Are you Spiritually Fat?

I know there are scriptures that tell us to "feast upon the word of Christ."  That is exactly what I am suggesting here, but I am going to flip the metaphor to do it.

Let me give you some context.  As many of you know, I went on a diet in early January.  (No, not a new years resolution.  I have to mentally prepare myself in order to diet.  I wasn't ready until around January 10.)  In any case, dieting and exercise are the only way I have ever successfully lost weight.  I count my calories and I give myself credit for exercise.  In such a way, I lost the extra weight I had gained in 2014.  It took both work and dedication.  I think the most important component was consistency.  I had to make it a priority to work out every day, and I had to avoid places and things I knew would keep me from success.  

I discovered that if I didn't work out in the morning, despite my best intentions, I would probably not work out that day at all.  If I got a hamburger at Five Guys, I almost always ate some french fries, even when I was determined to avoid them.  I learned to always save myself a hefty chunk of calories for that glorious time after the kids went to bed, because I crave cookies around then.  

I made this diet a priority, and I got into pretty good shape.  I've been telling myself I should take some photos of me working out to put up in my home gym for a long time.  Whitney (my husband) finally encouraged me to do it just after the diet ended "because I was at my leanest right now."  He's probably right.  Now that I'm off my diet, I am back to eating a lot of cookies.  I am back to eating french fries with my burger and not worrying about it.  I am back to eating two muffins instead of one.  I am no longer tracking my calories and I am not watching my weight.  I won't be surprised if the scale inches up little by little over the next ten months until January 2016.  I will probably be right back where I started, on a diet again.  

I agree that we should all be feasting on the words of Christ (aka, reading the Bible) but I am going to use an inverse analogy.  In order to stay physically fit, you need to watch what you eat.  You need to exercise or it will slip away.  Similarly, if you're out of shape, you can't run to the gym and hop on a treadmill and knock back 10 miles.  You have to work up to that.  

Your testimony of Christ and your knowledge of His life and His plan for you is exactly the same.  

You need to set time aside every single day to work on it, to build your faith, to increase your knowledge.  You need to make it a priority.  If you don't you will backslide.  I have a few beloved family members who are telling me they "just don't have a testimony anymore."  Let me tell you precisely how and why that has happened.  They had strong testimonies.  Their testimonies were shiny and beautiful.  Then either doubt or laziness crept in and instead of really focusing on it, they didn't read.  They skipped church.  They didn't pray.  They let it go.

Now they are telling me, and they are completely right, that they don't believe in God.  They aren't sure if He lives.  They don't believe He has a Son and that Jesus Christ came to the Earth to live perfectly and die unjustly just to rise again and save us all.  "Think about it," they tell me. "It just doesn't make sense."

The best things in life do not make sense.  Other than the gospel, the best thing in my life is my relationship with my husband, and my kids.  My husband is a farmer and a physician.  I know nothing about farming.  I know nothing about medicine.  He loves to run.  I run only when chased.  He loves to research old cars and dreams of owing an RV.  He likes camping.  I think the idea of an RV is ludicrous, I hate old cars and I think staying at anything less than a Holiday Inn should qualify as camping.  And yet, I love that man to distraction.  We laugh, we work out together and I will never give him up, not even if I have to get down on a tattered blanket inside a plastic tent on the friggin ground where there are bugs and rocks and dirt and sleep there for the night.  I will do it because the things that don't make sense are the things that are worth it.

My kids are hanging on me night and day, whining and crying and mooching and making messes, ruining things right and left.  I swear they have a PhD in complaining and a Masters in destruction and they are the lights in my life.  Things that don't make sense are not always untrue.  I know in my bones that Jesus is my Savior.  I can see the truth of it all around me, and I can feel the Spirit testify to me that it is true.  That He loves me.  That He lives.

But you can't come to that conclusion in a day, and once you do, you can't sit back and expect that faith to persist.  Just like you can't develop a perfect body and then BAM you're done, you can't develop a strong testimony and then do nothing.  You must work at it every single day.

