I had a friend who wrote about how when she was four years old, it seemed forever until her next birthday or Christmas. After all, a year in the life of a four year old is a fourth of their life.
It seemed to her that as she got older, the time until Christmas or a birthday became shorter. After all, when she was 80, a year was only 1/80th of her life. When compared to the time, when she was a young child it was like Christmas and Birthdays were coming twice a month.
That got me to thinking about how a year will be in the hereafter, when we have even more time. For example in 800 years, one year is 1/800 of the time we have had. That is 1/800 or 200 times shorter than one year in the life of a child. In 8,000 years it is 2,000 times shorter than it was in the life of that young child..
100 years to someone who is 8,000 years old is like the time to next Christmas to someone who is 80.
That gave me some perspective. When the scriptures talk about the eternities, that is a very long time, and it makes each year even shorter in comparison.
I took my wife to France for our twentieth wedding anniversary.
As a part of the trip we went to Versailles. There we saw the palace of France’s most well known king whose nickname was “the Sun King” and we saw his famous hall of mirrors, famous because of how expensive and rare mirrors were then.
I realized a couple things. First, if I tried to put mirrors like that in my house, instead of it being considered extravagantly, it would just be tacky. Second, my house, with air conditioning and central heating and modern plumbing and my comfortable bed was more comfortable to live in and gave me a better standard of living than the Sun King had.
Louis XIV, also known as the Sun King, ruled France from 1643 to 1715. He had the highest standard of living in the world in that era.
By the time I visited his palace, just about three hundred years later, his standard went from the most extravagant and highest standard of life in the world to sub-par an ordinary life in the suburbs.
It made me think that if heaven were only four hundred years ahead of where we are now in terms of technology and understanding, then it is probably unimaginably better than our lives are, the same way that my life now, with the food I eat and air conditioning, is that much better than Louis XIV’s life was about three hundred years ago.
Then years ago, I was on listening to the radio and a story came on about an anthropologist working in the jungle. He wore a lot of mud to keep the biting insects off and he ate a lot of grubs. He also had a native guide and the two of them were visiting a tribe deeper in the jungle when they had a feast day.
In the middle of the feast, he realized it was Thanksgiving, and there he was covered in mud and eating grubs. His guide noticed the anthropologist’s expression, and nudged him.
“I know how you feel. Back home in my village our grubs taste so much better too.”
I realized that in comparison to what things were like in the pre-existence and as they will be, we are like that poor guy covered in mud and eating grubs.
There are several realizations there.
One, how short life is.
Two, how much better life could be.
Three, how even the best experiences we can have from an eternal perspective are not that far from being covered in mud and eating grubs.
It becomes tempting to use that to downplay suffering, pain and the difficulties of human existence. Which I think is a terrible mistake. It is also the reason God has given us the gift of forgetting our premortal existence.
That allows us to not treat life like a temporary thing that does not have real meaning.
Instead, we are living life in the here and now, time is real to us, and our hardships and blessings are real. The gifts we give and receive are real.
Gift giving is a part of all cultures and civilizations. People always share gifts. With gifts we strengthen friendships, express love, share gratitude and mark important events. Weddings, birthdays, and holidays, like Christmas, are marked by gifts.
Humans are not the only creatures to give gifts. Penguins give rocks to prospective mates as a part of courting. Ravens and crows give gifts to each other and have even been observed to give gifts to humans they favor. Many of the various types of apes give fruit, or grubs, to expand and create friendships.
In reflecting on this, it helps to reflect on gifts we have given. Think of the times you have found the perfect gift for someone. The times you found a gift for your mother. Gifts given to friends, children and teachers. Gifts you have given to other family members.
Think about how you felt when you found the gift you intended to give. Think about how you felt when you anticipated their getting the gift or about how you felt when someone gave you the perfect gift.
I’m sure everyone in the audience has had gifts that they have received and treasured.
God gives us gifts too, which is the topic of the talk I was assigned to give.
