Going, Doing, Being: A Small Svithe

Today's musical number in my parent's sacrament meeting was a lovely arrangement of "I'll Go Where You Want Me to Go"--a former ward member arranged and sang it. He did something vaguely familiar that I believe I'd heard at the end before, combining all the key verbs from each song so that it ended with, "I'll go, and I'll do, and I'll be what you want me to be."

And it struck me: some (not all, but some) of the struggles I've faced are a direct result of my insistence on being, going, and doing what I want to do. And let's face it, someone else has better vision here. More eternal vision.

I hope to be better in the future at going, doing, being at the direction of someone infinitely wiser than I am.

Awareness

The theme of today's testimony meeting, if it were to be summarized in five words, would be this: "God knows and loves you." At least, that's what everyone kept feeling struck by. Or to be more specific, everyone who stood up in sacrament meeting today said something like unto it.

It's not a statement I would dispute.

But interestingly enough, that's not what I was hearing--or rather, what I was feeling--every time someone said that. Any time someone mentioned God's awareness of our difficulties, I kept feeling that I need to work on my awareness; after all, it is through other people that He usually blesses us. And I haven't noticed as much as I should have.

For someone who writes and reads as often as I do, I go through long periods of time where I'm oblivious to everything around me: there are times I barely notice the seasons changing, where I (unintentionally, usually) disregard the stress of those around me, and times where I become so focused on what I'm doing that I lose track of everything else I don't a passionate and intense interest in.

But I realized something today: I'm supposed to have a passionate and intense interest in helping those around me. I'm supposed to apply myself to the pursuit of awareness instead of oblivion. I'm supposed to become one of the instruments in the hands of God that helps other people come to realize His awareness of them.

As I grow older and as I serve in more capacities, I come to realize more and more that we are not a gospel of talking. I'm good at the talking. Far too comfortable, I think, with the talking. It's the walking that I have trouble motivating myself to do. But as Westley states in The Princess Bride when the six-fingered man pretends he will be taking him back to his ship, "We are men of action. Lies do not become us."

And when we talk as though we're walking, and we're not walking at all--well, we're liars. And hypocrites. And lies and hypocrisy do not become us, either. I'm afraid that I've been a liar and a hypocrite.

I'm going to try to stop that. I have roommates; I have visiting teachees; I have a calling; I have friends. I may not change the whole world by changing the way I look at things, but I hope that I can have the guts to work on improving my own little corner of the world.

Changes, Changes . . .

The other day, as I randomly perused blogs and kept finding--much to my chagrin!--that it seemed nobody whose blog I had read had updated recently, I started feeling grouchy. These people, I thought, needed to update. How dare they go a week without letting me into a little corner of their lives?

Um yeah. I'm a hypocrite. Not that I think anyone is dying to see what happens in my own little corner of the world, but . . . I shouldn't gripe about people not updating their blogs for a few days when I haven't either. Pot, kettle, and all that jazz.

Moving on.

It looks like I'll be doing more moving on. When my roommates and I moved, we were quite cognizant our house no longer stood in ward boundaries. But since the boundaries to our particular ward seemed less a guideline and more a suggestion, we didn't feel terribly guilty about staying.

The leadership in that ward is due to change. The bishopric will be released this month, and they realized just how many outliers they actually have in the ward. So they're implementing the boundaries, to graciously acknowledge that the new bishopric should not have to be viewed as the bad guys.

I'm not nearly as sad about the switch as either of my roommates, although there are certainly people I'll miss seeing in church on a weekly basis. And I've learned that the Church is true, no matter which ward I'm in. Or not in. In truth, I'll miss teaching Relief Society. And I don't know how I'll handle making a new set of friends.

But I have faith I'll make them. Changes happen for a reason. Yea, verily, I believe there is a purpose to just how much my life will have changed by August 25. I just can't see the purpose yet. (And me not seeing things? Not that new to me.)

And to end on a completely random note: it's official. The only other big change that could happen to me this year would be for me to get married.

(But don't worry. I don't think I'm that much of a change magnet . . .)

Brief Notes on a Movie . . . Also, My First Relief Society Teaching Experience

Feel free to tell me that it's sad, but watching The Dark Knight once was more than enough for me. Heath Ledger was quite amazing (and as decidedly creepy as he should be) as The Joker, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were--as always--delights as Alfred and Lucius, and Christian Bale served his purpose. (He was good eye candy. Sadly, though, he wasn't in the film nearly often enough.)

Anyway, once was more than enough for me because this film was dark to the edge of my limits. Which my roommate found interesting, because I own The Prestige, and she finds that movie far darker. (I don't. Obviously. But then again, The Prestige isn't something I watch on a regular basis . . . I've decided it's worth repeated viewings, but only if those viewings are spaced out to such an extent that it's not so easy or obvious to look for clues about what is going on.)

That said, it was definitely worth watching. There were lessons from the movie definitely worth learning. (Yes, yes . . . I know that modern cinema is no Aesop's fable, but I sort of feel like I should be able to find at least one theme in a movie, even if it has nary a plot line in sight) But it's highly unlikely I'll see it again.

Once we got home from the movie Saturday night, panic ensued. On the way to the movie, I'd made a flippant (yet not untrue) comment about how I'd yet to unpack the notebook containing the notes for my Relief Society lesson. But how I was so sure I knew where it was.

When I got home, I promptly retired to my room to review my lesson notes. Only to discover I did not actually know where I had packed said notebook. It would not have been nearly so stressing if we had an Internet connection, but alas--we're 'Netless at home until tomorrow afternoon. Otherwise, I would have printed off the talk and rewritten my lesson. My memory, after all, works quite well and I remembered--more or less--what I wanted to.

