Fatigue-- A Common Enemy

graphic by Emmy Mom quote by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland

What measures are you taking to combat fatigue?

Be Still My Soul

The LDS Church just released this music video that shows a mother's journey out of drug addiction.

As you go about your Monday, remember:

Walk With Gratitude

Let Them See You In Me

by introverted heart on tumblr

Prayer of the Children by Innovators

After watching the LDS General Conference, it's hard not to have the plight of refugees around the world on one's mind.

The song Prayer of the Children came on my pandora station today and it seemed fitting:

The LDS church also just launched the site I Was A Stranger, which gives suggestions on what you can do to serve others globally and locally. In my own research, I found a site called VolunteerMatch.org that helps you find local volunteer opportunities.

Since listening to General Conference, how has your perspective concerning service changed?

Rock of Our Redeemer

How has Christ been your rock?

Walking on Water

"The Hand of God" by Yongsung Kim

From the BYU Speech "Walking on Water" by Patricia T. Holland:

Madeleine L’Engle has said: “Peter was able to walk on the water until he remembered he didn’t know how” (Walking on Water [New York: Bantam Books 1982], p. 19).

Peter’s success hinged on his remembering it was through spiritual laws and not his own that he had power. In the frequently painful path from childhood to godhood, what temptations do we encounter that so divert our direction and cast clouds over our memory?

I have often heard, “When I was a child I believed everything was possible. I believed I could grow up to become anything I imagined. But then I grew up! There was anxiety in my home. I had self-defeating experiences in high school. My mission was more difficult than I expected. Now I’m often confused, depressed, and afraid.”

Perhaps you’ve heard those kinds of comments yourselves. Not only have we forgotten the glorious things we once knew, but we have also forgotten we were asked to endure some trying things—we who are children of Christ through adoption and the crucifixion. We too are to learn obedience by the things which we suffer.

I recently read the experience of a physician of another faith who was discharged from military service. He reported an alarming change in his civilian patients after being away from them for some time. He said:

Upon my return from the Army, I noticed a change in my previous patients’ troubles. I found that a high percentage do not need medicine but better [minds]. They are not sick in their bodies so much as they are sick in their [thinking] and emotions. They are all mixed up with fear, . . . inferior feelings, guilt, and resentment. I found that in treating them I needed to be about as much a psychiatrist as [an internist] and then I discovered that not even those therapies helped me fully to do my job. I became aware that in many cases the basic trouble with people was spiritual. [Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1965), p. 148].

Be a Constant Christian

"There are no instant Christians, but there are constant Christians!" -- Neal A. Maxwell 

Ever feel inadequate? Ever think the standard is set so high, you have no chance of reaching it? 

In his talk "Notwithstanding My Weakness" Elder Neal A. Maxell teaches: 

What can we do to manage those vexing feelings of inadequacy? Here are but a few suggestions:

1. We can distinguish more clearly between divine discontent and the devil’s dissonance, between dissatisfaction with self and disdain for self. We need the first and must shun the second, remembering that when conscience calls to us from the next ridge, it is not solely to scold but also to beckon. 
2. We can contemplate how far we have already come in the climb along the pathway to perfection; it is usually much farther than we acknowledge. True, we are “unprofitable servants,” but partly because when “we have done that which was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10), with every ounce of such obedience comes a bushel of blessings. 
3. We can accept help as well as gladly give it. Happily, General Naaman received honest but helpful feedback, not from fellow generals, but from his orderlies. (See 2 Kgs. 5:1–14.) In the economy of heaven, God does not send thunder if a still, small voice is enough, or a prophet if a priest can do the job. 
4. We can allow for the agency of others (including our children) before we assess our adequacy. Often our deliberate best is less effectual because of someone else’s worst. 
5. We can write down, and act upon, more of those accumulating resolutions for self-improvement that we so often leave, unrecovered, at the edge of sleep. 
6. We can admit that if we were to die today, we would be genuinely and deeply missed. Perhaps parliaments would not praise us, but no human circle is so small that it does not touch another, and another. 
7. We can put our hand to the plow, looking neither back nor around, comparatively. Our gifts and opportunities differ; some are more visible and impactful. The historian Moroni felt inadequate as a writer beside the mighty Mahonri Moriancumer, who wrote overpoweringly. We all have at least one gift and an open invitation to seek “earnestly the best gifts.” (D&C 46:8.) 
8. We can make quiet but more honest inventories of our strengths, since, in this connection, most of us are dishonest bookkeepers and need confirming “outside auditors.” He who was thrust down in the first estate delights to have us put ourselves down. Self-contempt is of Satan; there is none of it in heaven. We should, of course, learn from our mistakes, but without forever studying the instant replays as if these were the game of life itself. 
9. We can add to each other’s storehouse of self-esteem by giving deserved, specific commendation more often, remembering, too, that those who are breathless from going the second mile need deserved praise just as the fallen need to be lifted up. 
10. We can also keep moving. Only the Lord can compare crosses, but all crosses are easier to carry when we keep moving. Men finally climbed Mount Everest, not by standing at its base in consuming awe, but by shouldering their packs and by placing one foot in front of another. Feet are made to move forward—not backward! 
11. We can know that when we have truly given what we have, it is like paying a full tithe; it is, in that respect, all that was asked. The widow who cast in her two mites was neither self-conscious nor searching for mortal approval. 
12. We can allow for the reality that God is more concerned with growth than with geography. Thus, those who marched in Zion’s Camp were not exploring the Missouri countryside but their own possibilities.
13. We can learn that at the center of our agency is our freedom to form a healthy attitude toward whatever circumstances we are placed in! Those, for instance, who stretch themselves in service—though laced with limiting diseases—are often the healthiest among us! The Spirit can drive the flesh beyond where the body first agrees to go! 
14. Finally, we can accept this stunning, irrevocable truth: Our Lord can lift us from deep despair and cradle us midst any care. We cannot tell Hima nything about aloneness or nearness! 

 Yes, brothers and sisters, this is a gospel of grand expectations, but God’s grace is sufficient for each of us. Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage, and our personal progress should be yet another way we witness to the wonder of it all!

Parable of the Pencil

Does anyone feel like they can relate? I know I sure do.

Here comes General Conference!

The weekend is here, and so is General Conference! The LDS church has compiled all the music from past General Conferences in one, giant playlist.

Photo taken from morrismurdock.com