Thinking about gifts helps us to understand the three parts of gift giving and receiving as laid out by Elder Patrick Kearon.
First, there is the giving of a gift, where someone selects, prepares or creates a gift and gives it to the person they want to have the gift. There is intent to give a gift.
Second, accepting and recognizing the gift where the person receiving the gift accepts the gift and recognizes that it is a gift.
Third, receiving the gift. That is more than just unwrapping a gift or recognizing that someone has given you a gift. It is understanding that you have received something of value and completing the circle by expressing gratitude.
In many ways, to receive a gift is the intentional part of the process, beyond merely having a gift in your possession. Reception is the word used for when a gift strengthens the bonds between the giver and the receiver. It is when the gift cycle moves from acceptance to connection.
This step becomes important as we consider gifts from God.
There is much in our lives that consists of gifts from our Heavenly Father to us.
This begins with being able to be in this life and to experience it as real and meaningful.
When you trip and fall, your trip, your fall, and your pain are all real and meaningful. When you have loss or pain or care or suffering, it is real, it has meaning. It is not that the pain you have is transitory and won’t matter in a thousand years, because you do not remember a thousand years, that is not your current state. You remember this life and what you have lived.
So the first gift we have from God is that what we experience is real and it is meaningful in the lives we remember and the lives that we have.
The next or second gift is that just as our lives are real and meaningful, so are the lives of those we meet and those we know in this life.
When I give a gift or do something, while from an eternal perspective my gift may be the same as a feast of grubs, in the present time and perspective my gift is meaningful. When I buy my grandchild a swim suit, from an eternal perspective it might not be much better than a coat of mud given to an anthropologist.
But in the present, to my grandchild, it means something, it is real to them.
The third gift we have is that the good things we have in life that we take pleasure in, those things are real to us and we can appreciate them and be grateful.
I can be grateful for my clothes. I can be grateful for my home.
When I was younger and my dad gave me a Chevy Vega, I could be grateful for it. When I had a chance to watch television on a black and white TV that was 10” across, I could be grateful and I could enjoy it.
Each of us can take joy and be happy in the moment.
We can give and receive gifts, and we can take this life as a gift and see it as a joyful thing in the present.
We can also accept and experience the losses and pains we have in the present as real and we can have compassion for the real losses and pains others feel.
With a perspective that comes from not remembering thousand of years in the past, we can be in the present and be there for each other, with real kindness and empathy. We can focus on the here and now. When we focus on this life—instead of the hereafter—we are present for ourselves and we are present for others.
We are involved.
Beyond the present, we can also expand our understanding of the gifts God has for us as our parent and in giving us Christ.
First, that means we can accept that we are really God’s children and the truth that God loves us.
Second, we can accept and receive that, to pull from scripture “In the gift of his Son hath God prepared [for us] a more excellent way” .
That is important because without this perspective, knowledge can make us miserable. That is because so much in life is painful, filled with loss and unfair.
Paul said that without the gift of Christ we would be of all mankind the most unhappy and the most miserable.
This is because the gospel lets us know both what can be and what should be. It highlights what is wrong and what is unfair. The pain and the loss that comes to the world, the same pain and loss we experience and that we are taught to have compassion for in others.
Without Christ, we have only the unfairness, pain and loss.
But with Christ we have the gift of the son of God, his love, his forgiveness and his healing.
It is also the knowledge that it is a gift.
We need not be “deserving” of that gift. We do not need to deserve love or to be a child of God. The truth is that none of us receives that gift because we are deserving. Instead we receive it through Christ freely as a gift.
That is important.
We did not have to be deserving to have the gift of forgetting so that we could appreciate the world we are in.
We did not have to earn the gift of our lives being meaningful and real. We only have to realize and accept that our lives are meaningful and real.
We did not have to earn the gift of being able to take joy in the lives we have. We only have to realize and accept the joy in the lives that we have.
We do not need to be deserving to be children of our heavenly father or to have hope in Christ.
Instead, we need to accept and recognize that we are children of our Heavenly father and that Christ came to give us hope.
