Small?

I had to teach a lesson to the women at church yesterday, using four talks from the most recent General Conference. Remember me mentioning them? (Look below.) Did you read them? Did you even click on them? I know you're busy. But, really, they're so good.

My topic for the lesson was Agency. Agency in a Mormon sense though - the ability and privilege God gives us to choose and "to act for [ourselves] and not to be acted upon." Agency is to act with accountability and responsibility for our actions.  (from Elder Hales)

Did you know some people don't understand agency in that way?
(But that's not my point at the moment. Just read Elder Hales' talk.)

Anyways, I've been thinking a lot about choice and decisions. Agency was something our Heavenly Father gave us. He wants us to choose, on our own, to follow his commandments. But we are not perfect. Sometimes we follow them and sometimes we don't. Each day though, we make tons of decisions, that, whether we realize it or not, truly show our level of committment to God.

Remember that old seminary scripture in Matthew (6:24)?

        No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

So, I was thinking about the decisions we make. Some are big and some are small. It doesn't matter what diapers I buy for the kids. It doesn't matter if my shoes are brown or red. But some things do matter, don't they?

(I'm assuming here that you're nodding your head in agreement with me.)

Now, here's the thing. Satan is miserable and wants us to be miserable too. He didn't want us to have agency, but we have it. He still doesn't want us to have agency, and spends all his time trying to find ways for us to give it up - through temptations and addictions. He is very clever. He is very smart.

(By the way, did you read Elder Ballard's talk about addictions? Read it.)

It dawned on me that one of the ways Satan gets to me is through "small" things. I make decisions each day that I think are small and inconsequential, but in reality, their effects are pretty big.
   
Example: I usually don't each lunch when my kids do. I'm busy feeding the baby her mashed up baby food and pouring more water and getting more food for them all. My chance to eat comes during quiet time/nap time. But that is MY TIME. My special, limited, finite amount of time to work on a lesson, a project, the bills, take a nap, read a book or whatever. It's special because I get to be BY MYSELF. And I don't want anything getting in the way. Including lunch. Sometimes I don't want to take the ten minutes to make something for me and eat it. So I don't. I grab a cheesestick and call it good. And then guess what? By around 4:30pm I am grumpy because I am hungry. When I am grumpy I have less patience with the kids. I am not the mom I could be. Pair my grumpiness with dinner prep, homework, cleaning up the day's mess of toys and tired kids, and you've got a scary combination.

So, it happens once. No big deal. I had a bad day. I move on.

But what if I started doing this every day? What if the only time Emily was home each day, I was always grumpy and impatient? 

My seemingly "small" decision to not eat lunch, suddenly has big side effects. I'm not being the mother I ought to be. My children have to suffer through my grumpiness because I wouldn't take ten minutes to throw something down my throat.

How sad is that?

There are other things in my life too, that I've realized I should change. (I used to think the time of day I read the scriptures didn't really matter, as long as I read them each day, but I've realized that it actually makes a huge difference.)

So, what's my point? That Satan is clever and determined. Very clever. I was convinced these choices didn't matter. They really do. He's "battling" (as Elder Ballard put it) for our agency everyday. Yet, we can beat him.

President Packer said this:
"The old saying “The Lord is voting for me, and Lucifer is voting against me, but it is my vote that counts” describes a doctrinal certainty that our agency is more powerful than the adversary’s will."

And President Monson, our prophet, summed it up best when he said, "Decisions do determine destiny."



**So there you have it. The Reader's Digest version of what I've been thinking and reading about the past week. (And I ate my lunch while I typed, I'll have you know.) :)


And it's your choice what you do with it. :)