From Dream to Reality

If you think it, it becomes a dream.
If you write it down, it becomes a plan.
If you tell someone, it becomes a commitment!

Freedom.....

Neal A. Maxwell

All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience

"As one who suffered much in a concentration camp, Victor Frankl observed that the one freedom that conditions cannot take from us is our freedom to form a healthy attitude toward those very conditions, grim as those may sometimes be."

Be the House.....

C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity, pg 174

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently, He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of  --- throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace."

God's Love For Us!

"The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched. God will tutor us by trying us because He loves us, not because of indifference!"

Eric Hoffer

Suffering....

Neal A. Maxwell

All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience

The myopic and despairing soul-cry and question, "If there is a God, why does He permit suffering?" reflects a basic failure to understand the very nature of life with its components of chastening and suffering. And as for that question, it is not difficult to imagine who originated it, however understandably sincere some are who now raise it. The question strikes at the heart of Father's plan, because it comes from him who rejected that plan!.....Thus the relentless love of our Father in heaven is such that in Hisomniscience, He will not allow the cutting short some of the brief experiences we are having here. To do so would be to deprive us of everlasting experiences and great joy there. What else would an omniscient and loving Father do, even if we plead otherwise? He must at times say no.

Furthermore, since there was no exemption from suffering for Christ, how can there be one for us? Do we really want immunity from adversity? Especially when certain kinds of suffering can aid our growth in this life? To deprive ourselves of those experiences, much as we might momentarily like to, would be to deprive ourselves of the outcomes over which we shouted with anticipated joy when this life's experiences were explained to us so long ago, in the world before we came here.

We Are Not Our Own.....

Neal A. Maxwell

All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience

There is little doubt, for instance, but that a goodly portion of our pride proceeds from some assuptions we make about ourselves and our lives - assumptions that are at first soothing but very wrong. We think, for instance, that we "own" ourselves. It is perfectly true that our individual identity is guaranteed, that we are agents for ourselves, and so forth - but this truth, when it is torn away from otherrealities, gives us a very lopsided view of things. Without the ransoming atonement of the Savior, we would be stranded soulds, doomed to die with no hope of the resurrection or of individual immortality. We were literally purchased by Jesus. (Acts 20:28)

Quite true, we do not yet have to acknowledge that reality, though someday we will. Nor are we now even forced to follow the conditions that the Purchaser laid down. So, in a sense, we are quite free to do as we please, just as if we were our "own"......

This illusion underwrites the false assumptions that we make about our time, our talents, and our possessions that each of us sees as "mine." We may even feel noble when we give of our time and means, and  we are apt to be somewhat grumpy if anyone, especially a prophet, reminds us that all that we have belongs to God anyway......

these are hard sayings that bruise our pride. Unless, unless, through humility and obedience, we can transform feeling owned into a grand sense of belonging, and being purchased into gratitude for being rescued, and dependency into appreciation for being tutored by an omniscient God, which He does in order that we might become more dependable and have more independence and scope for service in the future.