The Servant's Heart

There are two things that I learned from today:

Having Kristen in my life is my light and motivation.  My world is simply not whole when she is not here.  While my feelings for Ethan are not yet as powerful, they feel of the same kind.

I spent my entire day at work searching for and executing on opportunities to serve those around me.  It lightened my heart and actually gave me energy, rather than draining me as yesterday did.  I will not learn this in a day, but today was a good start.

Thank you to everyone who responded to yesterday's post.

The Waiting Game

I'm doing much better today.  Headache is gone and mind is much clearer.  I am starting into the technical content of my training, so that wait is over; but, funny thing, now I find my heart "waiting" for Kristen to arrive.  I guess there's always something to wait or worry over if you allow it.  I wonder when I'll learn how to just be content with who I am and where I am.  I wonder when I'll learn to let gratitude fill my heart.

"Doubt not, fear not"

Adventure and Anxiety

I'm sitting in my hotel room at the start of a new adventure.  For the past two days I have been plagued by headaches, mostly caused by the tremendous amount of anxiety I feel.  For some reason, the waiting for trials and struggle is hugely harder than the struggle itself.  If I can master the waiting, I will be able to do anything the Lord asks of me.

I'm open to suggestions.

Everything Takes Longer With a Baby

This baby makes everything an adventure.  He turns grocery shopping into a wild ride of noise and excitement.  We also spend more time cleaning up messes.  Because of the additional constraints on our time and schedules, we find ourselves focusing on the small, family-oriented things more.  We take walks in the evening.  We read the scriptures together.  We talk and nap and smile more.

Getting rid of the "stuff" in our lives has made us happier, not sadder.  What a strange thought.

Change and Whatnot

Today is my last day at my current job.  In a few days I fly across the country to train for a new job.  Adventure is on the horizon.  God is sustaining us day by day.

Carpe Diem!

Slop

My wife and I have been fighting recently over time and priorities.  It drives us both crazy that our house is not better organized and our days are filled with errands, yet our to-do lists just keep growing.  One of the things that we realized tonight is that before we had a child and before I became serious about my career we had a lot of slack time.  We would use this time to play catch-up on our errands and cleaning the house, etc.  Much like the strive/indulge cycle, our works were sporadic and built around play time and inefficiency.  We got away with it because of the slack time.  Now that the slack time is gone, the pain of our inefficiencies is driving us both crazy, and so we fight.

If you have to carry a bowl full of hot soup, you're more careful if it's filled to the brim.  Just because you can get away with swinging the bowl around willy nilly when there's hardly anything in there doesn't make the slop any less sloppy.  To put it another way, pain is God's mechanism for teaching us incorrect behaviors.  The more we fill in our Funnels and start to build Spires, the more painful slop becomes.

And that's a good thing.

Admiring the Problem

Sometimes Heavenly Father blesses us with enormous problems.  Problems so daunting and complex that we tremble to even face them head on.  When faced with a problem like this, we can sometimes get caught in the trap of admiring the problem.  Whether its a troubled teen, government corruption, or a sermon we don't agree with, if we pour our energies into admiring how large and difficult and exceptionally challenging our problems are then we'll never solve them.

It takes humility to accept the nature of our trials and focus our hearts on solving or enduring the trial, as God directs.

Rally!

Our neighbor is a single woman with some major health issues.  She's a teacher with a passion for teaching her children, and yet her struggles continue.

During the last week, we have seen her family rally around her and provide support and encouragement.  More than that, I imagine they help her feel part of a whole, larger than herself.  That's what families do.

Even now, there's a spontaneous kickball game going on in the yard and laughter and warmth fills the air.  We're not made to go through this life alone.  We are relational beings.  When we rally around a loved one, our service fills our lives, even as we give it away.

Who can you rally around today?

How God Gives...