We then complete that cycle by being grateful for the love of God and Christ and giving place for it in our hearts.
So God has given us many gifts. He deserves a thank you note.
We can recognize the gifts God has given us. We can recognize the gift of a real and meaningful life. We can recognize the joys we find in life. We can recognize that we are children of our heavenly Father and finally, we can recognize that Christ was given to us to bless and heal us.
Then we complete the cycle by understanding that we have received gifts that have value and we complete the circle by expressing gratitude to God.
That allows us to constantly accept and be grateful for the many gifts God has given.
In the name of God’s greatest gift, Jesus Christ, Amen.
Stephen M (Ethesis)
Monday, May 26, 2025
How to Accept and be grateful for the many gifts God has given (Sacrament Talk May 25, 2025)
Tuesday, September 26, 2023
My blogging history (old links).
- My attempt at a backpacking blog for when we started trying to do a through hike is at https://ethesis.wordpress.com/
- My Trail Space trail journal entrees begin at https://www.trailjournals.com/journal/entry/596552
- My first blog started in 1997 at http://adrr.com/living/one.htm
- I followed that up at http://ethesis.blogspot.com/
- (still current) I’m a sometimes part of a group blog at https://wheatandtares.org/author/ethesis/
- My Appalachian Trail photo album on Facebook.
- I also have Pacific Coast Trail photo album and plan to start a Continental Divide Trail album in 2024.
I'm suddenly back involved with gaming.
- Rarely at http://apostephen.blogspot.com/
- More often at https://www.facebook.com/groups/829726510438199
- Including a lot of files at https://www.facebook.com/groups/829726510438199/files
- How I used to feel: What happened that I stopped work on this gaming? The link explains everything, but basically in a five year period I buried three children. Do I plan to start work again on a fantasy setting or as a game designer? Who knows, perhaps some. I had a good run though if nothing else comes of the projects I'm involved in.
- After everything went dark, Doug Rhea contacted me to participate in NTRPG Con and a lot changed
- https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=d20%27s%20h%20pageiking
- My current backpacking blog: https://adrr.com/d20/
Sacrament talk on coveting
I
was asked to talk on the tenth and final commandment “Thou shall not covet.”
The
Hebrew word translated "covet" is chamad (חמד) which is commonly
translated into English as "covet", "lust", and
"strong desire." The word means yearn to
possess or have (something). In the
tenth commandment we are warned not to year to possess or have things that
others already have. Not their husband
or wife. Not their house. Not those who
work for them. Not their mode of
transportation or the things they use to earn a living or anything else.
It is interesting that Elder Tom Perry stated
that of the ten commandments, too often people dismissed the tenth as one that
they do not find important. He warned
that Coveting, or envying something that belongs to another, is damaging to the
soul. It can consume our thoughts and plague us with constant unhappiness and
dissatisfaction. It often leads to other sins and to financial indebtedness.
Traditionally
in Christianity the commandment to not covet has been linked to with the command to "love your
neighbor as yourself." That is, to long
for things that are another’s is the opposite of loving them, to not covet what
others have is the first step towards loving them.
In addition, not coveting is to avoid the first
step that leads to other sins.
In traditional Judaism, coveting was seen as
the first step that led to theft or murder.
Coveting also leads to entanglement in the world. Christ spoke on this very point in
response to someone who interrupted Christ giving a sermon about relying on the
Spirit. The man interrupted to ask about
the man’s brother’s refusal to divide an inheritance with him.
Let
me read from the scriptures to you, from the Gospel of Luke.
13 And one of the company said unto
him, Master, speak to my brother, that he divide the inheritance with me.
14 And he said unto him, Man, who made
me a judge or a divider over you?
15 And he said unto them, Take heed,
and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of
the things which he possesseth.
16 And he spake a parable unto them,
saying, The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully:
17 And he thought within himself,
saying, What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?
18 And he said, This will I do: I will
pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits
and my goods.
19 And I will say to my soul, Soul,
thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and
be merry.
