Ice cream

Today I went to a lecture about being true disciples of Christ. There are several steps to that, but it involves obeying with all your heart and your mind. Once you learn a principle, you are supposed to act upon that principle. How many times in my life have I said to myself, "oh yeah, I can totally do that!" and then I get lazy and give up. I'll try for a little while and then decide it is too hard. I can parallel this to my experience with ice cream. I love to dance. I love ice cream. I'm trying to eat healthier and limit my ice cream intake. However, sometimes I just completely give up and eat a huge bowl of ice cream just because I'm tired of trying. If I truly wanted to be as healthy as possible, I would learn to eat ice cream in moderation just like I've been taught.

Becoming a disciple of Christ is very similar. I've been taught to do this, that, and the other, and I want to do them. I want to be perfect and do everything I've learned; however, the learning part is the easy part. It's implementing the plan that's the hard part. I just need improvement. I think that is part of being a disciple, too. Always improving, always growing, and continually trying harder. One of my favorite sayings is, "Heavenly Father doesn't expect you to be perfect. He only expects you to be progressing." So, even though I'm sure I'll go for that big bowl of ice cream many more times in my life, I know I can at least improve my track record, and maybe one day I'll get at least a close to perfect score!

Lights

Friday night I had an adventure. I went to the birthday party of a friend from back in Memphis. I've known her for eight years, so we go back. Well, I surprised her when I showed up and the look on her face was priceless. After we caught up for a few minutes, I set my stuff down in the living room and saw a guy sitting on the couch that I knew I knew from somewhere, but I had no clue about how I knew him. He said, "I know you," and I replied, "I know you too." After several minutes we figured out that we had been in the same anatomy class last semester. I sat down on the couch and chatted with him and his roommate joined us. After some small talk, the roommate came up with a brilliant idea. He would write a story, anatomy guy would narrate it, and I would do an interpretive dance to it. It was my birthday present to Lauren. So, they wrote the story and I wasn't allowed to ready it. Then he narrated while I did an improv interpretive dance about a king who got his head eaten by a lion and then the lion was king. Really a good story. However, it was a very unique experience for me because I never put myself out in the middle of everything for everyone to see like that. And I learned something. It was a BLAST! I loved it. I made everybody at the party laugh...especially the birthday girl!

As I was thinking about this experience, Matthew 5:14-16 came to mind. It's the classic "let your light so shine before men" scripture. I thought about how I have so many talents (singing, dancing, entertaining...) that I hate to share simply because I'm scared about how people will perceive me. But if I really want to use them for good and make other people happy, I'm not allowed to hide them under a bushel. I guess it's really important to use the blessings that you have for good so that you can grow and receive more and more. All in all, it was a very fun experience and now that I've done something a little outside of my comfort zone, I'm way more likely to do it again. Maybe I can let my light brighten someone else's day!