Category: Jesus Christ

Do the Things Happy People Do

Some words that have influenced my thinking in the last few weeks from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s talk, “Living After the Manner of Happiness”:

The Prophet Joseph Smith once said that “Happiness is the object and design of our existence; and will be the end thereof, if we pursue the path that leads to it.”

Remember the Prophet Joseph’s choice of language: He spoke of the path that leads to happiness as the key to realizing that goal.

We know one thing for sure; happiness is not easy to find running straight for it. It is usually too elusive, too ephemeral, too subtle. If you haven’t learned it already, you will learn in the years ahead that happiness comes to us when we least expect it, when we are busy doing something else. Happiness is almost always a by-product of some other endeavor.

But my reassurance to you today is that in God’s plan we can do very much to find the happiness we do desire. We can take certain steps, we can form certain habits, we can do certain things that God and history tell us lead to happiness…

In short your best chance for being happy is to do the things that happy people do. Live the way happy people live. Walk the path that happy people walk. and your chances to find joy in unexpected moments, to find peace in unexpected places, to find the help of angels when you didn’t even know they knew you existed, improves exponentially.

How can we know the way? Jesus gave the answer that rings from eternity to all eternity, “I am the way, the truth, and the life…”

Learn as quickly as you can that so much of your happiness is in your hands, not in events or circumstances or fortune or misfortune. [President Abraham Lincoln said,] “folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Happiness comes first by what comes into your head a long time before it comes into your hand.

“The Lord requireth the heart and a willing mind,” the revelations say. Too often we have thought it was all up to the heart; it is not. God expects a willing mind in the quest for happiness and peace as well. Put your head into this. All of this takes effort. It is a battle but a battle for happiness that is worth waging.

Kindness and pleasantness and faith-based optimism are characteristics of happy people. From the words of Mother Teresa “Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile.”

Avoid animosity, contention, and anger in your life.

Work at it. Learn to work. Serve diligently. Don’t be idle and mischievous.

I encourage you and applaud you in “pursuing the path that leads to [happiness.] Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life” –that no one comes to true happiness except by Him. I bless you to know that someday, sometimes, somewhere you will have every righteous desire of your heart as you live the gospel of Jesus Christ, thus living “after the manner” that leads to those blessings.

Pep talk

Today I made a big mistake. I didn’t set out to do it, but as I spoke to someone, my error became so clear that it made my hands shake. I have apologized and will learn from the experience.

I have power in Christ to dispel the shadow cast by a few terrible minutes. I choose to call today powerful in its teaching. I choose to forgive myself. I choose progress over pain. I choose to accept what Christ’s Atonement offers: the ability to move forward. With faith, I will find my smile again.

A Second Post about this Piece of Music

I am posting this piece again on this Holy Week, because it captures the meekness, agony, and triumph we commemorate at Easter. If you want to know more about the composition, the second video is an interview with the composer who set out to write a piece using common liturgical phrases with simplicity and power, enough to “knock people’s socks off.” He wrote it by candlelight in a cabin on an island. “There is no electricity or anything in that piece.”

You don’t have to know the words to feel the power of this piece, so listen in a solitary place and feel what the music has to share with you.

O Magnum Mysterium

https://youtu.be/gi51yTIQJXc

Forgiving

Someone did a thoughtless thing, not an abusive or violent thing, just thoughtless. I needed to forgive. I tried praying for the person. This seemed a noble thing, and I righteously persevered. I was praying this person would have a nice day when all I could think of was the pain I felt. How good of me.

This went on for a long time. Months and months. I got a different bandage solution now and then that would make me forget or at least laugh off the person’s ignorant behavior. Sometimes it helped to separate the good qualities from the behavior that wounded me. Sometimes it helped to know I was loved by God. Still, I found myself stewing over my feelings of indignity and injustice and this person’s ignorance and ineptitude. Praying this person would have a good day was not enough. In fact, it was a symptom of what was really the cause of my pain. I was hurting because I was full of pride and wanted to feel superior to this person.

Wound my pride and I will remember it forever was my plan, a mystery even to myself until one moment when I finally asked God how to forgive. It became clear to me that the Sermon on the Mount has many solutions, and I had chosen the wrong one. This person was not my enemy and therefore did not need my sanctimonious, I’ll-take-the-high-ground prayers. My problem was a beam, right in the eye. It turns out I am the one who needed to ask forgiveness for some vain repetition in prayer and a lot of pride.

I am learning that asking the right questions in prayer is the way out of trouble.

A Baptism Here and There

A few weeks ago we studied as a family about being born of water and the spirit. While offering our family prayer after sharing what we learned, I felt I should thank our Heavenly Father for baptism. In an instant, I felt what this ordinance, along with confirmation, have meant to our family. Immense, personal, empowering, enhancing, clarifying, cleansing, gathering, unifying, and sanctifying, these gifts are something to cherish. Our Father is generous, and because of the sacrifice of his Son, we can be baptized. The Holy Ghost fills us and leaves its elevating effects without fanfare. The influence and power of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost seem to come together at important days like baptism, not just at the Jordan River, but for little David, Maria, and each of us. At baptism, we are gathered, and we find where we belong.

I Read It Aloud

“Read the Gospel of Mark aloud,” I have been told several times in my life. “That’s the way it was meant to be experienced, aloud and during one sitting. It will take you a couple of hours.”

Well, today I did it, using Julie Smith’s rendition. It took less than two hours to finish. The King James Version is still awesome, but a modern language translation helped me see things I did not see before.

Her rendition is free on the Kindle. (LINK) If you have two hours alone, I recommend you read it aloud (or any way you like) and enjoy the good news.

