Sacrifice

So I gave this training in District Meeting the other day. I would like to share it hear as well. It deals with sacrifice. 
What is Sacrifice? Is I thought about it the best thing I could come up with was this "sacrifice is to give up something we value for the sake of something of greater worth." So if we give up something we value, something that is near to us, we give it up for a greater good. We will get something better in return.

How have we made sacrifices in our lives? The few I came up with was these. First I gave up my friends and family for two years to come out here and serve the Lord for two years. It was a sacrifice for me becasue I love to go and do things with my friends. Love to go to movies and play games with them. Out here I dont get that privilage. Second I give up working in Alaska to be out here. I love Alaska. It is my favorite place. When Im up there I feel closer to heaven. Another example is not going out with friends on Sunday to help keep the Sabboth Day holy.  So have we not always got something better in return when we made these sacrifices by giving whatever thing we gave up? As members of the church we have the opportunity to sacrifice worldly things to build up the Kingdom of God. We should be willing to to make any sacrifice for the Lord.

Read Genesis 22:1-9. Its the story of Abraham. It took Abraham, who having developed great faith in Christ to be willing to sacrifice his only son Issac.  To literally sacrifice him. It takes faith to be able to sacrifice anything. So they go togehter hand in hand. Abraham proved faithful as he prepared to sacrifice his son. Thankfully he didnt actually have to do it, and proved his faithfulness to the Lord. Did he not receive anything greater for his willingness to make a sacrifice?

Another great sacrifice was of our Savior, Jesus Christ. He sacrificed his life so we could be able to repent and be forgiven of our mistakes and sins so we could be given the chance to be clean and to return to our Heavenly Fathers presence. That took great sacrifice to give up his life for his Fathers Kingdom. In the song Praise to the Man it has a line that I really like which is "sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven." I know that is true with all my heart. We are blessed from heaven when we make sacrifices.

I challenge us all to think of something we can sacrifice to give us stronger faith and help us further the work this transfer. I know that we are blessed as we make sacrifices in our lives. And that sacrifice will strenghten our faith. I say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Dont Stop Believing

I really love this song by Journey. It is a simple song. As does every song it can have many meanings. It can be taken so many ways with many messages in it. I shared a blog on hope awhile ago. So I want to finish it with this. This can be part two.

 We need to keep on believing. We can never give. We had a boy in our branch that just lost his father. I have also had that same experience. I know how easy it is to give up,  to quit believing in the church, or Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Satan knows how to get us to feel down and quit believing  in the things that we know we should be doing. But more importantly we must not give in to this. We need to hold on to the happy feelings that we have when we are doing right things and making right choices. This can be very hard in times of great trial but we can do it. I hope we can all always believe in The Fathers plan and commandments even when its hard. We will be greatly blessed for it.

The Following is a selection from and Ensign article that was published in 1979 by C. Kay Allen. "I’m a psychologist and a bishop of a singles branch. I’m also a husband and a father, and that means I’ve spent years becoming aware of the dimensions of the problem we call self-esteem. And that’s in addition to the time I’ve put in on myself. Every day, including most Sundays, I see people who want to be loved and to love themselves but who really aren’t doing very much to merit love.

And they feel terrible—lonely, cynical, or helpless.

And it makes me feel bad too, because I can plainly see that what they are doing and feeling moves them away from love. Since they often feel no value in themselves, they usually see little value in others. They don’t know that the self love they need to develop is not selfishness or self-centeredness; in fact, it is its opposite.

But usually they want to change and can change; and for me as a family counselor and a bishop, there’s nothing quite like the first flicker of hope that lights up their eyes when they realize they are worthwhile and that change is a possibility.

Our present feelings about ourselves were born in our intimate relationships with family and friends. But most of us face disappointment or hostility at one time or another and develop fears and self-protective reactions. And what has happened seems beyond our control.

It is true that we can’t change the past, but we can deal with the present. The question is, how do I deal with my life in a healthy and productive way now? If I don’t deal with life adequately my self-esteem is low. So my capacity to change, to bring my life under my control, becomes the key issue. That’s where self-esteem begins: with change, with the conviction that I have control over my attitudes and actions toward others.

Changes in behavior are easier to talk about than to do. One of the hard facts of life is that self-esteem comes from your ability to solve problems, not from sympathy, not from realizing that life has handed you a raw deal, and not from blaming your parents or teachers or employer. If you can’t solve problems and deal with conflict, your self-esteem is going to stay low. When we operate out of control, we have the awful feeling that circumstances control us, rather than that we control ourselves."

