Parenting is supposed to suck

My mom is awesome.  My dad is pretty wonderful too.  Because they did such a great job raising me, I really thought that when I had kids, it would be completely great and fulfilling and just... awesome.  My mom made it look that way, and I'm not exaggerating.  She found so much joy in parenting.  

Imagine my surprise when I had a baby (and by the way, pregnancy sucks, too!) and then that baby CRIED.  Like all the time.  I looked around at my friends and their beautiful, bouncing babies, and realized something: I was a broken parent.  I couldn't do anything right.  Nursing was a nightmare and I quit after only six weeks. I was incapable of going out because I always forgot the exact thing I needed.  I ran out of diapers, I didn't pack the changing pad when there was a monster blowout, I needed more bottles, more formula, I had the wrong toys, the list went on and on.  No matter what I did, I didn't measure up.  I couldn't seem to keep my little brat happy.  

Then he got older and marvel of marvel... it got HARDER.  I had another pregnancy, this one even worse.  I then had an unruly toddler AND a new baby.  I was fat.  I felt tired all the time.  My older child didn't listen.  My home was a mess. 

I was a failure.   

Now, bear with me for a moment.  I am going somewhere with this.  

Mormons believe something a little radical, I guess, when it comes to our origins, and who exactly we all are, and more importantly, who we can each become.  We believe that there are three individuals who make our salvation possible.  The first is God the Father.  The second is God's only begotten son, Jesus Christ.  The third is the Holy Ghost.  These three work together to form the Godhead, or the group of deity that allows all of us to become more than we are.  Think of us as lumps of clay, and their goal is to make us more like themselves, to mold us into masterpieces.  

Each of these three individuals must do something amazing, nay, something PERFECT, and MIRACULOUS in order for Christ's suggested plan of salvation to work for us.  

First, God the Father, all knowing, all powerful, has to allow his only begotten son to sacrifice everything for us.  I always see God the Father painted as the Just God.  The one who makes the rules and expects obedience from us.  Except He can't be quite that severe, can he?  He can't be that black and white, because He has to do what I feel I would utterly fail at if it were asked of me.  He has to stand by and watch while His perfect son lives a perfect life of service, and then suffers untold pain.  He has to stand by and do... nothing, but guide His son, then with all His power, He must watch as His son suffers and dies.  That must take an amazing amount of love for the rest of His children, and willpower not to step in.   He is not the cold figure I sometimes imagine.  He must love perfectly, as you would expect of the God of all the earth.  

Next is His son, our older brother, Jesus.  He must come to earth, walk among us lumps of clay, standing nose to nose with all our imperfections, and He must still love us enough to teach us (the scriptures are, after all, the words the prophets are recounting as messages for us from Jesus). He must live a perfect life, set an example, always doing exactly the right thing, and then He must take all our sins and sorrows upon himself and suffer the punishment and pain for each so that we can be saved.  Then He must allow humanity to scourge Him, to mock Him, and to kill Him. Then He must choose to live again, able to die due to the mortality of His mother, able to take His life up again because of the immortality of His father.  By so doing, He breaks the bands of death, so that we all can live again. 

The Holy Ghost is the one we know the least about, but can feel the most clearly in our own lives.  We do know that He was willing to postpone coming to earth, receiving a body, and becoming like our Heavenly Father, so that He can bear testimony to each of us in our hearts and minds of the truth of the gospel, of the love of our God, and our older brother Jesus Christ.  He is willing to give up His time and wait on His own progress to help us all feel the divinity we have within us.  What a sacrifice; I have so much gratitude for it. 

Now, back to my point.  My routine day is long and tedious.  I have five children.  My youngest is five months old and wakes up at night. He needs to be held all day long.  My oldest is nine and goes to school.  He is in scouts and takes piano lessons and is learning, learning, learning.  I have three girls sandwiched in between who hit the spectrum between my two boys.  Sometimes they need to be held, sometimes they need to be prodded, and sometimes I send them off to school.  My day begins around six am and goes until ten at night.  I wake up kids, get them dressed, get them ready and off to school.  I feed babies, I clean up messes, I teach, I chide.  

I say no a lot.  