If you want to nourish your testimony, if you want to create one, or if you want to rehabilitate a flagging or debilitated testimony, here are my four parallels to gaining a healthy physique:  

1. Do It Every Single Day.  In order to get into shape, I had to work out and watch my food consumption every day.  Likewise, you must read in the scriptures and pray every single day.  If you go to church weekly as you should, you have heard this over and over.  You already KNOW you should be doing this.  The hard part is doing it!! I would recommend you pick a time (for me, I always worked out just after the kids left on the bus) and read and study and pray at that same time, rain or shine, school or not.  Make this something that matters.  Some days I had to cut my workout to just 30 minutes and some days you will have to cut your reading time to a few verses.  That's okay.  Just make sure you still DO IT and that you don't let your one short day turn into several.   If you're worried you won't remember, put a sign on the fridge.  Or enter "scripture reading" as a repeating event on your phone and make your phone ring and remind you every morning at 8 am.  

2. Avoid Bad Places and Things.  I could not go out to eat at many of my favorite places during my diet because I knew I'd consume my weekly calories in one meal.  I couldn't conceive of being set back that far because I didn't want to have to extend my diet.  Your eternal salvation is every bit as important.  Every single reader here has a favorite sin, or a particular weakness that was handcrafted for them.  CS Lewis wasn't wrong when he wrote the Screwtape Letters--Satan has certain sins in mind for each of us, the ones we like, the ones we miss, the ones we love.  Think of yours--it could be as big as adultery or as small as gossip.  If there is a place you go or a thing you do that makes it just a little easier to contemplate that sin, GET RID OF IT.  If you are an alcoholic, that's an easy one.  Stay away from bars or events where people are drinking.  If you're addicted to porn, put the computer out in an open spot and smash that laptop to bits.  Make yourself accountable.  My point here is that there are things you can do to either encourage good behavior or discourage bad.  

3. Prepare for Success.  I love cookies.  90% of the weight I gained in 2014 was from eating cookies.  My love handles smell like butter and flour and sugar.  Seriously. (Ok, maybe from my cookie scented lotion, but still...)  Before I started my diet, I had to get rid of my typical bags of frozen cookie dough (I make double batches and freeze the dough in big bags so I can just pop it into the oven and have warm cookies anytime.)  Instead, I made a few lower calorie cookies (small ones!) and froze them in bags of just one or two cookies.  This made it more likely I could keep within my goal range in an ongoing and realistic manner.  I also came up with a list of easy to eat diet foods that I liked.  Lentil soup (also frozen in single serve size bags), oatmeal with fruit, cottage cheese with fruit, eggs with salsa, the list goes on and on.  The point here is that I planned for a way to succeed.  You need to do the same thing with your salvation.  

What's keeping you away from church?  Kids are a mess?  Put together a church bag with toys, games, coloring stuff so that they can be excited to see these things.  If you're struggling with what to wear, treat yourself.  Head over to Ross or somewhere and get a new outfit.  If you don't enjoy reading the scriptures, skip the parts you dislike! Eli hates the Isaiah stuff and I let him skip some of it.  Go buy some contemporary church books about particular topics and substitute that every other day for the actual scriptures.  Having trouble making time?  Set your alarm back 15 minutes and use those extra minutes to read.  There are lots of things you can do here, only limited by your creativity. 

4. Get Support Lined Up.  I talked to Whitney before I started this diet.  I explained to the kids I would be eating a little differently.  They were pretty supportive and willing to eat a lot of the things I ate, too.  They actually loved my lentil soup.  You need to get your family and friends ready or get them to do this with you!  You can even commit to make this a priority with them, and both check in with each other.  You need to make sure you are not trying to do this on your own.  It's a lifestyle change and it's not temporary like my maintenance diet.  It's a permanent change and you'll need some help, some cheerleading.  But it will be worth it, because as nice as it is to have a healthy body, you need a healthy spirit even more.  Make that commitment and make sure you aren't spiritually fat anymore.

The great thing about this kind of commitment is that you really can feast on the word, and you won't gain a single pound. ;) 

Charity means serving people you don't like

When I was growing up, my family moved a lot.  We moved 12 or 13 times (I think) before I left for college.  One move was particularly difficult on me.  I remember crying when we left my grandparents in Midland, Texas and moved to Bakersfield, California.  Both places were oil towns, and both places were hot.  It shouldn't have been a big change.

It was.

I didn't have any friends after we moved.  To be fair to the good citizens of Bakersfield, I was very awkward and unattractive at that time.  Money was very very tight for our family, so my mom made my clothes (uncool!) and I wore pretty tacky glasses.  I had no idea how to do my hair and in general, I looked pretty ugly.  I was also very bookish and prone to speak my mind too much.  Add to that my tendency to suck up to adults, and I will admit, I was not easy to love.

