities. In this talk he says, "The ultimate Latter-day Saint priorities are twofold: First, we seek to understand our relationship to God the Eternal Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and to secure that relationship by obtaining their saving ordinances and by keeping our personal covenants. Second, we seek to understand our relationship to our family members and to secure those relationships by the ordinances of the temple and by keeping the covenants we make in that holy place." I have decided that these need to be my top priorities.
After I decided this, I asked myself, "Well, how do I make it apparent that these are my priorities now?" I can't just make a sweeping declaration and call it good. I have to change myself. In order to show that my priorities are different, I have to be different than I was before. In the talk, Elder Oaks says it best, "Our priorities are most visible in how we use our time. Someone has said, “Three things never come back—the spent arrow, the spoken word, and the lost opportunity.” We cannot recycle or save the time allotted to us each day. With time, we have only one opportunity for choice, and then it is gone forever."
This is where my desire to better manage my time comes in. I think that this is one of the base roadblocks in my way to coming of of this trial. I started to see a habit of procrastination and poor time management around my sophomore year of high school. Ever since then, I have not been able to overcome this problem. But I will.
One of my classes this semester is a Honors class about the writings of C.S. Lewis. We just read The Screwtape Letters, and I loved it. This book has a reversed perspective of my own, because the book is a a fictitious work written in the perspective of a senior devil (Screwtape), to his nephew, giving him advise on how to be a more effective devil. When I read the book, I mentally take notes on what the adversary is trying to do to stop me from achieving my goal.
In one of my favorite letters, Screwtape is telling his nephew that he needs to distract his "patient" (the human he is attempting to lead away from the truth) from what is really important: God. He says, "As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked".
What a scary thought! How often do I find myself doing nothing i.e.: watching pointless Youtube videos, creeping on Facebook, or literally doing nothing instead of reading my scriptures, saying my prayers and getting to bed on time? Too often.
This emphasizes the point that Elder Oaks was making about how our priorities are most visible in how we spend our time. In his talk he also says, "We also need quiet time and prayerful pondering as we seek to develop information into knowledge and mature knowledge into wisdom". Quiet time, and prayerful pondering is essential in our learning process?! It makes so much sense now. I realized this last night when I found myself constantly stimulating my brain with music, facebook, or talking to people. I never give myself a moment to think, let alone a moment for the Holy Ghost to communicate with me. I decided to make this more routine in my life.
I tried allowing myself to prayerfully ponder the things going on in my life and what Heavenly Father wants me to do about them. In know that returning to him is supposed to be my number one priority, so why am I not following through? I realized that for a long time I haven't been excited to read my scriptures at night, or say my prayers. I wondered why others talk about how they enjoy this and they are so dependent on it, and why I felt close to nothing. I realized that I was just going through the motions and doing what I knew I was supposed to do without realizing why I needed to do it. I also realized that I had let my relationship with Heavenly Father fade because I wasn't putting any effort into it. I was letting myself forget who He is, who I am, and what He has done for me. I knew that Heavenly Father should be the first priority in my life, but I needed to determine the why. Why should I worship Him? And should I make Him first in my life?
I said my prayers last night and I laid in my bed thinking about all of this. I decided to think of it logically.Who is Heavenly Father? Who is He really? Well, I know that God was once like us. He had to be mortal at some point in His existence so that He could learn and progress just like we are now. In Doctrine and Covenants 88:107 it says, "And then shall the angels be crowned with the glory of his might, and the saints shall be filled with his glory, and receive their inheritance and be made equal with him". I am LITERALLY a daughter of God, the most high being of our universe. President Lorenzo Snow often said, “As man now is, God once was; as God is now man may be". God has been through everything that I am going through now. He knows what it is like. He knows what failure, heartbreak, sorrow, frustration, and sadness feel like. He also knows how happiness, excitement, success, and love feels like; and He wants us to know too. He wants me to know too.
Heavenly Father was once a spirit being and chose to enter into a mortal existence and experience life just as we do now. After he did that He was able to progress and extend His experience and obtain exaltation. With that came the ability and experience to create worlds without number. Heavenly Father was able to prove His ability to be responsible for Himself in His earthly life, so He was given the ability to create more lives. We are some of those beings that He has created. Heavenly Father made you. I thought about this a lot. In Moses 3:5-7, we learn that everything on this earth that is physical, was once spiritual first. Heavenly Father had to think of the idea of the things He wanted to make and design them first. That includes us. He had to have individually thought of you. He went through the thought process of who you will be and how your personality and characteristics will be. He designed you and everything you are and can become. He then wanted to create for us, physical bodies. He came up with a plan so that we can obtain these bodies and experience the mortal existence that He once did. He called this The Plan of Salvation.