Then when they all come home, I help with homework, I push for piano practice, I take them to activities, I feed and clean, and review school stuff.  I pack lunches and I do laundry and we read scriptures and say prayers and then the whole thing reboots.  This sounds pretty vanilla, really, but once you throw in the tantrums, the begging, the whining, the ingratitude, the extraordinary messes, and you mix it together with a heaping helping of tedium, exhaustion and leave very little to no time for me to do anything I want to do... well, it sucks.  

Let me say that again: being a mom sucks.  

I think sometimes about Satan's plan for us.  He wanted us to come to earth and be forced to do what is right. We wouldn't whine.  We wouldn't be greedy, we wouldn't make mistakes.  Because we couldn't.  We would come to earth, get bodies, and then turn around and march back to heaven.  

I'm not gonna lie.  It kinda sounds awesome.  

Except in that plan, I start out as a lump of clay, and when I get back up to heaven... I'm still a lump of clay.  God wants us to become like him.  He wants us to grow, to take shape, to become a miraculous, spectacularly beautiful work of art.  If you're like me, when you read about the Godhead, about our Heavenly Father, about our brother Jesus, and about the Holy Ghost, you felt the beauty of what they are, of who they must be to act as they do.  They are creators.  They are shapers.  They are givers.  They are perfect and wonderful and amazing, and you yearn to be like that. To be more than you are now.  More than a lump. 

Well guess what?  When I'm a mom, when I'm doing the things that suck, the things that beat me down and wear me out... I am a creator.  I am a giver.  I am emulating the three most perfect beings I know about.  I am becoming like them.  Because I am imperfect now, because I'm a lump, that process really sucks.  I'd rather sit around comfortably as a lump of clay.  But God knows better.  

My kids whine.  They are ungrateful.  They hit one another in the face.  They tell me I am the worst mom in the world.  They pout and they complain.  They sneak around, they lie, they take advantage of one another.  But inside all those flaws, there are flashes of brilliance.  There are little kindnesses and there are these leaps of growth that give wings to my heart.  God must feel the same way about all of us.  He sees our flashes of brilliance, the light in our souls that He wants to develop.  

So here is my point: our job as parents is supposed to suck.  If you're doing it right, being a parent isn't fun.  It's miserable, and God has given us this difficult, exhausting, miserable job because He knows it is a very expedited way for us to become more like Him.  He wants to mold us, and helping little brats become people of substance is one way to do that.  

I am grateful for my job, even though it's hard.  Even though it sucks.  I am grateful for the chance I have to be like my Heavenly Father, to give of myself, even if it's begrudging sometimes, even if it's not nearly on the same level as the selflessness of the Godhead.  

But ultimately, my point is this: being a parent sucks, and that's how I know I'm doing it right. 

God sees the beauty of your heart

I have been reading lately in the book of Alma, in the Book of Mormon.  Now I know some of my readers (I'd say two of five!) aren't mormon.  Bear with me, because I think the point is one that will transfer.

The Book of Mormon is largely an account of two main groups of people who come to live on the Americas.  There's a group of "good" people, the Nephites, and a group of people who are typically wicked, the "Lamanites."  Basically their parents were good and bad and they kind of taught their children to do the same as they did.  Now, of course, over time nothing stays black and white, so sometimes the Nephites were really wicked, and sometimes the Lamanites weren't so bad, but for the most part, one thing stayed the same: they didn't get along and the Lamanites took every possible chance to hack on the Nephites with their swords.

So imagine the King of the Nephite's surprise when he tries to pass off his kingdom and all four of his sons turn it down.  Instead, they only want one thing: to preach God's truths to the wicked, Nephite hating, warmongering Lamanites.

As a parent, I'd say this would be a lot like my kids asking me if they could go preach the mormon faith in, say, Iran.  Or something like that.  I would be scared.  Well, the king of the Nephites is, too, presumably and he prays.  God reassures King Mosiah that he will care for his sons.  So, they go on their mission.  They have a lot of problems, but they are also met with a lot of success, and through a variety of scary things, God keeps his word and the sons of Mosiah stay safe.

Thanks to their mission, thousands upon thousands of wicked, murderous Lamanites are baptized and converted to the gospel of Christ.  This is a joyous event!!  Unfortunately, it isn't long before Satan stirs up the hearts of the other (non-converted) Lamanites by way of some hardened former members of the church.  They come over and start to attack the newly baptized members.  Now, I can tell you from the verses in Alma, these new members are shiny, and they are bright.  Their souls are gorgeous and pure.  They have been completely transformed by the gospel in the best way.

