Sharing My Thoughts About The Bamboo Plant While In China

Multitasking

An honest and self-aware definition of multitasking would be: The art of doing multiple things poorly.

Success, Failure and Repentance.

“Success,” it has been said, “isn’t the absence of failure, but going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.”

Repentance is God’s ever-accessible gift that allows and enables us to go from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Repentance isn’t His backup plan in the event we might fail. Repentance is His plan, knowing that we will. This is the gospel of repentance, and it will be "a lifetime curriculum.”

Success is not going from failure to failure, but instead growing from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread.

Just as we need daily physical sustenance, the need for daily spiritual sustenance is just as strong. For the Children of Israel, manna was a daily reminder of the source of their blessings; today, we can remember Jesus Christ every day as we pray, read the scriptures, and meditate.

Jesus Christ gave a pattern for prayer that has become known as the Lord's Prayer. The same is recorded in Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 6:9–13). Included in the Lord's Prayer is the petition “Give us this day our daily bread".

Jesus Christ is the bread of eternal life. By following Him, remembering Him, and having faith in Him we can change and become what we aspire to become.

Text from the video: (Voice of Elder D. Todd Christofferson) I think it's not by chance God has created us in a way that we have to have daily physical sustenance. The Children of Israel coming out of Egypt lived for forty years, approximately, on something called manna. They couldn't have lived from hunting, and their lifestyle was such that they couldn't be planting, so they really didn't have an alternative. God was in essence providing their daily sustenance. And I think at least one of His purposes was to teach them to remember Him, to think of Him, to look to Him, to have faith in Him, that He was the source of their life. He did in the way of making it a daily thing; they couldn't gather up manna and store it, it would only be good for one day. They couldn't forget who was the source their blessings. There's a spiritual parallel in our day. We all recognize the need for physical sustenance; hunger and thirst remind us very strongly if we forget. But the spiritual need for sustenance is equally strong, that comes not in drinking water and eating food but in our constant daily efforts of communion with God. We ought not to think that we can go weeks and months without spiritual sustenance and not suffer, and not have a deadening influence in our spiritual life. Acknowledging the reality of our need for a daily spiritual ministration, or manna, helps us increase in our courage to do the right thing, and to serve others, more than we would have if we ignored God. People sometimes think ""Well, those are such small things; prayer, immersing ourselves in the scriptures, pondering, meditating; how can that really produce a significant difference in a person's life?"" But it does. As small as those things seem to be, as daily, routine sometimes they may seem to be, these are the kinds of things that day by day, transform us.

Some Things Matter; Some Things Don’t.

Some things matter; some things don’t.

A few things last, but most things won’t.

-Author Unknown

What matters to you? What is lasting to you? A matter of lasting value to our Heavenly Father is that we learn of Him, humble ourselves, and grow in obedience to Him through earthly experiences. He wants us to change our selfishness into service, our fears into faith. These lasting matters can test us to our core.

It is now, with our mortal limitations, that the Father asks us to love when loving is most difficult, to serve when serving is inconvenient, to forgive when forgiving is soul stretching. How? How will we do it? We earnestly reach for Heavenly Father’s help, in the name of His Son, and do things His way instead of pridefully asserting our own will.

Our challenges can pull us off this course of happiness. We can lose our trusting connection to God if trials drive us to distraction instead of sending us to our knees.

-Neill F. Marriott

Respect

"Let us look for ways we can respect differing views and still live together in society. Rather than simply living according to our own views without infringing on another’s freedoms, let us try something better—something that is fundamental in a pluralistic society if everyone is to be treated fairly. We must stand up for the basic civil rights of others, recognizing their right to express their opinions and speak up for what they believe in, if we are to expect others to stand up for our basic civil rights." —Von G. Keetch

Ignorance Is Not Bliss.

What you don't know can hurt you. 

Ignorance is not bliss. 

Ignorance can shorten your life, 

it can create disease, devastation, 

tragedy,it can leave your life empty.

So no, ignorance is not bliss! 

Learn every day.