I re-read the story of Jesus feeding the five thousand.  I was struck by the way the Savior interacted with His disciples.  Upon seeing the hungry multitude, the disciples asked if they should disperse the crowd to the surrounding villages to buy food.  This fits in with the principle of revelation that states that when we have a question, we should study it out in our minds and ask if our conclusion is correct.  The Savior responds that they people don't need to leave to find food, and asks the disciples to feed the multitude.

The disciples explain that they have only a few loaves and fishes, not nearly enough to feed the multitude.  The Savior responds "bring them to me".  He blessed the food and then gave the food to the disciples, who in turn fed the multitude.  There is one particular aspect of this story that I want to draw out:

We always have enough when we consecrate our resources to the Lord, and turn them over to Him, and then turn around and serve our fellow men at His direction.  If we rely on our own strength, we will fail.  If we refuse to serve the poor and the needy because "God will take care of them" then we will be held accountable for our inaction.  This pattern is how God gives to His children.

Perfecting the Saints

As followers of Christ, we have a mandate from our Savior to become perfect "even as (he) is perfect".  This can be horrendously frustrating if pursued incorrectly.  If we attempt to obey Him in this by presenting perfect smiling faces to the world around us, our worship will ring hollow.  As with most things in the gospel, true obedience targets things below the surface.

The pursuit of perfection has everything to do with repentance, humility, patience, work, work, and work.  Remember this next time you see a "perfect" couple.  Remember it also when you see a quiet family quietly struggling in obedient sacrifice.  That quiet family is closer to perfection than the "BMW/perfectly white teeth"brigade.

The Bulwark

This life is a time to prepare to meet God.  As such, it is designed to test us and to try us, to prove whether we will serve the Lord under any and all circumstances.  That means that temptation doesn't quit.  Ever.  However, the Lord does not allow us to be tempted beyond that which we can bear, and so He provides refuge from temptation.

One of His refuges is protection against temptation.  By that, I mean a bulwark of strength that absorbs the fury of hell.  God makes this available in our lives through the principle of integrity.  As we seek to be more like Him, we become more whole, more intact as human beings and children of God.  As we become more whole, we have a greater and greater power of integrity: the power to see reality as it truly is and to face its challenges.  That integrity is the first and great bulwark against temptation in this life.

Every time you cracked under the pressure of a particular temptation, you first cracked your integrity.

Bravery

Most addictive behaviors stem from a desire to avoid.  Sometimes a person wants to avoid confrontation, or pain, or doubt, or just the uncomfortable knowledge that they are less than they hope to be.  The addiction's siren call is to let someone else into the driver's seat, that way you can hide from the pain.

There is an antidote to this fear.  It is courage.  Fear drives us to inaction, courage drives us to action.  Courage is the ability to stand up straight, face your fears, and quietly and calmly move in the right direction.  I suggest that you could solve a problem in your life today by embracing courage and speaking the truth.

Better Than I Deserve

This post is a tribute to my wife.  We have been going through a difficult time in our marriage; a time of adjustments, trials, and just plain pain.  I'll spare you the details, but today I want to share one thought with the world.

Because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and my amazing wife, I am better than I deserve.

My Son...

He turned one month old today.  I'm getting to know his personality and learning how to speak in his language.  I still marvel how each new life is introduced to us as a massive service project: we volunteer to feed them, clean them, teach them to speak and listen, to read and write, to persuade, negotiate, and to stand firm on their principles.  We get no pay for these labors, yet year after year people choose this path.  It's insanity, but it is also exactly right.

Sleep

Sleep restores us, reinvigorates us, makes us whole from injury and disease.  With a new baby, even a well behaved one, I'm learning to live with less sleep.  Even though sleep does so many amazing things for me, I cannot afford to have it be my highest priority.  Sometimes we put our own needs behind another's need.  Is that what defines a stewardship?

Adventure!!

An adventure is any endeavor that we attempt where the outcome is uncertain and we walk away with a story.  Some things we do a lot of, and are hardly ever an adventure: television, talking a walk around the block.  Other things can be continual sources of adventure, but only if we approach them with the right heart: work and worship for example.  True communication with the living God of Israel is always an adventure.