You and I both know that God can forgive us for our sins.  But these members, they were so afraid to sin again that they would not take up arms to protect themselves.  As a result, more than a thousand of them were slaughtered without any resistance.  On that same day a miracle happened.  Some of those hardened warriors who killed them felt the stirrings of remorse and the Spirit got through to them. They joined the church.  In fact, more people joined than were killed.  And those who died had repented, so they went to heaven. (Probably a small consolation to those left behind.)

Now, the part I wanted to write about today.  The wicked Lamanites who had become even more hardened were coming back to kill off some more of the traitorous converted Lamanites.  They were still angry and they meant to kill every Lamanite who had joined the Nephite church and believed in Christ.  Ammon was sort of the chief missionary and he was devastated to see this was happening.  Now, Ammon basically said to the king of the righteous Lamanites, 'hey, how about if we go live with the Nephites, since you guys won't fight, and let them protect us?'

The king, had a very surprising response.  In Alma 27:6, he says, "Behold, the Nephites will destroy us, because of the many murders and sins we have committed against them."

There's no recrimination there.  He isn't upset, or moaning, and he isn't critical.  It's a simple fact.  He had committed sins against them, and he felt they would be right in destroying them.

Ammon doesn't give up.  He asks the king, 'if GOD says we should go, will you do it?'  The king's response is, again, very interesting.

The king says in verse eight, "Yea, if the Lord saith unto us go, we will go down unto our brethren, and we will be their slaves until we repair unto them the many murders and sins which we have committed against them."

So he doesn't say, "Sure I'll do what God says."  He goes beyond that.  He says, if God says we should go, we will, and we will be SLAVES.  He feels bad, guilty beyond even what the Nephites feel in anger against most Lamanites.

Ammon tells him the Nephites have a law against slavery (bravo) and the king agrees they will go if God tells them to. If not, they will perish without complaint.

As I was reading this, it struck me that sometimes in life, we have made mistakes we feel are quite egregious. Since none of us are perfect, we make mistakes a lot.  I know a guy (my cousin and now a dear friend) who made some big mistakes that became very public.  In fact, he went to prison for them.  And while he was there, he had a major change of heart.  I am lucky to have witnessed a portion of that change of heart myself.  I imagine it is similar to the change of heart the Lamanites experienced, and that a great deal of sorrow for past decisions accompanies any such change.  I have seen my cousin's heart change and it brought me so much joy.

It is very clear to the reader of these passages that God sees the heart of these Lamanites as it is post conversion.  It's pure, clean, and eager to do the right.  God loves those people and He wants to bless them and keep them safe.  But here's the key:

God can only bless you if you let him.

The Lamanites would never have asked to be protected by the Nephites because they didn't feel worthy.

How often do we feel unworthy and in so doing, block God from blessing us?  I think sometimes, I daresay, many times, we are our own worst enemy! We may have repented.  We have souls that are filled with light now, but instead of allowing ourselves to recognize that we have changed, nay, transformed, we continue to think of ourselves and our past actions.  We allow our past to become an anvil around our necks, dragging us down, instead of letting those mistakes go and trusting in the power of Christ's atonement and seeing what God sees in our heart.

In its own way, this means we are doubting God's own word.  In Isaiah 1:18, God tells us that though our sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.  We need to trust in him, and in ourselves so that He can bless us in our lives.

Do you have past mistakes you allow to keep you from feeling worthy of God's blessings, even though you've repented and moved on from them?  Forget the past, and let the Spirit reassure you that God knows your heart and He sees its beauty.  You are worthy of God's choicest blessings and He wants to shower you with them.  Don't do what so many many many worthy and transformed souls do and doubt yourself.  Trust in God, in His word, and ultimately in yourself and He will bless you beyond your imagining.

Don't Ignore the Promptings

A few months ago, I was pregnant with my fifth baby.  I was on modified bed rest (i.e., get up and do anything you have to and otherwise sit around like a useless blob.  It's very depressing, and not dire enough to merit any real concern.  It sucked.)  I had this condition that made me itch like I had poison oak all over my body.  And I was going in for super fun bi-weekly ultrasounds.  I had a very full plate.

I went with my four kids to church alone and sat down in a pew.  I hadn't been for a few weeks thanks to the baby issues and spring break.  I noticed a new woman sitting behind me with two older girls who I'd never seen before.  The Spirit prompted me to introduce myself.

