Lean In - An Important Life Lesson

Many important life-lessons can be learned while serving a mission. We invite all of our missionaries to "lean in" during their 18 or 24 month period of service.

To lean in is to be proactive in thought, word and deed. It is to serve others, seeking nothing in return. It is to put forh real effort in all that one does. This message is shared often, but the real learning takes place in the daily doing of missionary work.

I was pleased to receive the following email from one of our missionaries this past week. He has learned the value of leaning in. He has let go of a teenage way of living and is developing skills and abilities he never knew he had.

"Dear Pres. Murray,


Recently the Zone Leaders came into our area and worked with my companion and me. It went well. I learned that I shouldn't be afraid to work hard and to exceed. For the longest time I have been afraid to work as hard as I can. I felt like if I did I would be forced into doing so much more for many others and less for me. That was something that was holding me back.


Looking back I feel like I was a mouse afraid of it's shadow. But the shadow in this case is my potential. If we work hard we shall not fear, no matter what we are given or how God wants us to serve. We will receive strength and learn more about everything. So that is my new breakthrough. Hope you have a great week."

Another important life-lesson has been internalized.  This will hopefully become a successful pattern of living throughout this young man's life.

A Favorite Book

One of my favorite books is Yearning for the Living God: Reflections from the Life of F. Enzio Busche.  The author is Elder F. Enzio Busche, an emeritus General Authority of the LDS Church.

Born in 1930, Enzio Busche was the first resident of Germany called as a General Authority of the LDS Church. At the age of 15 Busche was drafted into the German Army during the Nazi regime's desperate final push in World War II. After the war, Busche returned to his hometown of Dortmund where he lived on molasses that had poured out of a supply train American soldiers had previously attacked.

After the war, Busche completed high school and then studied at universities in Bonn and Freiberg. He then took over a printing business from his father. Under his direction the company grew to being one of the larger ones in Germany. It was also one of the few companies in Germany at that time that used a participatory style of leadership.  Busche and his wife Jutta joined the LDS Church in 1958.

You can gain a sense of the deep wisdom of this good man by listening to his voice and studying his words on this short YouTube video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snAjZ8mfoYw. (My daughter-in-law Tianna found this great video for me.)  This video comes from a talk he gave at BYU in May 1996, entitled Unleashing the Dormant Spirit.  Full text of this talk can be downloaded into a pdf file at http://www.byub.org/talks/Talk.aspx?id=270.

Cinnamon Toast

Yesterday was Mother's Day.  I started out by making breakfast for Joyce.  She ordered old fashioned cinnamon toast and orange juice.  She hadn't had this for three years.  (Once you see the caloric overload, you'll understand why!)

Take one cube of soft butter, one cup of white sugar and lots of ground cinnamon.  Blend together into a big brownish mess.  Then make 3-4 pieces of toast using white bread and a toaster.  Don't use wheat bread or any healthy derivative.  Must be plain 'ol white bread.

Then liberally (like a Democrat) spread the cinnamon sugary mess on each piece of toast.  Thick is good.

Now put the toast in the oven on the next to top rack with the broiler on.  Keep careful watch.  Allow the cinnamon sugary mess to cook for a short period of time (indicated by boiling bubbles).  Then remove the cinnamon toast and let cool.  The cinnamon sugary mess should create a semi-hard shell over the toast.

Serve with orange juice.  Prepare for instant intense sugar-induced high, followed by a 4-5 hour crash.  Only do this once every 3 years.

Love is a Verb

I can remember diagramming sentences in grade school:  Noun. Verb. Adjective. Adverb. Prepositional phrase.  I liked diagramming sentences -- the structure made sense and it was like playing with a puzzle.

Wikipedia defines a verb as a word (part of speech) that usually denotes an action (bring, read), an occurrence (decompose, glitter), or a state of being (exist, stand).

Consider the familiar phrase:  I love you.  In this sentence, the word love is the verb.  Too often this verb denotes a "state of being".  I get excited when it denotes an "action".  From this week's mailbag comes a remarkable story of love as an action verb:

"Dear President,

This week has been good and there is so much i want to share but today most of all i want to talk about an example of love.  There was a day in this past week that everything that could go wrong did go wrong.  And all through the day me and elder smith were able to stay positive about most of it and the lord truly blessed me to open my mind and i was able to look at everything as it is being for my good.

