Thursday, November 11, 2010

Reflections


Not to be too cliche' or to beat the dead horse of mission talk, but I have come to ponder and reflect on my mission over and over again as time goes by. In all reality, there isn't a day that goes by where I don't think of my mission in some form or fashion. My first Mission President, President Albert E. Haines III, used to always call it the "laboratory for life." I've come to appreciate that analogy as I've seen the controls and variables of my mission consequentially poke their head out in the practicality of 'real life.' I talk to my friends, brother, sister, roommate, professors, church leaders, etc. every day, and in each of those conversations it seems that I cannot get away from the oftly repeated phrase, "On my mission..." Now unless you've been on a mission, and I mean really been on one, not only go to the MTC, use the plane ticket to wherever, and live in some place for two years; what I'm talking about is the full immersion of self in service, to take your heart and put it in the Lord's hands and allow Him to mold it more than almost any other experience allows you to; unless you've done that, you can't know exactly why that phrase lights itself in my conversations so oft, or why others seem to do it repeatedly as well. My mission has accentuated every good trait that God has blessed me with and has exterminated many of the ill ones I lived with for the first 18 years of my life; if it did not exterminate it, it tempered and dulled it to less than it was. Every facet of my being has been enlightened by the experience and has illuminated my life from the inside growing outward. The profundity of it is to see my life's abrupt change from a mediocre boy to a motivated man. "I know that I am nothing, as to my strength I am weak, therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast in my God, for in His strength I can do all things." (Alma 26:12) This is my secret to happiness and the change that has been wrought. I can equate all of the trouble I have caused myself to selfishness and pride. Humility on the other hand, has only ever contributed to the furthering of my happiness. This lesson alone takes most men decades to realize, if some even ever realize it at all. This is only one of the many thousands of principles that so transfigured my life when I lived in Chicago. So in the faces of scorn which respond to my repetition of "On my mission..." will I smirk at their ignorance and hopefully portray to them some of the joy, nostalgia, and impact which this statement induces within my soul.

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