I declined. After all, I didn't have time to fellowship anyone, and soon I'd be out of pocket for like two months with a new baby.

The Spirit prompted me again.  Introduce yourself.

I ignored it again.  I had my kids here alone.  I have too much going on.  I don't need any more things to worry about.  I don't have the energy or resources.

The Spirit prompted me again.

Fine.

I turned around and rather awkwardly said, "Hey my name's Bridget.  I haven't seen you before.  Are you new?"

She told me her name.  She mentioned her kids ages.

There, good enough? I thought.  But then during Sunday School the Spirit again told me.  Sit by her.  Gah.  So I did.  We chatted and it was nice enough.  I found out her husband was overseas.  Egads, she would need help.  She was in the process of moving into our ward.  I grit my teeth and offered to help, thinking, how am I going to be able to help someone else? I'm barely hanging on.

I should say here, I have always struggled with having friends.

This is sort of hard to say.  When I was in grade school, and middle school, I was super dorky.  The cool kids picked on me in part because my family was poor and my mom made my clothes, in part because of my librarian glasses, in part because we moved a lot which perpetually made me the new kid, and in part because I was... a dork.

When I got older, I like to think that dorkiness developed into a kind of bizarre, indie style.  Of course, maybe it was just less pronounced, or kids got kinder.  Either way, I wasn't picked on anymore, but I was never the kid who everyone wanted to be friends with.

It was okay, of course.  I worked hard in college, and then in law school.  I read a lot, then and now.  And now, I'm married, have FIVE kids, and I work part time.  I also write novels.  I have plenty of things to keep me busy.  I've never been someone who needed lots of friends or a busy social calendar and I live near my family and they are stuck with me.

But everyone needs friends.

I was lucky enough in Hershey to make a few close friends.  I thought we'd be friends forever.  But now they both live up north and they have families and are really too busy to do anything.  Then a few months ago, my two closest friends (they're married) decided to move to Idaho! Boohoo!  Right after I had my fifth baby.  I was so bummed!!

God knew I needed a friend.

He had to prompt me to introduce myself to her four times.  He had to force my hand, because I am an idiot and I thought He was asking me to do Him a favor.  I was stubborn, but He knew what I needed.  He wasn't asking me to serve; He was trying to bless me.  The same scripture keeps coming to mind for some reason, as I contemplate the hand of a loving Father in Heaven in my life.  It's about tithing.  Which means it doesn't really apply here specifically.    But, here it is anyway:

Malachi 3:10 Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

I feel very strongly today that in our lives, God wants to bless us.  God knew how desperately I needed a best friend.  Someone I got along with, someone who didn't judge, who would be there to lift me up and support me.  God sent Anna to me when I needed her.

He wants desperately to open up the windows of heaven and bless each of his children.  He has untold blessings waiting for you.  Some of them may be hard, like a special needs child, some may seem confusing, like a move, or a job change, and some of them may not make sense to you, but if you will listen to the Spirit, He will guide you to untold blessings, I promise you.  He loves you and He has plans in mind for you that will be just what you needed if you will heed His promptings.

Ignore the Scoffs and Scorns

This image is a very magnified image of something you see every day.  Go ahead and guess what it is.  I'll let you know at the end.

Sometimes it's hard for me to recognize the God of the Old Testament.  He is stern, He is Just, and frankly, sometimes, He is scary.  I'm more accustomed to the God of the New Testament, the Jesus who says 'turn the other cheek.'  I was thinking this week about the story of Joseph, son of Jacob, from Genesis 37.  He was beloved of his father, and on Father's Day yesterday, I was thinking how that should be a good thing.

Only, for Joseph, it wasn't.

His brothers succumbed to that most basic of human emotions, jealousy.  You see, even at an early age, Joseph was a "dreamer."  Which is Old Testament speak for someone who had visions from God.  God told him he'd be favored and it made his brothers (and even at times his father) angry.  The brothers were angry their father loved Joseph, angry God favored Joseph, and instead of trying to be as lovable as Joseph, or instead of loving Joseph themselves, they made some bad decisions.  In fact, when Joseph went to bring them food, they decided to kill him.

Let's let that sink in.  Younger brother Joseph was taking food to his older brothers who were watching their flocks, so in our terms, they were day traders out there making the family money.  Joseph jaunts on down to their office place to take them their favorite order of mushu pork and... BAM, they decide to KILL him.  As in, off with his head.

