29 September 2013

Peace - Spiritual peace vs Worldly peace

I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! Today our sacrament speakers were people that we highly admire and happen to be our neighbors, too! Guess I should clarify that comment, most wards in this Church are organized by neighborhoods, so most all the members are neighbors. We attend the local signing Branch, so our boundaries are more outspread and include several towns, so not all the members live close to each other. This family actually attends the hearing ward where we live, but are also involved with and friends with many people in our Branch, thus they were asked to speak! Anyway, on to my thoughts, which I will share backwards...instead of starting with the first speaker! Their topic was peace...

The father: He shared some stories, starting with a boy scout camp near a lake. They had to go up to the camp on a Saturday instead of waiting until Monday when the camp was supposed to start. On Sunday morning, the leaders woke the boys to attend church, much to their dismay. They had to walk about 20 minutes to where they were going to have the services. Much to their surprise, they were at the nearby lake and had one of the most spectacular views of this lake. The water was still as could be and they were awestruck by the view as the meeting quickly turned into a testimony meeting. This meeting ended with a leader throwing a rock into the lake, creating nonstop ripples, taking away the stillness. This shocked the boys, but they learned many lessons with this entire experience.

The mother: She talked about her family reading the New Testament as a family and how great it is to be reading about the life of Jesus Christ. She talked about many things we can do to help bring peace in our lives. She spoke a lot about taking action and several things we could do, including scripture study! One of the best lines from her talk is "Heavenly Father knows our plan from beginning to end." She talked about his desire to help us, if we pray. She also asked us to think about how the Gospel has influenced us, how has it influenced you? She pointed out that scriptures will bring us peace. Then challenged us to serve each other in our homes, which also creates peace.

The teenage son: He introduced the topic of peace and talked about there being more than one type of peace. Then he shared the experience of a recent youth conference in his ward. It was a three day event. The first day, they walked 22 miles from the Draper Utah Temple to the Salt Lake Utah Temple. The second day, they did baptisms for the dead at the Logan Utah Temple, Brigham City Utah Temple and Salt Lake Utah Temple. The third day they spent at Seven Peaks, including playing laser tag. He pointed out that the first two days brought spiritual peace and the third day was about worldly peace. His conclusion was that you could get worldly peace fairly easy by doing things but that you had to focus and work for spiritual peace by making specific choices. 

The son had the quote of the day, which I share in the following pic, that also includes the three main things they spoke about to bring spiritual peace! Even though this lake is in California, I highly doubt it is the perfect lake the father spoke about, but he talked about the mirror effect, so I felt this would do!


I guess that sums it all up pretty well...watsit2u?

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