Making Christmas about Christ

Today forget all your worries of the world. Clear your mind and think of your Savior Jesus Christ. Imagine Him; think of Him as your older brother with the best expression of love for each one of you. Someone that accepts you with all your defects and appreciates all your qualities. Think of His power and glory, and all that He created and all He’s given you. Imagine that He smiles to you. Think of the life you have, in the marvelous world you are in with the flowers, trees, the sun, the moon, and the stars, and all that He has offered you. Think of your family, your friends, your parents, your brothers, your sisters, your children, your husband, your wife.

Think of the great example that Jesus Christ left you. Think of His sacrifice and His wonderful life that He voluntarily offered to give for you. Think of the suffering that He suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which He only felt, in his anguish, in his sadness, of everything He did so that you wouldn’t have to pay the price of your sins. Think of the desire that Christ has that you return home with our Heavenly Father and with Him.

Imagine the great Prince of Peace, humbled, wearing a crown of thorns, badly treated, and not appreciated. Imagine seeing Him carry that heavy wood, when He felt the nails enter into his hands and feet. Try to see His face, the tears He quietly shed. Think of all the suffering He took upon himself.

Now, try to imagine in the distance, you see the sacrificed body of the Savior. Imagine little by little you get closer to Him and the sadness overwhelms you for the suffering He went through. Think of Him agonizing. You and He are alone, you look at Him and He looks at you. Now He sees you and smiles and whispers, “I did everything for you and I want you to never forget how much I love you.” You observe the Savior. What would you be able to tell him? Is there any other way to reach eternal life than with out Jesus Christ?

Choices and Decisions

I feel like I'm at a turning point in my life. Our lives are constantly and consistently filled with crossroads. These points in our lives are times when we must choose which path to follow. The great poet Robert Frost wrote in his famous poem, The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both.

And by one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear

Through as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

--Robert Frost

Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter--certain hinge points in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while other seconds are spent so as to stretch the soul.” In the words of Elder Maxwell, there are certain points that are more important than others and thus should be given more thought and much more preparation.

In his book, Defining Moments, Hoyt W. Brewster, Jr. affirmed the words of Elder Maxwell when he wrote: “While each decision we make has an ultimate bearing on our future opportunities and blessings, certain pivotal points are critical. In these soul-defining moments, we are faced with choices that one made will, in many cases, forever open or close door of opportunity. Every moment is not equal. Some moments simply pass while other moments determine the course of life.

“History records the positive and negative results of choices that were made in defining moments of such earthly and eternal consequence—moments that mattered so very much. Adam and Eve’s choice to partake of the forbidden fruit and thus effectuate the plan that would bring each of us to earth was a hinge point of history. The scriptures remind us that “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.” (2 Nephi 2:25)

“Esau’s decision to sell his birthright for a bowl of beans, in order to satisfy a short-lived physical craving, not only shoed shortsightedness on his part but also had lasting effects on his potential posterity. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are today the children of Jacob rather than of Esau.

“How often in life have we, like Esau, bartered away something of significant, even eternal, value in order to satisfy a short-lived passion, appetite, or desire? Occasionally this bartering away of values occurs in private moments, when we succumb to personal temptation. Choices made in character-defining moments, whether public or private, determine our destiny.

“King David’s decision not only to pause and watch a woman bathing but also to pursue the evil thoughts spawned in that moment of sin led to his loss of a much more important crown than the one won on his mortal brow.

“Joseph, who was sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, was an example of one who made the right choices regardless of the sometimes unfair consequences. His steadfast refusal to submit to the seductive invitations of his master Potiphar’s wife led to her unrighteous rage toward him. Because he stood for what was right in a defining moment, Joseph was unjustly cast into a foul prison for years.

“Blessings for doing right do not always come immediately. One who stands for the right may sometimes suffer severe persecution or stand outside the popular crowd—for a few mortal moment. But the Lord has promised, “If thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high; thou shalt triumph over all thy foes” (D&C 121:8).

“The prophet Abinadi’s unwavering refusal to recant his testimony of Jesus Christ led not only to his own martyrdom but also to the conversion of a young priest named Alma. In a defining moment, one man’s death by fire kindled the flame of faith in another.