20 But God said unto him, Thou fool,
this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things
be, which thou hast provided?
21 So is he that layeth up treasure
for himself, and is not rich toward God.
22 And he said unto his disciples,
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat;
neither for the body, what ye shall put on.
23 The life is more than meat, and the
body is more than raiment.
24 Consider the ravens: for they
neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth
them: how much more are ye better than the fowls?
25 And which of you with taking
thought can add to his stature one cubit?
26 If ye then be not able to do that
thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?
27 Consider the lilies how they grow:
they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these.
28 If then God so clothe the grass,
which is to day in the field, and to morrow is cast into the oven; how much
more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith?
Christ
warns against coveting because Coveting causes us to focus on things, and to
treat people as things. Coveting causes us to not trust or follow God.
To
better illustrate Coveting I am going to go to some stories in the Bible.
I
will start with the story of Cain and Abel from Moses Chapter 5.
32 And Cain went into the
field, and Cain talked with Abel, his brother. And it came to pass that while
they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him.
33 And Cain agloried in that
which he had done, saying: I am free; surely the bflocks of my
brother falleth into my hands.
There
are many reasons why Cain slew Abel, but a key facet is that he gloried in the
result, that he took possession of the flocks that were his brother’s. Coveting and greed were a part in what led
him to murder.
There
is another story.
There
was a king. He had two generals. The grand daughter of one of the generals was
the daughter of another general and was married to the equivalent of the king’s
head of Seal Team Six. They called the
elite of the elite something else in those days, but comparing them to our Seal
Team Six captures the heart of what it meant to be the elite of the elite, a
mighty man at the hand of the king.
The
married daughter’s home was within the walls of the Inner part of the city, a
hill top reserved for the king and those very important to him.
You
probably know this as the story of David and Bathsheba. Not only did David have
Bathsheba’s husband murdered, but as a result he turned two of his generals
away from him, another of his sons rebelled against him, most of his wives were
separated from him, and his reign was almost extinguished.
David’s
son Solomon killed another one of David’s sons, Adonijah, for coveting the
throne and David’s last wife. Coveting brought ruin and disaster upon most of
David’s house, much of it in his life, and the rest not that long after his
death.
God
even called the prophet Nahum to chastise David for coveting.
Later,
in the book of Micah, God called the Prophet Micah to chastise those who led
the people of Israel for coveting. He
said.
1 Woe to them that devise iniquity,
and work evil upon their beds! when the morning is light, they practise it,
because it is in the power of their hand.
2 And they covet fields, and take them
by violence; and houses, and take them away: so they oppress a man and his
house, even a man and his heritage
Coveting
led the leaders to take action, the action included violence and oppressing
through the governmental system so that they could take possession of what the
common people had.
Looking
to the New Testament, when the Apostles met and decided to focus on what was
important to keep from the Old Law, Paul summarized the laws that were critical
in Romans Chapter 13:
8 Owe no man anything, but to love one
another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.
9 For this, Thou shalt not commit
adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false
witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is
briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself.
10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbor:
therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.
From
these stories and that summary, we can take away the following points about
coveting:
1
Coveting is a strong desire to possess
something that someone else has rather than just to have something. Not “I want a car” for example, but rather “I
want that car that belongs to someone else.”
2
Coveting is never satisfied, it never
has enough.
3
Coveting goes beyond just desire to
dwelling on the desire and seeking ways to fulfill it at the expense of
others. All of the examples of coveting
in the scriptures involve theft or murder or other methods of extorting results
in order to have what the person is seeking—the property and relationships of
someone else.
4
Coveting takes us away from God.
I
would also note that coveting does not make us happy.
My
undergraduate degree was in Applied Economics.
A part of economics I always liked, even if it was all done by graduate
students which I never was, is called experimental economics where economists
try things out to see what happens.
So
they might compare having someone pan handling outside a bakery and then panhandling
next to a sewer to see how that affects the amount of money they make. Or they might see how paying tithing affects
people economically. They might study
what winning the lottery does for people and if it makes them happy.
