Be Still

President Hinckley stated, " the world is so noisy. There are voices everywhere trying to influence us. We all need time to think. We need to drown out the clamor and noise and simply be quiet. We need time to ponder and meditate, and to contemplate the deeper things of life. We need time to read and to immerse ourselves in the thoughts of great minds."
-from Way to Be

At a BYU management society dinner this past year, I had the opportunity to hear Elder Ballard speak. I was impressed by his knowledge of the technical world, and of his understanding of what happens on the ever-famous w.w.w. He told us (I'm not directly quoting here) to make sure we use our blogs as missionary tools and to not be afraid of sharing our testimonies of the gospel on our blogs.

At the time I heard this I did not have a blog. And I did not intend to start one. However, the more I have thought about Elder Ballard's words, the more I have realized that I need a place to organize my thoughts on the gospel and on other things I believe to be true. I do have a personal journal that I write in often, but this blog is an attempt to share, publicly, thoughts and quotes that are important to me.

If you happen to find this blog, I hope you can find something in it that is meaningful to you. More importantly, I hope it will give your day an extra boost, and I hope it will allow you a moment to be still.

The "great mind" that has impressed me today is Chieko Okazaki. In Being Enough she said "Every living person is a child of God. But that's the beginning point, not the ending point. The ending point is to become peers of God, friends of God, coworkers with God, adults of God. He wants us to grow up, not remain children. I think that some of us sometimes regress to being two-year-olds of God and have tantrums when things don't go our way or when we get tired or scared. Some of us get stuck being teenagers of God, who just got a driver's liscense and are out to see how fast we can move our lives from one lane to the next and play some pretty reckless and heedless games with this precoious life God has given us. Some of us jump ahead and are Alzheimer's patients of God where our short-term memory is disappearing and we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again because we can't remember that the exact same thing we're doing right now didn't work before either. Some of us are junkies of God and go from one spiritual book or speaker or Education Week to another without ever thoughtfully sifting and sorting and laying out the pieces of our lives before God and asking him to help us shape these pieces into something meaningful. Some of us are workaholics of God. We plunge into our callings and our service projects and our personal gospel study and our genealogical research and God becomes somebody we meet at the drinking fountain or the copy machine long enough to gasp out a quick report before we rush off to the next project."