No Coincidences

Tag: love

  • Be Ye Therefore Perfect

    Be Ye Therefore Perfect

    There is a message recently brought to my attention in Matthew chapters 5-7. We all know the sermon on the mount. Don’t just not kill, also don’t even be angry. Don’t just not commit adultery, don’t even lust. Be ye therefore perfect.

    What comes next though? I haven’t before considered how the next chapters lead to a great message, a culmination of how we should behave and how we should try to be.

    What does the Sermon on the Mount transition into? What is the theme of chapter 6?

    Matthew 6:1 –

    “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.”

    Matthew 6:20 –

    “But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.”

    Matthew 6:38 (JST) –

    “Wherefore, seek not the things of this world but seek ye first to build up the kingdom of God, and to establish his righteousness”

    Matthew 6 is all about our motives. In chapter 5 you seek to be perfect by your behavior. Chapter 6 asks, “why are you seeking to be perfect?” Is it for the glory of the world? Is it for more temporal possessions and blessings? Chapter 6 looks at your heart and asks your intention. We should want to be perfect because we love God and we love others. We should want to be perfect because it’s right. Perfection shouldn’t be about us or what it does for us. We should want to be perfect because Christ was perfect, perfect love, and our example. Chapter 6 tells us to look heavenward in all things.

    Which leads us to chapter 7. What does chapter 7 teach us?

    The message of chapter 7 is summed up by verse 1 (JST) –

    “Judge not unrighteously, that ye be not judged; but judge righteous judgement.”

    You’ve worked hard to fix your bad habits, to be loving, to treat others as you want to be treated. You’ve then addressed why you’re doing these things. Your heart is pure, you love others because it’s the right thing to do you. You look heavenward. Chapter 7 is about understanding that not everyone is at the same point on their own journey to perfection. Just because someone is working along their path, and in your mortal eyes may seem to be “behind” you, they’re not. Judge not others. They’re working their way down the path of perfection just as you are.

    That said, we still judge others righteously. Righteous judgement is loving judgement.

    Matthew 7:9 (JST) –

    “Go ye into the world, saying unto all, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come nigh unto you.”

    D&C 6:9 –

    “Say nothing but repentance unto this generation.”

    D&C 15:6 –

    “the thing which will be of the most worth unto you will be to declare repentance unto this people.”

    D&C 16:6 –

    “the thing which will be of the most worth unto you will be to declare repentance unto this people.”

    D&C 14:8 –

    “And it shall come to pass, that if you shall ask the Father in my name, in faith believing, you shall receive the Holy Ghost, which giveth utterance, that you may stand as a witness of the things of which you shall both hear and see, and also that you may declare repentance unto this generation.”

    What Christ’s apostles at the meridian of time were told to preach was the same thing those who were instrumental in the restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ were told to preach. It’s the same thing we’re supposed to preach today.

    Repentance.

    That’s what brings us and those around us closer to Christ.

    So, work on yourself first, Matthew chapter 5. Work on your motives second, Matthew chapter 6. Then, preach repentance to those on a different part of the path than you. Preach repentance with love and understanding. Never forgetting that you’re on the path too, trying to be your best. That’s all we can ask of each other. Do your best.

    From the book 40 Years And Marching On, an article by John W. Welch (p. 228) he says:

    “First is the acknowledgment that all people are at different stages in the eternal journey toward the glory of God, which is intelligence.”

    This is the message of the Sermon on the Mount. It’s not a one-part lesson, it’s 3 parts. Be perfect – be perfect for the right reasons – accept that others are not perfect (yet).

  • Do We Really Want to be like Jesus?

    Do We Really Want to be like Jesus?

    I had an interesting thought recently. That thought was, do I want to be like Jesus Christ? What makes me want to be like Jesus Christ? Why do I want to be like Jesus Christ? What about Him makes me want to be like Him? Do others want to be like Christ? Do I know the attributes of Christ well enough to be confident I want to be like Him? Do others know Him well enough to want to be like Him?

    We hear so often in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that we’re working to become like Jesus Christ. We have a children’s song (near and dear to my own heart) titled, “I’m trying to be like Jesus.”

    Why?

    When we say we want to eventually be like Him, do we know what He was/is like?

    Recently I was playing pickup basketball at a church. It was relatively competitive. Those who know me well know how seriously I take basketball.  There was one girl playing that wasn’t super competitive. She’d come the past few weeks and she somewhat lowered the level of basketball that was able to be played. 