Spoiler
alert. Winning the lottery, even tens or
hundreds of millions of dollars, doesn’t make people happier for longer than
about a year.
Economists
have also studied many factors that go into what causes happiness.
One
result of this research is that we have an area of hard science that deals with
happiness. One interesting outcome of
that science is that it is now well established that people who live beneath
their means are happier than people who live at their means or above their
means.
We
know that making more money makes people happier until they are making around
$60,000.00 a year and then more money doesn’t mean more happiness.
And
we know that the emotions and mental states that go into coveting the
possessions and relationships of others makes people unhappy and that actually
getting the things that were coveted doesn’t make people happy.
Coveting
is a way to become profoundly unhappy.
So,
what does the command to not covet mean, what is its significance?
Coveting
is a gateway to sin, whether the sins be those of violence, theft or coercion.
Coveting
leads us not to love God or our neighbors.
Coveting
leads us to not trust or accept God.
And
coveting makes us unhappy.
Avoiding
covetousness makes us happier, more able to love God and our neighbors and more
able to avoid other sins.
I
leave you with this, in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.
Sunday, December 19, 2021
Just had the best birthday I've had in my life. I'm grateful for that.
And Win is the best part of my life, which continues to improve, even thought I'm now 66.
When I was new to grief I also began to gnash my teeth, grinding them, without being aware of it. My dentist pointed it out to me and I was able to quit grinding them during the day, but not at night.
I started using guards at that point. The ones you can buy in a drug store would last a night or two. I ended up with very hard plastic ones from my dentist.
Then in 2019, while hiking on the Appalachian Trail, I lost my guard and replaced it with what I could, a soft one from a drug store. It is now 2021. I've basically had two of them, one of which I lost rather than using up. I've gone from getting a couple days out of one to a couple years or more -- the physical side effect of grief that has been a barometer for me has had marked changes.
Other things are better as well. I can enjoy my birthday and the holiday season does not fill me with sorrow.
--So an update.
I'm really enjoying my life right now, much of it revolving around helping out with the grandchildren.
I'm doing so much better now. It is like I've crossed an infinite distance.
So, I'm providing a summary here, where my grief and related blogging transitioned, to let people know where I am now.
My blogging history (old links).
- My attempt at a backpacking blog for when we started trying to do a through hike is at https://ethesis.wordpress.com/
- My Trail Space trail journal entrees begin at https://www.trailjournals.com/journal/entry/596552
- My first blog started in 1997 at http://adrr.com/living/one.htm
- I followed that up at http://ethesis.blogspot.com/
- (still current) I’m a sometimes part of a group blog at https://wheatandtares.org/author/ethesis/
- My Appalachian Trail photo album on Facebook.
I'm suddenly back involved with gaming.
- Rarely at http://apostephen.blogspot.com/
- More often at https://www.facebook.com/groups/829726510438199
- Including a lot of files at https://www.facebook.com/groups/829726510438199/files
- How I used to feel: What happened that I stopped work on this gaming? The link explains everything, but basically in a five year period I buried three children. Do I plan to start work again on a fantasy setting or as a game designer? Probably not, but you are welcome to pick up where I left off. I had a good run.
- But then Doug Rhea contacted me to participate in NTRPG Con and a lot changed
- https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=d20%27s%20h%20pageiking
- My current backpacking blog: https://adrr.com/d20/
Sunday, August 23, 2020
From my mission.
Thanks to President & Sister Siddoway and the A.P.'s who put this together originally, and to President Siddoway for the enormous amount of work it was for him to make a copy for Kris Morgan Cunningham, and then thanks to her for getting it to me so that I could get it to you!!! :)
Parts 1-2: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-parts-1-…
Part 3: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-part-3.p…
Part 4: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-part-4.p…
Part 5: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-part-5.p…
Parts 6-7: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-parts-6-…
Parts 8-9: https://thesoleacademy.com/…/1975-Pageant-Workbook-parts-8-…