a gospel poet, in case you didn't know it

since this is my journal, i thought i would start posting the talks and lessons i prepare for church. i have a bunch saved on my computer that are doing me no good there. my children will never go back and search my files to see if i saved my talks, but they love reading the blog so hopefully they will come back to this and read their mother's testimony and love for the gospel of Jesus Christ and my love for preparing and giving talks. they probably could all use some healthy editing, but this blog and my gospel study is always a work in progress. 

          I am speaking today on judging good and evil in today’s information overloaded world.  I’m going to focus on how we can judge and modify our use of social media. A good portion of my talk comes from “things as they really are” by elder Bednar. I highly suggest you go home and read it or listen to it. It takes 38 minutes. The scriptural verses I have been assigned are Moroni 7:15-16,

15 For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that ye may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night.

16 For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God

          Using that verse, we have a lot to break down and talk about today. First of all, we have a TON of information at our fingertips. Literally at our fingertips. Computers are prolific. Everything is “smart” these days. Smart phones, smart houses, SIRI, alexa, echo. Google is used as a verb. We all have stories of having conversations about things we are interested in an then that very thing shows up as an ad on our sidebar. All of this is incredible and amazing and essential to the spreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. All of this is happening because of the gospel of Jesus Christ. I’m not here to tell you to shun any of the positives of technological development. But even the positives can be ill-used.  I’m here to discuss was to ensure that we’re all using it wisely and appropriately. Secondly, Moroni uses the word judge 3 times in that set of verses. He outlines how to judge and the ways to judge. But, judge is a touchy word in this day and age. We hear it all the time in all sorts of contexts. As Moroni discusses it, he states, judging is that “he may know good from evil”. I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of having an opinion or defending a belief and heard someone reply, “but you can’t judge me!” That can be scary! It can be overwhelming. The distinction that needs to be made is that we aren’t judging people. But we have to be able to use the Spirit to make judgment calls to protect our own salvation. There is room to make a judgment call on a situation without condemning another person. We do not make final judgements.

Elder Bednar asks a couple of questions to help us better judge what we should be doing with technology:

1.   Does the use of various technologies and media invite or impede the constant companionship of the Holy Ghost in your life?

If we are using technology wisely, we will see that information will lead to inspiration. Inspiration is from the Holy Ghost. Based on what you have viewed or entertained yourself with, how do you feel? Do you feel companionship of the Holy Ghost? If you are “researching” as we all do as we fall down rabbit holes of information, do you feel better or worse? The prophet Prophet Joseph: “All beings who have bodies have power over those who have not. The devil has no power over us only as we permit him; the moment we revolt at anything which comes from God, the devil takes power.” Yikes, folks! In contrast, “every thing which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ”

How often do we permit the adversary to have power over us? It doesn’t even have to be major indiscretions that keep us from the Spirit. Oftentimes it is simply time wasting or devoting too much time to things of little personal improvement or eternal consequence. Lehi’s dream illustrates this point, in 1 nephi 8:23 we read, “And it came to pass that there arose a mist of darkness; yea, even an exceedingly great mist of darkness, insomuch that they who had commenced in the path did lose their way, that they wandered off and were lost.”

When we are not clinging to the iron rod, we are permitting Satan to have influence over us. There’s a famous quote we hear all the time, “Not all who wander are lost.” Sorry, JRR Tolkien fans and hobbits everywhere, some who wander ARE lost. When we allow things to become more important than the the gospel, we have given our power and right to choose away.

2.   Does the time you spend using various technologies and media enlarge or restrict your capacity to live, to love, and to serve in meaningful ways?

a.    I want to tell you a story about me in the 6^th grade. I love to read and I love to draw. I spent all my time in these two capacities, so much that I never did school work and was failing several classes. I had become entrenched in only the things I enjoyed doing and had no patience for anything else required of me. When my parents approached me, which is a nice way of saying, meted out punishment for my lack of discipline, I was SHOCKED! I actually said, “but no one on TV gets grounded!” My mother had the eye roll heard round the world. I couldn’t believe that I was getting in trouble. In all the 30 minute sitcoms that I loved watching, no one ever got into trouble. Things were lovingly resolved in 30 minutes. I specifically recall my favorite show, “growing pains” with kirk Cameron, that Jason and Maggie seaver always laugingly dealt with their children’s comical hijinks! That fictionalized TV family distracted me from living and loving and serving in meaningful. I had no concept that the reality I constructed in my head was way off the mark from true reality. But this still happens all the time. We all do this to an extent. We allow the influence of media to make us believe our lives should be a certain way, things should happen easily and in great outfits. We see pictures of beautiful families only having wonderful times on extravagant vacations eating decadent food and never gaining any weight. I can attest that is alllllllll lies. I just got back from a family vacation and though I love my family and we did some fun things, I was dirty and sweaty and I cried every single day. Nobody shows the pictures on Instagram of kids getting sick on planes, or spouses receiving work assignments while everyone else can go to the beach. We cannot fully live, love and serve our families or those around us if our expectations are so skewed by the false projections from social media. We can never be happy if we only ascribe to false expectations and do not allow ourselves to see things as they really are.

