The Triangle(s): Romance and Discipleship

Christlike staying power in romance and marriage requires more than any of us really have. It requires something more, an endowment from heaven. Remember Mormon's promise: that such love—the love we each yearn for and cling to—is "bestowed" upon "true followers of Christ." You want capability, safety, and security in dating and romance, in married life and eternity? Be a true disciple of Jesus. Be a genuine, committed, word-and-deed Latter-day Saint. Believe that your faith has everything to do with your romance, because it does. You separate dating from discipleship at your peril. Or to phrase that more positively, Jesus Christ, the Light of the World, is the only lamp by which you can successfully see the path of love and happiness for you and your sweetheart. How should I love thee? As He does, for that way "never faileth."
—Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, BYU Devotional, February 15, 2000

Faith, Hope, Charity

Faith is believing that everything in my past has a purpose. Every misjudgment, jealousy and hurt. Every joy, indulgence and success. All my wrong choices, all my right choices pushed me forward to right now. My rejoicing, my repentance, my realignments, all of it, has brought me here. Faith is believing that I have been on an upwards progression all my life, guided by the very angels of heaven. There have been no mistakes so grave, no depression so dark, no wind so strong that I've been knocked off course. Faith is believing that the past has accumulated for my good. And though it still makes up my soul, the past is over.

Hope is believing that the future will come. A future of better things, stronger convictions and securer sense of self. It is having the confidence that everything I don't have today, everything I want, will come because I am worthy of it. Hope says, I am weak today, but tomorrow I will be a little bit stronger. Hope can promise all the hurt, all the fear, anxiety, the lacking will slowly leave, vanish, melt away. Hope is okay that today isn't perfect. Hope holds all the mysteries yet to unfold. Hope is never-ending because the future is always ahead.

Charity is all we have in the present. Our past is gone, our future is yet and there is no sense living in those two spaces. We remember, we project, but for now we love. We love all that we have presently, all that our eyes can see and bodies can touch. We love the people who are in our rooms, our spaces our dreams. We love with intelligence and understanding. We may not have the money we want, the body we crave the things that occupy our desires, but we can love the salary we do make, the body we have cultivated, the things that fulfill our needs. We love the meals we eat, the shoes we wear, the woman at the grocery store. Charity is the now we own, the present we can manipulate. It's all we have and it's all we have to give.

 From C.Jane Enjoy it (again) Her picture is below.

oh, and this too: 

I am a daughter of God, and therefore entitled to intelligence, creativity, joy, inspiration and beyond. These are my strengths. Real strengths. 

I think she means those are her personal strengths and not all daughters of God, but I hope they are mine too.

At the pearly gates

I don't want to be drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully tailored clothes, my hair perfectly coiffed, and with long perfectly manicured fingernails!

I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with grass stains on my shoes from mowing sister Schneck's lawn. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbors children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my finger nails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my checks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived.

Majorie Pay Hinckley

Expect Nothing, Give Everything!

Love is not selective, and charity knows no bounds. Thus if I expect anything in return for charity except the happiness of the recipient then it is not charity. There is no bookkeeping, no quid pro quo, no deals, interests, bargaining or ulterior motives; charity gives to those who do not deserve and expects nothing in return;

It is the love God has for us, and the love we have for little children, of whom we expect nothing but from whom we would give everything. -Hugh Nibley

How to get Charity

But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are 'cold' by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his 'gratitude', you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 116