    We were all, of course, nice to her. But some showed their frurstration in the level of basketball, I might have been one of them.

    This last time I played I decided I was going to have this girl on my team. I decided, not only was I going to have this person on my team but I was going to pass to her, encourage her, cheer for her, and we were still going to win.  The level of competition was such that, despite it being “somewhat” competitive, those were all realistic goals.

    After the first game this girl came up to me and meekly asked if there was anything she could do better. So I gave her some pointers –

    “If you’re open, shoot. Don’t pass back to us if you’re open,” and some general guidance on defense. She showed marked improvement and I was happy to have her on my team, especially over some athletic guys who could be ball hogs.

    Every couple games she would ask me if there was anything she could do better and I continued to give some advice.

    At the end of playing I told her how awesome she did that day and her response so, so warmed my heart, “thanks to you.” Such a simple statement.

    And in that moment I remembered something. It didn’t matter if we won. It didn’t matter that the game was competitive. Nothing mattered. Except that this person had a fun time, felt welcome, felt loved. Being compassionate and caring was vastly more important than any game of basketball, despite how competive and riled up I can get during competition. I needed that reminder.

    I come home from basketball often and feel good, happy. I usually tell Beth stories about what happened. It’s usually about some play I made, how the games went, how many we won and lost.

    After that night I came home and told her, “sometimes I need to be reminded how good it feels to be kind to someone.”

    Why do I want to be like Jesus? What is it about Him that makes me want to be like Him? What are His traits that I aspire towards?

    The answer is in that story.

    I felt better after that session of pickup basketball than I had in the last 10 combined. Her gratitude, and seeing someone feel welcome and have fun, was worth 10 game winning shots.

    Jesus Christ is all the love. All the caring. All the compassion. All the service.  All the joy.

    Why do I want to be like Jesus? Because loving others provides the greatest reward I have personally felt in this life. Nothing in this life compares to feelings of love, and the feeling of doing something right.

    This is in no way meant as a pat on my back for being a nice person. Jesus Christ is always a nice person, and He only asks that we be like Him in return. How interesting is that, consider it for a moment. Jesus Christ is perfectly selfless and loving to the point that all that He asks of us in return is to be perfectly selfless and loving to others. Is there any purer love than that? He makes this request not for Himself, but for us, all of us. He wants us to be like Him so that others can be happy. All He gets out of it is our joy.

    How amazing is that.

    I hope I can more and more every day, “try to be like Jesus.”

  • Forgiveness

    Forgiveness

    Forgiveness can be so hard. There’s a reason Christ emphasized it so differently from normal human traditions. Human thinking is, “I can’t forgive them that many times.” God’s response is, “how many times have I forgiven you?”

    That point is brought home in Matthew chapter 18. In verses 21-23, Peter asks that question we’re all tempted to ask. How many times must I forgive? Seven? Surely seven is good. It’s 4 more times than the Hebrew law dictated at the time. Christ’s famous response,

    “I say not unto thee, until seven times; but, until seventy times seven.”

    Christ expounded upon this with the parable of the servant who owed a king a large sum. When brought forward to pay the sizeable debt, the servant fell down before the king and begged for patience. In great mercy, the king waived the debt.

    That same servant then went out and grabbed another servant, demanding that a tiny amount be paid back. The second servant asked for patience and the same servant who had just been shown so much mercy had the second servant thrown into prison.

    When the king heard this he “was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all that was due to him” (Matthew 18:34).

    It seems so easy here on earth not to forgive others. What does it hurt us to not forgive? How does that person who wronged me deserve my forgiveness?There is a story from the book Return from Tomorrow. A holocaust survivor is found in a concentration camp. When he is liberated by the soldiers, he is put to work helping with the sick and dying around him. He is energetic and relatively healthy. The soldiers finally say to him, “you must have been lucky. You haven’t been here long, huh?” The man tells them how many years he’d been at the concentration camp; a long time. They marvel at his health. How can it be?

    The man tells them that early in the war, his wife and children were murdered before his eyes. He desperately wanted to hate these men, hate this war, hate this world, hate God. He had every reason to. But, the survivor made a decision. He decided he would not carry that hate with him. He decided he wouldn’t poison himself with hate. Forgiveness saved his life.