Instead, I asked my roommate if she knew where her copy of the Conference Ensign was, and more panic ensued as we searched for that. She found her copy, only for me to go upstairs, look at my laptop bag, open it, and therein find my copy. All was right in the world.

And my lesson went well. The sisters laughed when they were supposed to laugh, participated when I asked for their participation, and paid attention to what I said. Nobody gave me a deer-in-the-headlights, our-Relief-Society-teacher-is-crazy kind of look.

But I learned something valuable yesterday that's rather paradoxical: when you teach, you have to plan a lesson. But you can't truly plan the lesson. I invariably plan how I teach based on the way I would react to my lesson. But that's the thing about teaching church: you aren't teaching you. Well, actually, you are. I learned any number of things while preparing this particular lesson. But you're called to each (in my case) about fifty other sisters, none of whom think in exactly the same ways you do.

(Thus my surprise at some of the answers to a question I posed yesterday. We were discussing President Uchtdorf's "Faith of Our Fathers" and a quote that says (I'm paraphrasing): "True religion should not originate from what pleases men . . . but rather, from what pleases God." So I posed the question: what sorts of things please God? I was looking for answers like service, being kind to others, and faith--my segue between the "pleasing God" part of my lesson and the "faith" part of my lesson . . . Because according to Hebrews, without faith it's impossible to please God. The sister who quoted that scripture with no solicitation whatsoever earned many, many brownie points. I wasn't looking for answers like, um, chastity.)

Lessons, I learned, are evolving creatures. While a teacher can steer them in the direction she wants them to go, the boat never ends up at precisely the pre-determined destination she wanted. And that, I discovered, is not a bad thing. In fact, I think I will worry far more if my lesson goes exactly according to plan. (I will also be disturbed, because that would mean that 50+ girls were channeling my thoughts, and that is downright frightening)

And so I leave you here with a thought I had when I prepared my lesson: though Alma 32 teaches us that faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things, faith--once cultivated--eventually becomes knowledge of perfect things (when we're talking about principles) and of The Perfect Person.

And as we learned from Elder Oaks, that knowledge--though not empirical--is no less valid than things we learned by seeing. In fact, I think that knowledge may be more valid. But that's a topic for another time.

The Effects of Living a Religion

"But even in this present life, there is danger in the very concept of religion. It carries the suggestion that this is one more department of life, an extra department added to the economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the rest. But that whose claims are infinite can have no standing as a department. Either it is an illusion or else our whole life falls under it. We have no non-religious activities; only religious and irreligious." --C.S. Lewis

In Relief Society today, we were talking about missionary work. One of the question posed was why talking about religion intimidates some of us. One of the comments pointed how ridiculous, even crazy, part of the premise the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is based on. We believe a fourteen-year-old boy had a vision. That he saw the Father and the Son, and he was told what to do. Other people find that hard to accept.

My mom, when she once spoke with me about her conversion (she was baptized at age 20), mentioned that it was something that seemed pretty unbelievable. But she found herself believing in spite of any urges she had to think of it as a crazy story. She knew it was true.

But that wasn't what brought her to the missionaries. She was friendshipped into the church. When her family moved into the house in Kaysville shortly after her high school graduation, she and her sisters were assaulted by a myriad of invitations to church activities. And they weren't invitations designed to convert my mom or her sisters. They were welcoming invitations. Everyone there wanted to be friends with them.

And my mom found herself impressed by all of these people. By the way they interacted with each other. How they related to other people. Their optimism. Their kindness. In short, she wanted to learn more about what religion they were because of who they were. I can never express to any of the people who had such an impact on my mom how grateful I am.

One of my Institute teachers used to talk about how the world likes to compartmentalize their life as they would a pie: a slice for work, a slice for play. Slices for hobbies, slices for religion. All part of the same pie. His point was always this: for us as members, religion is the whole pie.

It affects who we interact with and how, our work lives, our home lives, and our relationships of any kind. It dictates what we say and how we say it--and how we feel afterward. I can't think of any part of my life that isn't affected my what I believe.

Because there is an amazing power in living what we believe. They say a picture is worth a thousand words.

I think a good example is worth a thousand sermons.

Thoughts about C-ville Church

I always love going to church with my parents. And the rest of my family. Because those are the times when I realize, though I'm usually reluctant to admit it, that Centerville truly is home. That no matter how much the congregation changes--no matter how often people move in and move out, change callings, or how much their families grow or shrink--it is still a place where many people know me. And these are people who have known me since before I could walk. Or talk.

And they have a great deal of faith in me. More than I have in myself.

It is also a place where I have multiple surrogate mothers. Where the reminiscing takes a very, very long time to get old because there a lot of years to cover. It's a place where the woman conducting Relief Society doesn't have to ask my name to introduce me, because she already knows me. Where they don't judge me if the speaker is boring and I have no attention span, because a lot of them don't either.

Of course, things aren't exactly the same. Three of my siblings are married. My sister has three children. And I've reached a point where it's odd for me to be in a family ward. There's, you know, noise, during sacrament meeting.

But it's nevertheless a place where I learn. Where people love me. Where the Young Adult Sunday School class is half life stories (of the most highly entertaining variety) and half doctrinal teachings. It's a place where it's not only okay to laugh, laughing is encouraged.

Because that's what it's all about, people. 2 Ne. 2:25. We are that we might have joy.