What adventures will you have today?  Who will you tell about them?

What I Was Born To Do...

I reread yesterday's post and realized that I had ended it by saying "This is what I was born to do".  That sentiment is a conclusion that has been growing gradually for me as I have worked on my own addictions and as I have written this blog.

If we want to unlock passion and enthusiasm in our daily lives, I believe that we have to be able to say: "This is what I was born to do.  This is why God put me on the planet!"  We are in a war here on earth.  What we do every day matters.  I believe that my small efforts are part of a larger scheme.  I hope that my simple contributions will help to save families from addiction.  That is why this is so important to me.  I hope that He can use my efforts for a wise purpose.  I trust in Him.

Steps

Hey all,

As I mentioned last week, I've started to work on gathering these scattered thoughts and metaphors and whatnots into some form of a manuscript.  My amateur philosophizing aside, my purpose in writing is to help other people who might be in my similar situation deal with addictions in general and pornography addiction specifically.  As such, I feel that it is important to condense this material into a series of specific, concrete steps, that anyone dealing with an addiction could use to step their way out of their personal funnel.

I recognize that other people and groups have covered this ground in the past.  AA and other types of counseling, both amateur and professional, come to mind.  I hope to accomplish two purposes with this work: first, by talking about it, I might be able to educate a spouse or parent of an addiction sufferer; second, by approaching it from a pragmatic and direct perspective, I hope to pierce through some of the false walls the devil has set up around this problem.

I approach this from the simple perspective that addiction is a problem, not a disease.  It is a disorder of the human mind that Satan uses to trap and ensnare us, in order to prevent our progression.  It is a learned behavior that can be unlearned.  A specific type of brain, personality, and spiritual upbringing is most susceptible to pornography.  Our culture needs the wealth of creativity, genius, and personal spiritual power that is currently trapped in the minds and hearts of those who are addicted.  Addiction leaves scars on a person's heart that are beyond the healing power of anything except the Atonement of Christ.  Fighting this battle is what I was born to do.

The Power of Final

I was listening to a radio show a few days ago, and the guest was discussing the passing of her father.  She talked about how death holds such power over us because it is so final.  I have pondered this for the last few days, and I think that we can learn something from this.

Death is indeed final, and its power over us is increased by this attribute.  We can look at that as a bad thing, but I'd like to try and turn it around and see if we can glean some value from it.  A final decision, either by God or by ourselves, can shape our lives and the lives of those around us.  Can we use the power of a death-like finality earlier in our lives?

I've also been pondering integrity.  It has many definitions, but one definition could be simply this: integrity is the personal power to make your word into the limit of your behavior.  If you have integrity, then when you say no, you mean no; when you say yes, you mean yes.  (See Matthew 5)  If you have integrity, then you can make your word final.  To be clear, I don't mean that integrity allows you to impose your will on others.  It's actually quite the opposite.  Integrity is your power to affect your own actions, not someone else's.

Back to finality.  Death is scary because it's a one-way door.  It may be one-way, but if we believe God, the other side of that door can be an infinity of experience in the presence of God.  What if we practiced going through that one-way door while we're here on earth?  What if we made some decisions and developed the integrity to hold the walls those decisions make so firmly that they are final?

I suggest looking at your life and finding the pain.  Be bold enough to look straight into your soul and all your relationships and point to the spot that is causing pain and speak out loud exactly what the problem is.  Then take that problem in prayer before God, counsel with the scriptures, your spouse, your parents and your church leaders.  Decide on a course of action that has the power to resolve that pain and then walk through that one-way door.  If you follow those steps, I believe it will result in a life more filled with the Spirit, closer to the presence of God if you will.  If you walk through that one-way door, you open yourself to a multitude of experience in the presence of God's Spirit.  You'll also be able to heal the pain, true healing that only comes from approaching the Savior in humility.

I'd say that's worth an experiment.  I have a few points of pain in my life that I'm going to try this on.  I'll let you know how it goes.