However, when I moved, there was someone who should have been my dear friend, or at least nice to me.  She was smart, like me.  She sang in choir, like me. She was a swimmer, like me. We were the same age.  Perhaps most importantly, however, she was Mormon, just like me, so we went to church together.  For some reason, perhaps my clothing, perhaps my accent, to this day I still don't know, she took an immediate disliking to me.  She made fun of me, she ensured her friends and family despised me by telling them lies, and she went out of her way to make my life miserable any way she could.

In the face of all this inexplicable hostility, I did as I had been taught.  I hunkered down, became more meek, and more kind.  I picked her roses from our front yard and took them to her.  I made her cookies.  I made her cards.  I was unfailingly nice.  I can honestly say that I acted with unfailing kindness and charity toward her.

Basically I was a completely pathetic chump, and things only got worse.

Eventually, after two very long years, I got into high school, where the opinion of one person didn't matter so much.  A year later, we finally moved back to Texas and I closed that chapter in my life.

Where am I going with this story?  Well, I learned from Miss Hansen that sometimes we must love people, and we must treat them kindly, even when they do not reciprocate.  I learned that doing so can be hard, but it is still the correct path.  I didn't fully realize until years later that my dad had been struggling with a nearly identical situation at work.  He didn't take his boss roses, but he dealt with almost the same issues.  It would have given me a little extra perspective, that although it was exacerbated by my age, this same difficulty can recur over and over in any walk of life.  Of course, I was a teenager, so once I was removed from the terrible situation, I promptly forgot everything I learned.

Not too long ago, my parents had a friend I will call Tom Thumb.  This friend was a mooch in every sense of the word.  Tom had lost his job, his marriage and many other things and was in pretty humble circumstances.  All of those things generated a substantial amount of sympathy toward him, and my parents gave and gave and gave.  My husband and I had cause to come into contact with him, too.  We gave to him as well, and were rewarded by his complaints about our gift and then by his theft of cash we had not properly secured.  It soured us on Tom from that point forward.  As time went on, we watched him continue to siphon resources of both time and money from my parents any time he could, in any method he could contrive.

Before I continue, I should mention that my husband works in the Emergency Room.  He works nights, weekends, and holidays when most people are home with their families.  He has been punched, spat upon, puked on, bled on and kicked.  People swear at him every night.  People call him names, and yell at him and abuse him every which way.  I say this only to make it clear that Whitney is no stranger to being mistreated.

I had spoken with my mom, and heard of some new way Tom was taking advantage of my parents and I was grumbling to my husband.

"It's so frustrating for me to think," I said, "that our tithing and fast offering money that we give to the church with open hearts is going to people like Tom.  I'm happy to give to someone who has fallen on hard times, and who really needs it, but I don't want my money going to a good-for-nothing-sponge who just sucks up resources from everyone because he's made bad choices and is lazy."

What my husband said next was a (well needed) slap in the face for me.

"But that's exactly where our fast offerings go, and it's where they should go.  They go to people who made poor decisions.  They go to people who haven't planned and who aren't living frugally.  That's precisely why they need it.  Charity isn't about giving things to nice people who you want to spend time with.  It's giving it to the people who are unworthy, by very definition."

His words sunk deep into my soul.  I still think about what he said there, that day, because it is so simple, and yet so true.  Giving to people you like, or people with bad luck, or people the world has wronged, that's easy.  That's friendship, or at the very least, that's rewarding.

It is not charity.

Timothy 1:5 reads, "Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned:"

A pure heart doesn't judge the person receiving the aid and withhold it when it's the wounded person's fault.  A pure heart gives to the person in need, regardless of why he needs it.  I'm not saying we should throw our money away and just give away everything we have, but I am saying that charity is giving to anyone in need, regardless of whether they have clean hands.  

1 Corinthians 13 calls charity "the pure love of Christ", and explains that, "it endureth forever."

Forever, not until the person annoys you.  Forever, not until the person steals from you.  You don't get to revoke that love when Tom takes advantage of you, or you deem him unworthy.  You love him Forever.

It got me thinking about how I had been so faithful as a child, even in the face of great personal adversity.  I continued to turn the other cheek.  I was kind, to a fault, to a person who made my life miserable.