Luckily, good old Reuben had some affection for him, and suggested that they just throw him in a pit instead.  He had plans to come back later and save Joseph, but I want to point something out here.  Reuben didn't speak up.  He didn't stand up to his brothers.  Instead, he took the coward's route.  He had his heart in the right place, but he didn't do enough.  I will come back to this.

In any case, Judah thinks, hey, we could get some cash out of this... let's not be hasty.  So they sell poor Joseph for twenty silver pieces and tell their father he died.  Their father is devastated, to his credit, but that doesn't help Joseph.

Poor Joseph is in bad shape now.  He ends up in the household of a wealthy man, Potiphar. Think how easy it would have been for Joseph to say, "God let my brothers sell me into slavery.  God forsook me, so forget Him."

But he doesn't say that.

He keeps the faith.  He is still faithful, even after being SOLD AS A SLAVE!  And so, with that attitude, he does well enough,he is "blessed" by God to do well there.  Unfortunately, he is presumably good looking or young enough to attract the attention of Potiphar's (not virtuous) wife.  Notwithstanding his extraordinary attempts to do the right thing, Joseph is then run out of the house by her and caught and slammed into jail for his attempted seduction. (Turns out men in love were delusional even then...) Joseph (again!) did nothing wrong, and got tossed out into an even worse fate.  His life has most certainly not been fair.  First he was treated badly by his brothers and dad for visions, then thrown in a pit, sold into slavery by the ones who should love him, and finally tossed in jail because he wouldn't betray his God or his master.

What a mess.

Yet, Joseph keeps the faith.  He is again put into a position of authority (sort of) within the prison.  He comes into contact with two men, a baker and a butler, and he interprets their bizarre dreams correctly, thanks to the power of God.  He tells that butler, "think on me when it shall be well with thee", but do you think that butler does?  Joseph is proven right, and... still he is betrayed and forgotten.  It's not until TWO YEARS LATER (!) that the butler remembers him, because Pharaoh has two dreams and he's asking everyone for help in interpreting them.

You know the rest.  Joseph correctly interprets the dreams, and he becomes one of Pharaoh's trusted advisors.  In this way, the Egyptians were prepared for the famine, and Joseph's family was brought to beg before him for food.  Joseph was in a position to save all of Israel.

Now, God is God.  He knew the famine was coming and could have stopped it.  He could have stopped Joseph's brothers from doing what they did, and He could have sent an angel to rescue Joseph at any point.  What God couldn't do was change the hearts of Jacob's family, so they would listen.  He knew that with the way they treated Joseph, they wouldn't listen to him.  God let Joseph's brothers exercise their agency, and make horrible decisions, but kept blessing Joseph in the circumstances where he was placed.

What should we take from this?  God allows hard things to happen to us for a reason.  First, so we can show Him that we will keep the faith.  Think of the faith of Joseph, despite all evidence to the contrary!! For YEARS.  Secondly, God uses difficulty to shape and sculpt us into the people we are.  Third, God uses us to bless others, in this case, Joseph blessed his whole family, and countless others in preventing the starvation that seven years of famine would have caused.  In this way,  God showed the family and even the Egyptians the benefit of faith.

Similarly, God now wants to use us, to strengthen, to shape us and to bless our families and those around us.  In order to qualify, we must remain faithful, even when things are hard.  Thank goodness my life hasn't come close to the difficulty level of Joseph!

Now, back to Reuben.  That poor guy had the right idea, but his follow through was sadly lacking.  He didn't get to the pit soon enough, and when he went back, Joseph was already gone.  He rent his coat, he was so upset, but it was too late.  He should have stood up to his brothers for Joseph at the outset.  He also didn't follow the slave traders to try and track Joseph down.

There is another "dreamer" we Mormons read about in the Book of Mormon.  His name is Lehi.  He got this one vision from God in which Lehi was following a rod of iron to get to a tree where he could eat some fruit that was essentially the love of God.  I was reading about his dream last night in 1 Nephi 8:33.  Lehi talks about the distractions in place to try and sidetrack people from making it to the tree.  There's a river of dirty water, there are mists of darkness, and there's a "great and spacious building" that's full of people who had already fallen away.