Margins

I have always had meaningful work at church until five months ago. Even after out-of-state moves, I was busy at church within a month. I count these last five months as some of the most trying of my life. I have continued to minister to people on my own, and that has been sweet and saving, but there was a dread that crept in every Saturday night when I remembered that church was the next day. I wanted to partake of the sacrament, but I was sad to have nothing to do at church. (I was given a church job but I had to wait several months to act.)

For the first time in my life, I was experiencing what it feels like to be the marginal person whom people do not ask for help. Sure, I had a husband and children on the bench with me, so I looked like the model church goer, but my spirit was living on the margins.

Meaningful work is one key to mental health. The timing of school starting and no longer home schooling, Daniel going on a mission, and being released as RS president meant that I lost almost every piece of meaningful work in the same month.

I am coming out on the other side of that pain now and I am glad I went to church each week, even when it was hard.

I am glad I followed the prophet’s 4 tasks given to the women of the church, even though I was so angry at the time. Those tasks weren’t token acts to show I was being good. This was preparation for meaningful work in a home centered church.

The other night I was looking at pictures from the last five months, and you know what? I don’t look the way I felt inside. I actually have a bit of a glow in my smile. Where was God during all of this time of pain? His Spirit was right inside of me, holding me up and teaching me. I had a private tutor, guiding my thoughts and giving me courage to keep going. I see it now. At the time, I thought I was living on the margins of the flock, unnoticed, but I was actually being upheld by God. There is no better inclusion than that. I know God a little better now, and he is with the people on the margins.

Stream of Consciousness

After a blustery night and as I enter a gray-brown day, I see winter-swept scenery through bare branches. I have some projects with fabric once the floors dry and I finish dusting. I need to do some clothing alterations. After that, I hope for easier weather when I have to carry my sewing machine to a friend’s house for quilt work with friends who will probably be dressed in gray sweaters. Sometimes the howl of the wind thinks it will remind me it is winter, but I need no reminders. The steely light permeates every corner of the house, a reminder that the sunlight is there, but has traveled through miles of clouds to reach us. Today, we just get the leftovers of sunshine. The views are bleak, but the snowflakes on my window help.

Even my church assignment (I still do not feel it is a “calling”) is about the dead. Shoulders hunched and eyes focused on computer screens, I study clues from handwriting of those long gone. I sit among people 20-30 years older than I am in research classes and feel young! Woot! I have never felt so isolated, but I anticipate connection with living people will be possible in this work, eventually. I am entering my fifth month away from church assignments involving people who breathe. My temple and family history assignment still is not defined, and I wait. It’s a busy kind of waiting, as I have so much to learn. I am giving many hours a week to a work that feels absolutely invisible, kind of like housework. Ha!

My assigned ministering route was changed and not a single woman wants me in her home. Some have had it with churchy things. Another just needs to get out of the house rather than have a visit. She helped me make the snowflakes on my window as we talked this week. I count it an act of trust when I get a text from one asking me to give her son a ride home from school. Discipleship and ministry are among the indefinable things.

I gift myself one day of study a week. In these books, I lose myself to a degree that I call indulgence. Church prophets have often told women they are needed and important, but now I feel I have been given a task to prove it. I have come to understand that my New Testament knowledge, gleaned over years and years, is needed in my family. I still apologize and feel insecurity when I let myself be seen by my family for who I am: a scripture nerd. I spend time coming up with activities that will allow my sons to come to love the New Testament as I do. It takes all my self-control not to spill out what I have learned and what I feel, and what the Jews did, and what the landscape is like, and what a different translation teaches, and literary techniques of Gospel writers, and, and, and, and…Mary kept these things and pondered them in her heart. In a house full of men who do not enjoy conversation, I do a lot of pondering.

A few weeks ago I realized that Tim and Mark have seen very few plays, so I bought tickets to The Wizard of Oz at Hale Center Theater for later today. This will be a good start to a four-day weekend for them, and we are all ready for it. There was a bomb threat at Tim’s school this week and half the student body stayed home on Wednesday. This week I have learned that I need to get used to my children being in mortal peril. Let’s celebrate by watching Dorothy get swept away by a tornado and flying monkeys!

Witness

Building after evacuation

Today Daniel’s apartment building caught on fire in Santiago, Chile. He escaped, thanks to living angels who stopped to warn, guide, and unlock doors. Feel free to join me in prayers of gratitude for his protection. He grabbed his scriptures, wallet, keys, camera, and photos which were already prepared for travel. He already had his shoes on when the call came to escape. He and the other elders had to abandon a smoky stairwell with hot handrails for a different route out. When they were trapped on the roof, with only locked doors to stairs going down, someone came up to open a locked door to a safe stairwell. A quote from his message today:

Needless to say, that was an intense experience. Maybe we were never in real danger. But my mindset changed. As a missionary, I already have very few personal belongings, but as I stood there with reminders of my family and my scriptures with all my markings and couldn’t think of anything else I would want to save I realized how easily we can get distracted by things that don’t last. There are a lot of things I left behind that don’t matter, and now that’s especially clear to me. 

God really does protect us, guide us, answer prayers, and puts people, thoughts, and when necessary angels in our lives to help us return to live with him again. The Savior truly understands us, and through his infinite sacrifice and atonement we can be cleansed from sin.

-Elder Daniel Ross

I was very unwell all morning before I heard about this. Maybe I knew on some level he was in danger. I also felt complete peace when he announced his call (mission assignment) last April. I don’t need any more assurance that all will be well, whatever things look like at present. I don’t think he has his “cloak,” but he does have his “parchments,” (2 Timothy 4:13), and knows the value of them.

And last of all, here is a link to the journal page for our study of Matthew 2 and Luke 2 at our house for the week of January 14-20.