But then at the very end of the day we got out of an investigators house that had turned against the church and my spirit felt heavy and sorrowed.  And then when we got to our bikes, someone had stolen my seat.

Immediately in my mind i started thinking of complaints and excuses to not get home on time, to not plan as good, to be tired and not work as hard the next day, and all manner of thoughts of the natural man.  And so we started out on our very long ride home in the dark and at first these bad thoughts were still with me and had even began to escalate but then i realized something, something that has truly changed my life:  My companion wasn't sitting on his seat. . . .  i couldn't believe it!!

Never would i ever expected him to stand the whole time and choose to suffer with me for the only reason that i wouldn't suffer alone.  No words of complaint were said that night and as i lied in bed playing over the scene of him never once touching his seat.  My heart was full with true gratitude when i told him simply that it meant a lot to me that he did that.  I'm sure he doesn't know the impact that a simple act of pure love had on someone who needed it. i love this gospel and i love my companion because he first loved me."

Have Scientists Discovered the Light of Christ?

I’m always intrigued when science unknowingly bumps into one of the more unique teachings of our religion.

For instance, we believe that before you were born on earth, you lived in the presence of your Heavenly Father as one of His spirit children. Throughout this premortal life, you developed your identity and increased your spiritual capabilities. You grew in intelligence and learned to love the truth, and you prepared to come to the earth, where you could continue to progress.

This notion that our spirit or soul existed prior to life of earth is not a uniquely Mormon precept. See http://www.ldsmag.com/articles/100224sould.html for more on this.

Once on earth, we possess the Light of Christ. This spiritual inheritance allows us to discern right from wrong. What we call the Light of Christ, others might term conscience or moral compass. It has also been called the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ or the Light of Life. The prophet Mormon (between 400-421 A.D.) wrote, "For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man that he may know good from evil," (Book of Mormon, Moroni 7:16).

Have scientists discovered the Light of Christ?

Research psychologists at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University have discovered that "some sense of good and evil" exists in babies. From “The Moral Life of Babies”, by Yale Psychologist Paul Bloom in the May 3, 2010 New York Times Magazine Preview comes this fascinating observation:

"In 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau called the baby “a perfect idiot,” and in 1890 William James famously described a baby’s mental life as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”

A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone."

Watch a fun 5 minute video of the research at the Infant Cognition Center: http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/05/04/magazine/1247467772000/can-babies-tell-right-from-wrong-.html?emc=eta1

Meanwhile, back on the religious front, Elder Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles has written the following about the Light of Christ:

The more we know about the Light of Christ, the more we will understand about life and the more we will have a deep love for all mankind.

The Light of Christ is defined in the scriptures as “the Spirit [which] giveth light to every man that cometh into the world” (D&C 84:46; emphasis added); “the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed” (D&C 88:13; see also John 1:4–9; D&C 84:45–47; D&C 88:6; D&C 93:9).

And the Light of Christ is also described in the scriptures as “the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (D&C 84:45), “the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18; see also Mosiah 25:24), “the Spirit of truth” (D&C 93:26), “the light of truth” (D&C 88:6), “the Spirit of God” (D&C 46:17), and “the Holy Spirit” (D&C 45:57). Some of these terms are also used to refer to the Holy Ghost.

The First Presidency has written, “There is a universally diffused essence which is the light and the life of the world, ‘which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,’ which proceedeth forth from the presence of God throughout the immensity of space, the light and power of which God bestows in different degrees to ‘them that ask him,’ according to their faith and obedience.” (Improvement Era, Mar. 1916, 460.)

Regardless of whether this inner light, this knowledge of right and wrong, is called the Light of Christ, moral sense, or conscience, it can direct us to moderate our actions—unless, that is, we subdue it or silence it.” (From: The Light of Christ, Ensign, April 2005.)

It brightens my day when truth is corroborated along seemingly disparate paths. I have great confidence that science and religion are members of the same family. "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun," (Ecclesiastes 1:9).