Testimony Sunday

I know blogs are usually witty and light hearted, but I wanted to share a couple of amazing insights that have strengthened my testimony tremendously. They were a little deep to explain over the pulpit today, but for anyone who cares to read further, I'd like to share a few new testimonies I've gained this week.

#1. Adam and Eve messed up big time. They "ruined" the whole course of all of mankind. (I'm being harsh here but you know what I mean.) And yet, a Plan was created to correct their mistake. A humongous mistake. How little are our mistakes compared to that one? And yet the same Plan that was created to amend their mistake covers ours, too. And if Heavenly Father created that plan and loves them, then too He must love me even when I mess up. Being the perfectionist personality that I am, I have only recently come to see how forgiveness - true, genuine forgiveness - applies to me, too. It's amazing and I am so grateful for a Plan and a Savior who carried it out.

#2. How do we love God? I have been studying love and I've been thinking a lot about how love is a noun and love is a verb. As in, "to do." Yes, we feel love for our Heavenly Father - but how do we "do" it? As I pondered this a whole new meaning to symbolism opened up to me. We "do" all sorts of things that can show our love for God. We bow our heads on Sunday for the sacrament. We attend the temple and symbolically show our love through ordinances. We visit teach, we pray over meals, we.... everything. As I comprehended this deep, deep ability to show love for God in almost everything we do I was overwhelmed. The really, really neat kicker is that as we show that love - as we serve - our love grows. I tell people in marriage counseling they need to serve their spouse to love them, to re-fall in love with them, and it's a principle that really works. So, too, we can increase our love for Heavenly Father by loving in the verb "doing" sense of the word instead of just wondering why the noun/"feeling" side of love feels so stagnant sometimes.

#3. Scripture study is amazing. I made a goal only this week to really study - not just read - and I cannot tell you the outpouring of Spirit that has accompanied nearly every moment since. All because I chose a topic, pulled out my dictionary, grabbed a pen and paper and started really searching for personal meanings in a few choice scriptures. Try if for a week and tell me if your whole life doesn't change.

P.S. #4. (I knew I was forgetting a cool one!) In the parable of the sower & the seeds, I've always just assumed I'm the seed that fell into good ground and sprouted up, right? Well read closer. I haven't fallen by the wayside and gotten gobbled up and I haven't fallen into thin earth where I grew up and then withered, but read the description of the seed that fell into thorny places a little closer: "And the cares of this world... choke the word, and it becometh unfruitful." Note that the thorns don't kill the seed - they just keep it from being fruitful. I think this applies to me a lot more than the good seed which produced thirty/sixty/hundred-fold. I haven't been very "fruitful" in the kingdom in awhile... I'm excited to renew my determination to be so.