In verse 33-34, he says:

And great was the multitude that did enter into that strange building.  And after they did enter into that building, they did point the finger of scorn at me and those that were partaking of the fruit also; but we heeded them not.  

These are the words of my father: For as many as heeded them, had fallen away.  

Let me repeat that in today's vernacular.  Everyone who paid attention to the ridicule of the world left the church, left God, and fell away.  Not some.  Not a lot.  Everyone.

Reuben listened to the scorn of his brothers and he let his sibling be sold into slavery.  He succumbed to peer pressure and made a grievous, life altering, mistake.  Tearing his coat up later didn't make up for his poor decision.  Nothing could.

That photo from the beginning (taken from https://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/02/02/21-fascinating-images-that-make-simple-things-profound/) is a picture of salt and pepper, magnified a lot.  Looks like wood chips and marshmallows! I bet you see that every day, but not as close as in that photo.  God is, like us, with the salt and pepper.  He is able to step back and see the whole image.  Our lives, in the vast tapestry of the world, are like that image.  We can't see how it fits in with anything else, but God can.  It makes Him uniquely able to guide our lives.  He has a plan for each of us, for you, for me, if we will have faith in Him.

We live in a time that is full of scoffing, full of scorn.  I like social media a lot... but it's full of scoffing people.  It's full of people who mock my faith in God, my belief in a Redeemer, in Jesus Christ.  These people make fun of me for believing in something I can't see, and sometimes they go beyond making jokes and are downright accusatory, rude, or threatening even.

Do not heed the scoffers, or you will fall away.  You will be like Reuben.  You will regret it, eventually.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is about love, about kindness, about doing good to all men.  Do not let the behavior or words of others turn you into Reuben.  Stand firm.  Be as Joseph was, and let God work through you.  It won't be easy.  It won't happen in minutes or days, or sometimes even in years, but if you have faith and are patient, you will see God use you to accomplish something beautiful, something transcendent, something you can't even imagine, just as Joseph could not have envisioned the good he would do.  God will turn you into his instrument if you will but withstand the scoffs and scorn of the world.

Heavenly Father's plan for us as outlined by The Martian

I went to a dollar movie last night and saw a film most people probably saw before Christmas: The Martian.

My husband and my brother in law, and lots of other people are fascinated by outer space, and space travel in general.  I live less than 20 miles from NASA, and I couldn't care less!  Space doesn't fascinate me at all.  If someone offered me the chance today to go into space for free, I'd pass.  So when I realized The Martian wasn't a sci-fi adventure about aliens, I was a little disappointed.

If you haven't seen it, don't go into it thinking it's a film about God.  It's not, not really.  I'll be giving lots of spoilers below too, so read it at your own peril.  But, know that the movie mentions God only one time, in passing, and the reference is to "an Authority," I think.  One small character asks another small character if he believes in an "Authority," meaning God.  The second guy responds that one parent was Hindi and the other was Baptist and they first says, "That's okay, we'll take all the help we can get." Or something like that.  That's it.  No other mention of God or anything spiritual.  It's not a religious film, and yet, I have been thinking about it in the perspective of my testimony all day.  I finally decided to put my thoughts down here.

If you're like me, you watch movies like Vertical Limit (a mountain climbing movie about a group of people who go to save one guy, and like half of them or more die in the effort), and you groan.  I'm a lawyer.  Many in my profession spend a reasonably large amount of time quantifying the value of a human life.  But no matter how you value it, one life is not worth two.  Or four, or ten.

In the Martian, Matt Damon's character is one of a space crew of six.  I love that they don't give him a wife or kids to make his character any more sympathetic.  It's a nuance, but they don't make his worth contingent on his value to anyone else.  He's simply a human, and therefore of value.  In any case, due to a storm, he's left behind for dead.  Only he didn't die.  The crew doesn't know that, and NASA doesn't figure it out for a month or more.  He's in a temporary building intended to last only two months or so, and he has enough food for 40 days for six people.  A return trip is not planned for four years, and it's heading to a totally different location on Mars.  He's on a hostile planet where mere nanoseconds of unprotected exposure to the environment would kill him.

Oh and did I mention, the reason he got left is that a piece of equipment was rammed into his body?  He's impaled, his suit is breached, and he was left to die.  So yeah, I'd just take my helmet off and step outside.  Because starving?  Dying of blood loss?  No thanks.