In order to make a human being out of nothing, you must be the best biologist, physicist, engineer, psychologist, parent, neuroscientist... the best EVERYTHING. There is so much design and beauty about our physical bodies. If you ever have the chance to study it, you are able to see the intricate networks that our bodies have in place that help us to survive. Heavenly Father made that about you. He also individually designed us. He gave you the distinct characteristics of that little dot on your eye, the dimple on your cheek, the way you smile, how you flinch, how you laugh... He made everything. He knows you. This also extends to our personalities. He knows who we are, what our struggles are, what our hopes and desires are, what we think is funny, what kinds of things we like, EVERYTHING. Because He made us that way. He gave us characteristics and the ability to develop and grow new characteristics. He loves all of those things about us because He made us. He loves us just like a responsible and caring parent loves a child. He gave us life because He loves us.
This is where I come in. I once was with Heavenly Father. I knew Him. We were not given the ability to remember our pre-mortal existence so that we may be truly tested and be able to progress, starting the test of life at level 0. If we already knew everything, there would be no need for faith and no need for a means to be tested. We would just automatically attain exaltation without having earned it. My mother once told me when I was younger that she felt when I was born, that I had specifically requested to come to my family. She didn't know why she had this feeling or anything about it, that is all she knew. At the time, I was an angsty teenager and did not think much of it. I now look on that piece of information with sincere gratitude and pondering. I cannot wait until I know why and how I did that when I was in the pre-mortal existence. I am grateful that I did, because I could not imagine being in any other family.
Then Heavenly Father sent me here. Where I was able to be born into the church. Heavenly Father has been there through all my trials and experiences through my journey of life, and He is still with me now. Now I am in the middle of this trial of strength and testimony. After I had been laying in my bed thinking about all of this, trying to gain a wider view of the entire plan and where I fit in, I thought it ridiculous that I was originally wondering why I should make Heavenly Father my first priority in my life because He is my life. He gave me life. He made me. He is the only reason I exist. He is the one I want to return to in the Celestial Kingdom.
That is why I should worship Him. That is why I should make Him the first priority in my life. That is why I should be ecstatic to speak to him directly through prayer. That is why I love Him. It is with this new resolve that I have determined that Heavenly Father is the only way that I can make it out of this trough that I am in. He gave me this trial with a means of coming out of it on top.
Then I kept following the course. There was no sure-fire way for me to choose which way was right each time, I had to find out through trial and error. Then I reached a string that turned into two. I decided that it must have been a mistake, so I just held onto both strings. After a few steps I discovered that the strings led to two different trees... I had to choose. The one string on the left felt like all the other strings up to this point and the other string on the right felt different... thinner and weaker. I decided to choose the right, and ended up at a dead end. I went back and decided that I should have stuck with the familiar string from before. I followed it, left, left, left and... back to the same two string split! What?! How?! I did the same thing about 3 times. Finally I realized that I had missed a new string tied to a tree after the first left. I went that way. A voice said, "You're going the right way". I had to remember if it was the same voice that told me to choose the right, and I decided it was. I decided to trust it.
Sometimes in life we reach two strings and attempt to hold on to both of them, but eventually we realize that we have to choose. We cannot follow Jesus's way and Satan's at the same time, we have to choose. Sometimes we get stuck in a bermuda triangle where we continue to make the same mistake over and over. The only way we get out of the mistake cycle is to choose to get out and not continue making the same mistakes over and over. If we continue doing the same things, we will continue getting the same results. If we want to make Heavenly Father more of a priority in our lives, we need to make a conscious decision and change our ways. Sometimes in life we put ourselves in the right conditions to hear the still small voice. Other times, we hear the tempting voice of Satan. Satan's counterfeit of the Holy Ghost. We must consciously separate the difference between their voices and choose the correct one. Sometimes once we go through a trial, we continue on our way and end up back on the other side of the trial we just overcame. We have two choices at that point: doubt the choice we made before and go back and end up no better than we were before, or to choose to learn the lesson that trial taught us once and for all. If we choose to keep going through the same trial, not learning anything each time we get through it, we really gain no ground.