“One of the great lesions to be learned from those who have made correct choices is that they have decided on their course of action in advance. They have set their lives on such a proper path that when a moment of decision arrives, their reaction is natural. Thus, if you haven’t already done so, make the decision now that you will never barter away the standards you know to be true.”

According to Hoyt W. Brewster Jr, it is before these decisive moments arise that we must make our decision. If we wait until we’re looking it in the face, it will be too late. Neal A. Maxwell wrote, “Act now, so that a thousand years from now, when you look back at this moment, you can say this was a moment that mattered—this was a day of determination.”

Our lives are all about choices. The choice is ours.

"Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves."

It has been a long while since I blogged last. My two friends "Adventure" and "Whim" have been hanging around a lot lately...and it has been great. Three weeks ago I moved to Chicago to start an exciting new company called CLEANWRAP. (The website is www.cleanwrap.net if you want to check it out) I enjoy the spirit of entrepreneurship that everyone on the team has, its amazing. We are pinching pennies and trying to get by on our shoe-string budget. Sometimes as I lay down to sleep on the air mattress, I can't help but be reminded of the inspiring business quote by Andrew Carnegie, "Watch the costs and the profits will take care of themselves."

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are younot to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

--Marianne Williamson

Political Correctness...

I began to write a post on political correctness..but realized that Charleton Heston had already said it much better. This is taken (edited down a bit) from a speech he gave to the Harvard Law Forum on February 16, 1999.

"Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America,"We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you ... the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

"I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr.King in 1963 - long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist. I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

"From time to time, friends and colleagues, they're essentially friends from Time Magazine, say how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!" But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys - subjects bound to the British crown.

"For me, hyphenated identities are awkward ... particularly "Native-American." I'm a Native American, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife's side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American... with a capital letter on "American."

“Telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say , so telling us what to do can't be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the rightist. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it ... you are - by your grandfathers' standards - cowards.

"Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead, "Don't shoot me." If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don't let America's universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism.

"But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people. You simply ... disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King ...who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

"Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Vietnam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

"But be careful ... it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated ... to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me.

"Let me tell you a story. A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer" celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so-at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer"- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

"I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF
I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF
I'M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF
I'M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF..."

"It got worse, a lot worse. I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore.

"SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ...."

Well, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said "We can't print that." "I know," I replied, "but Time/Warner's selling it." Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warner's, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk.

"When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself ... jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors... choke the halls of the board of regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment ... march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you...petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ...boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

"So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience's of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country. If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree."

The Unexamined Life...

"The unexamined life is not worth living." --Socrates

What is an 'unexamined life'? I think it means that day-to-day, routinely repeating pattern of our lives: sleep, eat, work, eat, work, eat, sleep...repeat. All to often, we get caught up in our hectic lives that we fail to STOP and THINK. When we're young, all our choices are made for us.We're told what to wear, to eat, to learn, and to do. We get in that pattern of doing what we're told and never thinking for ourselves. When we're older, we make many more choices, yet we make these choices from a limited selection of options that our environment, our friends, our families, our employers, our teachers, or simply our habits present to us. Rarely, if ever, do we stop to reflect on what we truly want in life, on who we are and what we want to become, on what difference we want to make in the world, or on what is really right for us.

The price we pay for living an unexamined life, is precisely that, our lives. The real cost is the investment of all our energies in a direction thats not of our own choosing! Cervantes said, "Make it they business to know thyself, which is the most difficult lesson in the world."

Let us each live a life worth living. Take a moment each day to ponder about YOU. Think of what you want, what you want to become, what is really right for you. If you think you're too busy or the cost is too great, think of the real cost your paying--your entire life. After all, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

He has not left that open to us...

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." --C.S. Lewis

Flaws

Flaws, we all have them. Some are more noticeable and worse than others. While some people may be arrogant or argumentative, others are dishonest or conceited. A few are perfectionists and some are stubborn. Where some are combative or selfish, others are humorless or vain. Not everyone has every flaw, but I'm pretty sure everyone has at least a couple. Too often we are overly critical of ourselves or we always see ourselves through rose-colored glasses. Either way we stick to the ends of the spectrum and get no where productive. A few years ago I was taught to always attempt to see others as their mother's see them...and my mom thinks I'm perfect, so you get the drift. Everyone on this earth is perfectly imperfect. We all have flaws. I want to try to learn to celebrate flaws, not judge them.