b.   This is especially true about how relationships are portrayed on reality shows, sitcoms and social media. Everyone is beautiful on TV. No one is interested in a love story between a less than well coifed looking couple. Everyone worthy of love on TV has gigantic shiny white straight teeth, an incredible wardrobe, a gown for every rose ceremony, abs that you could do laundry on and some mythical job that allows them to be gone for 6-8 weeks competing for the love of a perfect stranger with dates that all involve a helicopter ride. I’m here for the helicopter ride. Of course, all the contestants are “there for the right reasons”. If  these contestants were truly there for the right reasons, they would be signing up for a TV show that involved couples learning to cook a meal together, balancing a budget, eating a hurried meal as one spouse walks in the door before the other spouse leaves for an evening of meetings at the church, finding perpetually lost keys, lots of diapers, lots of sleepless nights and lots of work at communicating. And these are the good marriages!

In the words of Jenkins Lloyd Jones,

“There seems to be a superstition among many thousands of our young [men and women] who hold hands and smooch in the drive-ins that marriage is a cottage surrounded by perpetual hollyhocks to which a perpetually young and handsome husband comes home to a perpetually young and [beautiful] wife. When the hollyhocks wither and boredom and bills appear the divorce courts are jammed. …

“Anyone who imagines that bliss [in marriage] is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed.

“[The fact is] most putts don’t drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. …

“Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed.

“The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride”

3.   My question is how? How do we rifle through the glut of information that we are bombarded with on a daily, even hourly basis?

a.    We have to invite the Spirit into our lives on a daily and even hourly basis. To be able to see things as they really are, we must use the lens of the Spirit to view them. To be able to discern whether we are looking at daylight or dark night.

b.   We need to program our technology to be instruments of the Spirit. We need to remove apps that take away from wise use of technology and we need unburden ourselves from dependence on social media. If it’s an app you enjoy but don’t use wisely, remove it for spans of time. Sometimes, I remove a certain app during the day and then allow myself to reload in the evenings if I have completed my chores. President nelson recently challenged us in June to take a 7 day social media fast. To “take a break from the fake.” The first thing I said was, I’ll start that NEXT week after I take care of a few things on social media. After I realized the absolute absurdity of this statement, because what things did I need to “take care of on social media”, I deleted Instagram from my phone. Instagram is my social media drug of choice because if I wanted to see my family members fight about politics, I’d go to their houses. Perhaps if you also participated in the social media fast, you noticed what my friends and I noticed. We stopped what we were doing periodically and checked our phones for no good reason. There was no chime of email or text, but we felt tethered to checking for information on our phones.  This is the BURDEN of social media. It took 2 or 3 days of this phone checking withdrawal to subside. Is checking social media an unrighteous thing? No, but do we have this same tether to our scriptures? If we are to make our technology our tether TO the gospel, we can make our home screen a picture of the Savior or a scripture we are ponderizing. In the October 2015 general conference, elder durrant challenged us to ponderize a scripture each week. I’m sure most of us embarked on this challenge with gusto, but we’ve probably lost steam on this challenge in recent years. In order to judge righteously all the information we receive on a daily basis, let’s start with ponderizing our scriptures on our phones. Here’s one, Moroni 7:15-16, the scripture from my talk today! See what I did there?

c.    Another thing I do each morning is to listen to a conference talk while I do my hair and makeup. 15 minutes for hair and 15 minutes for makeup. That’s two talks! My day is started in the right direction and the Spirit has been invited in to help me make righteous judgments and I got ready for the day.

d.   When we are working on building our testimony, are we turning to sources of truth? Elder Neal A. Maxwell once said, “Studying the Church … through the eyes of its defectors is like interviewing Judas to understand Jesus. Defectors always tell us more about themselves than about that from which they have departed.” In the first vision, when Joseph Smith asked which church he was to join, the response was none of them because though they had some truth, the did not have the fullness of the gospel, which Joseph Smith was to restore. We need to use this same criteria in our search for truth. We will not find the answers we seek if we do not go to the source of all light an knowledge. Our testimonies cannot be built on someone’s opinion or blog post. But our testimonies can most certainly be swayed if we give someone’s opinion or blog post too much importance in our lives. Plants grow when fed sunlight and water, they will not grow when fed sunlight and water and gasoline. We are the same. A ship a few degrees off course will only become more off course unless the course is corrected.

In conclusion, what is my message to you? Choose wisely. The gift of agency is to not be taken lightly. As a younger person, I could drive wherever I needed to while driving with my radio blasting at deafening volumes. It didn’t bother me. I would laugh at my mom who often needed to turn the radio down in order to concentrate on driving. That me is now. I often need the quiet, so I can concentrate on what is really important, arriving safely. That is my message. Do not let the noise of the world distract you from concentrating on your journey. Use information wisely and turn down what is not. Delete it. Abandon it if you have to.