    Elder David E. Sorensen said, “When someone has hurt us or those we care about, that pain can almost be overwhelming. It can feel as if the pain or the injustice is the most important thing in the world and that we have no choice but to seek vengeance. But Christ, the Prince of Peace, teaches us a better way. It can be very difficult to forgive someone the harm they’ve done us, but when we do, we open ourselves up to a better future. No longer does someone else’s wrongdoing control our course. When we forgive others, it frees us to choose how we will live our own lives. Forgiveness means that problems of the past no longer dictate our destinies, and we can focus on the future with God’s love in our hearts.”

    We may think not forgiving others is harmless, but hate is poison. Holding onto grievances and refusing to forgive only poisons ourselves.

    In the book, Surprised by Hope, N. T. Wright said: “If you lock up the piano because you don’t want to play to somebody else, how can God play to you?“

    Reading back on the story of the king and the foolish servant who would be forgiven his great debt then demand payment from another. We read that and scoff at the hypocrisy. Yet we all have this same hypocrisy in us. And God is our king, having forgiven us all, and wroth when we can’t extend the same favor to our fellow brothers and sisters.

    Verse 35 concludes that story:

    “So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.”

    Going along with what Elder Sorensen said, from this link: “I think it is helpful to recognize that offences and injuries are always bottled in our past. So, forgiveness requires us to deal with our past – not our present or future. We have to let go of our past in order to fill up the present and bless the future. When we fail to deal properly with our past, we are like someone whose elastic belt is caught on a barbed wire fence; we can make very little forward progress until we unhook ourselves from our pain and injustice in our past.”

    That quote is perfect in explaining how that man from the concentration camp survived. That man, if he hated, would have been stuck in the past, attached to a barbed wire. Never being able to progress to his future. Instead, he chose to forgive, free himself, and save himself. That is the true power of forgiveness.

    We have all been wronged. We have all wronged others. Some of us have been wronged worse than others. But life isn’t a ledger book. Life isn’t a tally of who has been wronged the most. There is always someone that has been wronged worse than you have. The book The Shack talks about this eternal idea of “being wronged.” If you refuse to forgive someone, and that someone refuses to forgive their father who made them that way, and their father refuses to forgive his father who made him that way: on and on for eternity. Grievances go back to the beginning of time. Forgiveness ends the vicious cycle of hate. 

    Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

    There was a point in my life when I realized I’d been carrying around poison for far too long. There was a day I realized I had to forgive some people from my past so that I could move forward. I reached out to some people I hadn’t spoken to for so long. It helped me. I felt that feeling, of getting a weight off your shoulders. For me, it was more a feeling of getting poison out of my system. I thought I’d forgiven. It wasn’t until I actually said it, to the person that needed to hear it, and apologized for my part in pain that was caused, that I realized the burden I’d been carrying for so long.

    We all must forgive.

    Again, I know that sometimes such heinous wrongs are committed that some people feel they have the right to shout, “But I’ve never hurt someone like they hurt me!”

    In those moments think about the person from the concentration camp who refused to hate. He chose to forgive. It saved his life. He had more reason to hate than just about anyone ever has. He chose not to. There’s always someone that deserves to hate more. Choose to love instead.

    Let go of the hate you harbor and forgive. Do you want to come before God and Him to ask, “how can I forgive you, when you never forgave?”

    We all do wrong, and we all get wronged. Remove yourself from the past and progress.

    A forgiveness post would be lacking if it didn’t mention where all forgiveness originates. Always remember, there is only one person who can truly break the vicious cycle of pain and hate. Jesus Christ is the ultimate giver of grace and mercy. If you feel you truly can’t forgive, lean on Him. He felt the pain, He felt all of it, and He has forgiven us. He’s forgiven all of us. He died so that we can experience the true feeling of freedom that He allows. His blood paid our debt, all of it. As we rely on Him, we will find the forgiveness our hearts desperately need.

  • Children Need Their Father

    Children Need Their Father

    I went on a weeklong river rafting trip. I believe it was the longest time I’d spent away from Ivy. A large portion of that trip, I did not have my cell phone with me.

    When I got off the river and started driving back to Las Vegas with my family, I checked my phone and learned that Ivy had not had a good week. Meltdowns, tantrums, refusing to sleep. Apparently, she’d had a very hard time in my absence. I didn’t even recognize the girl being described.

    Many theories were tossed around to explain the behavior: teething, out of her routine (they stayed at my in-law’s house), she was sick, her shoes were too tight. I knew the truth. She missed her daddy. I couldn’t wait to get home and comfort her.

