Keeping Clean

Imagine. You are in school and you come home and walk into your bedroom. There is a note left on your door which reads

I will be gone for a period of time

I don't know how long I will be, but I will be back when the boss tells me to go home.

When I return home, if your room is clean to the following criteria, I will take you out for some ice cream!

Your room must

• Have nothing on the floor
• Your bed must be made neatly
• Be vacuumed
• All of your clothes washed, folded, and put away in their correct spots
• Smell nice

 I can't wait to see your clean room, but remember, if there is anything out of place, you don't get the ice cream.

          -Dad

Now, who wouldn't want to go get ice cream with their dad! So he could return at any point, it could be a couple minutes it could be weeks, you don't know! So what do you do? Wait until he get's home to throw everything under the bed and make it seem like you kept it clean? Do you work on it little by little and hope he doesn't come back before you are done? OR do you clean whatever mess is presently there, and make sure that everything stays in order at ALL times? Obviously the safest choice is the last one, and even though it requires the most effort, it is the most worthwhile path to choose. 

This can be compared to our lives. Christ told us the criteria that we need to follow. He WILL come again, we won't know the time, all we know is that He will be back. So how will you live your life? Will you keep living an unclean life and try and make things look like there is nothing wrong when the time comes, or will you try and rid yourself of vices one at a time and hope that you will repent in time and finally be ready. Or will you do what it takes NOW to clean up, get active and do what it takes to be clean and then to stay clean. My earnest prayer and desire is that we will all take this life seriously, that we will do what it takes to be living a mortal life worthy of all the blessings that our Father in Heaven is waiting to give us, namely Eternal Life. I know that this is something that is possible for ALL of us to do, no matter how messy our rooms are right now!

One Little Mistake

Lately, I have rekindled my passion for Su Doku and have been completing these puzzles as quickly as possible. If you are unfamiliar with the game of Su Doku, check out http://www.sudokudaily.net/instructions/ to learn the rules.

As I have been destroying the easier level puzzles, I have been wanting to move on to the harder ones to challenge myself. There are quite a few little lessons I learned through this game that can be applied to life! First, each action you make in the game either is the right or wrong move, there is no gray area. Placing a number in the correct spot will either work towards finishing the puzzle or it will not. Each decision to write in a number should be thoroughly contemplated and worked out to make sure that it will not mess up the rest of the puzzle.

I have made the mistake before of writing in the wrong number in the beginning of one of the harder puzzles. And tried to solve the rest of the puzzle accordingly to that move that I made. I found out about half an hour later that this one move I made had screwed up the whole rest of my game! I was devastated! All that hard work was for nothing! 

This can apply to all of our lives! If we make one seemingly small mistake without thinking it through, it can and WILL affect the decisions we make throughout the rest of our lives. And maybe you won't figure out that mistake until way later, sometimes we figure it out sooner, but in any case, it is something that needs correction! That's why they ask us to use pencils and erasers. This is how the atonement of Jesus Christ relates to all of this! We can take the eraser and wipe our mistake clean! Then we can solve the rest of the puzzle without making that same mistake again! That is the most important part of repentance in our lives! If we are to make a positive change in our lives, we should be willing to NEVER do that again. Repeating a sin that we have already repented of would be like putting that same wrong number in the same square, it just doesn't make sense!! 

When we take our time and thoughtfully complete the puzzle, it all makes sense and works out, it creates a perfect picture and is something that you can be proud of! So let us live our lives in a way that we are working towards a complete puzzle and everything will work out as it should in the end.