Satan has a good way of making us feel like we are nothing. He knows how to get us to feel down on ourselves. He knows how to place the circumstances in front of us that makes us crumble. I know this personally. I stuggle with this a lot. Satan knows Im week with my self confidence and self-esteem. I get those moods where I think Im not good enough. That I have know idea of why Im out here. But when we build our self esteem up we dont have to worry about being a failure. God loves us all so much. He wants is to be happy and have confidence in ourselves.

The Beauty of the Earth

Today as I sat in the car traveling to the other missionaries in my district to get our car back from them; I was watching the view from the window. I saw lush green trees that were thick with leaves as green as could ever be. I saw fields with corn as tall as myself and fields with soybeans that were about 7 inches above the ground. I saw countless rolling hills covered with the vegetaion and trees. I thought to myself. This is a beautiful place. Our Heavenly Father created us a beautiful place to live. I'd like share the following hymn. " For the beauty of the earth, for the beauty of the skies, for the love which from our birth over round us lies. Lord of all to thee we paraise, this our hymn of grateful praise." We have been blessed with beauty all over the earth. Each region in our country has many types of terrain that is unique to that area. When I got my mission call to Nashville I didnt think it would be this green and beautiful. I thought it was flat, hot and very dry and dead. But it isn't at all. It is some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen! Lots of green trees and plants and grasses galore! It has many rolling hills and little groves and is very pretty and unique.



 This is a picture of the Alaska Range that is right out the front door of my granparents house. When you step out of the door two things happen. First you hear the silence. It is dead quiet with no busy highways or interstates nearby. Second, you are over taken with a view that leaves you breathless. You have a smaller mountain range off to the left, and the Alaska Range in front of you all the way to the side of you. Then behind you, you have some rolling hills. There is so much beauty there that its hard to take it all in. It leaves your mind wanting more but you can never absorb all that there is to take in.





I hope you enjoyed some of the extra photos I added of Alaska. I just wanted to take some time to stop and ponder the beauty of the Earth. I hope that we all can take the time to stop and take in the beauty of the earth. The Lord has blessed us so much with this earth that he has created for us. I hope we can all remember to slow down and take in the scenery. I am so thankful for the earth that we have been given. I enjoy the nature so much. The earth is truley beautiful enough for me!

Matter of a Few Degrees

In the April Conference in 2008 President Uchtdorf shared the following story to us. "In 1979 a large passenger jet with 257 people on board left New Zealand for a sightseeing flight to Antarctica and back. Unknown to the pilots, however, someone had modified the flight coordinates by a mere two degrees. This error placed the aircraft 28 miles (45 km) to the east of where the pilots assumed they were. As they approached Antarctica, the pilots descended to a lower altitude to give the passengers a better look at the landscape. Although both were experienced pilots, neither had made this particular flight before, and they had no way of knowing that the incorrect coordinates had placed them directly in the path of Mount Erebus, an active volcano that rises from the frozen landscape to a height of more than 12,000 feet (3,700 m).

As the pilots flew onward, the white of the snow and ice covering the volcano blended with the white of the clouds above, making it appear as though they were flying over flat ground. By the time the instruments sounded the warning that the ground was rising fast toward them, it was too late. The airplane crashed into the side of the volcano, killing everyone on board.

It was a terrible tragedy brought on by a minor error—a matter of only a few degrees. ¹

Through years of serving the Lord and in countless interviews, I have learned that the difference between happiness and misery in individuals, in marriages, and families often comes down to an error of only a few degrees." http://lds.org/general-conference/2008/04/a-matter-of-a-few-degrees?lang=eng&query=president+uchtdorf

In our life we do things that causes us to change our course be merely a few degrees. The change at first is very small and unnoticeble. But with time it plays a great role as a consequence. See what happened. It (the plane) ended up 28 miles off course. We ahve to be able to see those mistakes and correct ourselves and/or our courses. We need to be able to detect that things are not right so that we dont have a fatality. We too are experienced pilots somtimes coming to points where we think the snow capped mountain is the clouds. But if we are ablt to respond to the warnign signals and lights we can try to corect our course and not end in a fatality. President Uchtdorf also shares this thought with us "No one wants his life to end in tragedy. But all too often, like the pilots and passengers of the sightseeing flight, we set out on what we hope will be an exciting journey only to realize too late that an error of a few degrees has set us on a course for spiritual disaster." Through Jesus Christ we can have course corrections through the process of repentence. That way we dont end in spiritual disaster. May we all remember to keep making those course corrections so we dont end with a fatality.