Then I thought beyond that, to a more perfect example.  Our Savior lived a perfect life and then sacrificed that life for all of us, even though every single one of us is patently unworthy.  Every single one of us sins.  That sacrifice is why His love is greater than all.  Most poignantly to me, the Savior, in the act of laying down His perfect life, was spat upon, mistreated, called names and abused.  He was forced to carry His own instrument of death.  When the world mourned for His death, when the winds wailed and the storms came, He cried out for mercy on his assailants, He asked His Father to forgive the men who killed him, for they knew not what they were doing.

So my prayer to you all today is to reach into your hearts, and find that charity, that love for the unlovable, and do a tiny piece of Christ's work by serving someone you may despise with a happy heart.  Give to someone who doesn't deserve it, because they are the ones who need it most.  The gap between me and those I perceive as undeserving is far smaller than the gap between Jesus Christ and myself.  He bridged that gap for me.  I don't think I can do any less than try to emulate Him on a smaller scale.  I hope we can all remember this and try to do the same, because in its simplest form, charity means serving and loving people you don't like.

Don't be a P3 Smoker

At my old law firm, there were three levels of parking.  The tenants of each floor received a certain number of prime parking spots on P1, the highest level.  You didn't have to be on the elevator as long, and when you came in to park, you just zoomed right in.  Most of the associates, like me, parked in the unreserved spots on the second level, P2.  I eventually became valued enough that when we expanded and got more P1 spots, I got one.  In my many years there, I almost never went down to P3.

One day, I can't even recall the reason, I drove down to P3.  I had wondered whether anyone even parked there, because as far as I knew, everyone parked on P2.  There was plenty of room there.  So why keep driving?  I discovered on that day that the people who parked on P3 were the smokers.  When I drove down, there was a group of them, all huddled up, smoking together.

When I went back to get my car, there was another huddled group, smoking.  They looked so sad.  They looked so twitchy.  It made me think.  They didn't want to smoke on P2, or P1, possibly because  people complained when they did.  The smoke from their habit bothered other people or embarrassed them, or both.  They went down to P3 to hide.

Today's topic is the "Word of Wisdom" and how rules create freedom.

Many years ago, Emma Smith complained to her husband that every time they had a meeting of early church members, her house was filthy afterward.  She had to clean up cigars, ash, and clear out the smoky smells.  This eventually prompted what we now know as the Word of Wisdom.  You can learn more about it out here. It basically gives a guide for how to live healthy.  It discusses eating healthy foods, in moderation, following good sleeping habits, and more.

It also says not to use alcohol or tobacco.

I can't tell you how many friends have said the same thing to me.  "You guys can't drink?  You can't smoke?  You can't have sex before you're married? (Ok, that's a topic for another post, but they do marvel at that one, too.)  Why are you part of a church with so many rules?  I just want to do what I want to do, and it's my body, so why shouldn't I?"

Because, in case you didn't already know, some rules, the right RULES, create FREEDOM.

If you don't know someone who is an alcoholic, you may not know this, but there are some people in the world who take a single sip of alcohol and then they cannot stop drinking.  They got hammered their first time drinking, and pretty much every time since then.  There are other people who say, "Oh it's not a problem, because I have it under control."

Alcohol is diametrically opposed to control.

Smoking and alcohol are both addictions and they both impact your body.  Satan uses these to chain you down, to hold you back and to limit your potential.

I have chosen, despite occasional and sometimes even frequent, peer pressure, not to drink.  I don't smoke.  I adhere to the rules of the word of wisdom, and by so doing, my body is healthy and strong. I am able to go and do and work and exercise and my life has more freedom, more options.  Things like smoking and alcohol, they tie you down to more smoking, more alcohol.  They control where you park, where you go, how you spend your money and they impact how your body feels.

Sometimes following some rules, sometimes choosing not to make bad decisions will give you more freedom in the future.  God knows this, and that is why He gives us these rules.  We always have the freedom to choose.  We can choose to smoke, to drink, etc, but if we do, our bodies, our strength, our lives will be limited.  We will be less free.

I still have that image in my mind, those people all huddled together in a cloud of foul smelling smoke, chain smoking together.  I thought of how they have to park below everyone else, hiding away, destroying their lungs together, and shelling out quite a bit of money to do it.  I hope that I will always have the fortitude to follow the rules a loving Heavenly Father has set out for me, to keep me free from the bonds of addiction.  I hope you can, too.  And I hope you can see things in a new light, and recognize that rules do not always mean you are tied down.  Sometimes they are intended to help you soar.