    I’ve written about missing Ivy before. This was the first time, it seemed, she could really miss me. I just finished a book, What a Difference a Daddy Makes by Dr. Leman that talks all about the importance of a father, especially in a daughter’s life. It talks about how a father reinforces confidence and helps a daughter relate to men as she gets older. It talks about how moms have a tendency to parent and do things one way, and the balance of how a father generally does things is important to a child’s development. This is at least partly why The Family Proclamation says, “Marriage between man and woman is essential to His eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity.”

    I believe I was 16 when I first hung up on my mom while she was talking. I promptly received a call from my dad. The usual mild-mannered, relaxed father I knew was gone. I was told over the phone, in no uncertain terms, that if I EVER hung up on my mother ever again, he would kill me. I believed him. He told me I was to treat my mom with respect. It was an important lesson I needed to learn. It was the last time I ever hung up on my mom.

    This is an example of why kids need their dad. Dads, in society, have gotten a ridiculously unfair reputation. Dr. Leman in the aforementioned book noted the unfair representation of fathers on television. Fathers are almost always bumbling blockheads that can’t get anything right. This is unfair and wrong. It has built a belief in society that fathers aren’t needed, or worse, that they cause more harm than good. Fathers are important.

    So how was Ivy when I returned home? An angel. The most well-behaved, happy, sleeping babe you ever met. She smiled ear to ear the moment I saw her when I got home. It was such dramatic joy that I almost didn’t believe all the propaganda I’d been hearing about her. She just needed her daddy.

    Before I could get too cocky, Beth had a doctor’s appointment during the week. It was Ivy and I for a couple hours. Then I got to witness all the behavior I’d seen.

    A growing girl needs her daddy. She also needs her mother. We’ve seen that Ivy is way happier when it’s all of us together. Ivy’s still relatively fresh from heaven. She knows the importance of family and the The Family Proclamation.

    I’m grateful to understand the importance of family. I’m grateful to have a small inkling of how important I can be to Ivy’s life. I’m grateful that Beth continues to be such a great mother. I’m grateful to have an amazing family to help me understand these things. I’m grateful that families can be forever.

  • Share Your Light

    Share Your Light

    In Teaching in Heaven I talked about the struggle of sharing the gospel with friends and loved ones who have such a different starting point in religious background and understanding from what I have. I talked about how this can be frustrating at times. This is a follow up to that post. This is more a reminder for myself than anything.

    When I was Ward Mission Leader, I worked with a missionary who once said, “Be disappointed, but don’t get discouraged.” This is a saying I’ve tried to remember and sometimes could be easier said than done. When that frustration builds that those around me having zero interest in something so important to me, I get frustrated. When nobody seems to want to talk about things that have eternal significance, I have to work to be disappointed but not discouraged. It was explained that disappointment is temporary and can be combatted, but once you get discouraged, that is constant, and hard to shake. It is difficult to recover from discouragement.

    I believe it’s important while we’re here to share ourselves and to share our stories. We have all been given some level of light that we can share, and we can only share that light if we share ourselves. This isn’t restricted to those in the Church of Jesus Christ. This is about everyone. We’re all here for a reason and all have something to share.

    We don’t put a candle under a bushel. We let it burn bright (Matthew 5:15-16).

    While everyone needs to share themselves, for those who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ, it’s important to remember what we have to share. It’s important we share the light we’ve been given that has eternal significance. And then, after sharing your light, don’t be discouraged. Share and love and give and know that these moments of sharing will be immensely important. Don’t let yourself forget that one day when we all remember why we were here, every person you shared the light of Christ with will want to thank you for sharing that light. And how great will be your joy in the kingdom of your Father with those people (D&C 18:15-16).

    So when the world tells you to be shy about your religion, to be reserved about your religion, to not share these important things, remember what Christ said. The world will love you not for you share things not of this world. The world hated Him, because He wasn’t of the world (John 17:14-16). Step above the world as often as you can and share those parts of you, your testimony, that will make someone greet you with a hug of love when this life is over.

    That’s what this life is all about, after all. Share your light. Don’t cover your candle.

    Be disappointed in the world and the distractions that take so many away from true joy, but don’t be discouraged.

    One day Christ will say to you, “I always knew you.”  That, and bringing others unto Him will be worth all the disappointment this world can give. 

    Share yourself.  Share your story.  Share your light.