Now in his favor, he's got his training and education.  He's a botanist and a trained NASA astronaut.  He's got lots of equipment and a little food.  Unlike me, he doesn't give up.  He performs surgery on himself, and then sets to work setting up a big room to grow potatoes using his own fecal matter as fertilizer.  Crazy, right?  But it works.  He's doing it.  He's trying his hardest to make it out of this thing alive.

He knows people are alive and well on Earth and he takes the information he has and plunges ahead into a dangerous trek to find an old piece of space junk so he can communicate with the people back home.  After a sequence of unfortunate attempts, one in which he blows himself up, he succeeds and now he can talk to the people back home.

Eventually, against all odds, and after overcoming lots of problems, he gets back home.  He does this only because his crew of five sacrifices almost two more years of their own lives, and risks their lives entirely to go back and snag him.  The government, and an altruistic Chinese government, also sacrifice untold resources and time to make it happen.

Now, was this a good use of resources?  Certainly not.  At first this bothered me.  But then I realized...

Our situation is just as dire.

How are we any different than one lonely human on Mars?  We are imperfect, we are fallen, we are the natural man, each of us.  The task set before us, to become like our Heavenly Father, to grow and improve, to do better, to be better, it's insurmountable, an impossible task.  We will all fall, we will all "die."  We may as well give up now, right?

Just as much was sacrificed to save us.

We would all, similarly, perish, except, we have someone, a perfect someone, willing to live His life perfectly, and then sacrifice that life.  Now, He did it for all of us, but we all have our agency, our free will.  So by definition, it's possible only one of us will make use of this sacrifice.  He would have done it just for one of us, sacrificed Himself all the same. He loves each of us enough to do it for us alone.  Furthermore, we each have to effect our salvation ourselves.  No one else can do it for us.

We could give up so easily.  Many of us do.

We could all give up, and many of us do.  We could give in to the natural man, and take the easy path.  Or, we could look around at our resources, and make use of them.  Just as Matt Damon did, we all face starvation of our spirit, but we have prophets who have provided us food, if we will partake of it.  Read our scriptures, listen to conference, go to church.  It's all the normal answers that are easy to think of, but hard to actually Do.

We have setbacks, but we don't let them end us. 

In the movie, in one part, the end blows off his temporary housing, exposing his entire shelter to the elements.  It destroys his farming operation and seemingly annihilates his chances for survival.  But he doesn't give up.  He despairs, he sobs like a baby, but he goes (figuratively) on his knees and communicates to NASA and tells them what happened.  He has done all he can, and he has failed.  Now NASA has to change its plan to save him.  And they do.  In the same way, we can do our best, and sometimes we will fail.  It may be circumstance that conspire against us, or it may be our own mistakes.  But if we go humbly to our knees and we pray for help, God will answer.  He will revise His plan when he needs to and He will save us just the same.  It may not be easy, and it wasn't for Matt, but if we don't give up, it won't end us.

One small point here, too, is that Matt's character didn't expect NASA to do it all, or even do most of the work required to get him home.  He didn't expect his crew to save him.  He did everything in his power, and the crew did what he absolutely couldn't.  He lifted 200 pound machinery, moved things around, repaired stuff, drove for months on end, almost starved with rationing, and in the end, he poked a hole in his own suit to close the gap between where he was, and where his crew had made it to pick him up.  He sacrificed and worked, and toiled at every turn.  We must all do the same, our very best, give our all, because otherwise, we won't become who we must to get home.

I just love the themes of the movie.  The worth of one person, and his capacity to hope.  The importance of believing in others.  There is one line I guess I'll close with.  It was hilarious but it also made me think.  In one spot, he's contemplating this task that he's not sure he can complete, to travel for weeks on end in the Rover that was intended for short trips, in order to get to the other launch site across Mars.  He says he's glad that he literally has the greatest minds on Earth working on this problem.  Unfortunately, all they've come up with is that he should drill some holes in the top of the Rover and hit it with a big rock.

Sometimes when we ask for help, God will give it to us, but it won't be in the glorious, amazing, or miraculous ways we expect.  It won't be glamorous.  It probably won't be easy, and it won't be elegant.  But we need to remember that God knows and loves us and he's guiding our steps, even when they aren't down a gold brick road.  If we will listen to Him and trust that He loves us, He will be there for us every step of that path.  He will get us back home.