Some Inspiring Thoughts from a Great Man

by Jewel Leann Williams

One would think that with me having a rare Saturday off, I would have time to post something inspiring and wonderful Well, I am posting something inspiring and wonderful, but it's coming from the mind of President Dieter F. Uchtdorf.  I was thinking about this quote I read on Facebook and how genuine it is while being so profound.  So I thought, I need to just gather some quotes from this great man and just soak up the wisdom and grace from them.

Without futher ado: 

"Sometimes I think we misunderstand obedience. We may see obedience as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. Perhaps there is a different metaphor that can explain why we obey the commandments of God. Maybe obedience is not so much the process of bending, twisting, and pounding our souls into something we are not. Instead, it is the process by which we discover what we truly are made of.”

I love this because it reminds me that the purpose of obedience isn't some power trip God has, that we have to do what he says just because He's the boss. Our Father asks us to obey to teach us who were are meant to be.

“Think of the purest, most all-consuming love you can imagine. Now multiply that love by an infinite amount—that is the measure of God’s love for you. God does not look on the outward appearance. I believe that He doesn’t care one bit if we live in a castle or a cottage, if we are handsome or homely, if we are famous or forgotten. Though we are incomplete, God loves us completely. Though we are imperfect, He loves us perfectly. Though we may feel lost and without compass, God love encompasses us completely. He loves us because He is filled with an infinite measure of holy, pure, and indescribable love. We are important to God not because of our résumé but because we are His children. He loves every one of us, even those who are flawed, rejected, awkward, sorrowful, or broken. God’s love is so great that He loves even the proud, the selfish, the arrogant, and the wicked. What this means is that, regardless of our current state, there is hope for us. No matter our distress, no matter our sorrow, no matter our mistakes, our infinitely compassionate Heavenly Father desires that we draw near to Him so that He can draw near to us.”  

and related to the same subject:

“Though we are incomplete, God loves us completely. Though we are imperfect, He loves us perfectly. Though we may feel lost and without compass, God's love encompasses us completely. ... He loves every one of us, even those who are flawed, rejected, awkward, sorrowful, or broken.”

It's so important to recognize that we are ALL failures without our Savior, and that God loves us anyway. He loves us because He loves us--there's nothing we can do to change that.

“What you create doesn’t have to be perfect. So what if the eggs are greasy or the toast is burned? Don’t let fear of failure discourage you.”

There are so many more but I wanted to end with this one--I remember the talk where President Uchtdorf urged us to create. I think we often get caught in the delusion that we have to come up with perfection if it's going to be worth anything. This quote reminds me that much of what helps me grow as a writer, as a mother, as a creator of things, is learned in the doing--and that THAT is sort of the point.

There you go, just a few of the many inspiring quotes from President Uchtdorf--- I hope that you feel a little more inspired for having read them.

 

Thoreau is my homeboy: Strap on your hiking boots and step up your writing.

by Merry Gordon

When I’ve stared at the blinking cursor so long it’s burned a permanent vertical line in my retinas, I think of my favorite inspirational writing quote:  “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” I remember the first time I read that, how it resonated with me. I poked around a little until I found attribution for it in the form of one Henry D. Thoreau, author of Walden and all those other things I pretended to read but didn’t in AP lit.

So I finally picked up Walden for real this time and soon I was crushing hard on Henry David…he of the original hipster neckbeard, the skinny-dipping and cabin building, the civil disobedience. This guy had a solution for writer’s block, one that hadn’t occurred to me in the asphalt jungles of suburbia:

N A T U R E.

I don’t generally do nature. First off, I’m from Cleveland. It wasn’t too many years after I was born that the oozing Cuyahoga River was so polluted you could set fire to it. When we went swimming as kids, it was in our underpants in a plastic kiddie pool in the driveway, not in any of Ohio’s less-than-pristine waterways. I have always lived within ten minutes of a Target, I wore hiking boots with lace slouch socks only when the outdoorsy/vintage look was hip, and the closest I got to the forest was the Woodland Pine scented candle we put out every Christmas. I didn’t even go camping (without flushing toilets and suitcases and a 3-jet hot tub on the balcony) until I hit my mid-30s.

But this year I slung a backpack over my shoulder and resolved to try the Thoreauvian approach to writer’s block anyway.

Step one:  Get into nature. Not just get out into nature…get INTO it. Nature is messy. It’s beautiful mountain vistas and trailside wildflowers, but it’s also mud and pine sap on your adorable new L.L. Bean boots and a cloud of mosquitos swarming across your perfect blood orange sunset. Embrace the less-than-National Geographic moments. The unexpected contrast between the mundane and the sublime is often enough to jar your mind back to inspiration.

Step two:  Write. Journal, blog or blurb like crazy. Thoreau would have killed it in the blogosphere (in fact, he is…over 150 years after his death). His journals filled 47 manuscript volumes, and most of the time I can barely manage a 140-character tweet. Thoreau observed and recorded everything…some really sweeping, epic stuff, like the divinity in a snowflake, and some really boring stuff, like tables of plants blooming and water levels. Point is, he mined the little, sometimes tedious details in flora and fauna until he struck literary gold with such nuggets as, “We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” That’s deep.

Step three:  Look for connections and metaphors. Ultimately, going out into nature is as much an inward journey as an outward one. If we look at the natural world as a microcosm of the infinite and search to see our connection to it, our once barren creative fields suddenly emerge white and ready to harvest (ooh!—see what I did there?). Thoreau was acutely aware of this. Even humdrum rural sights like the stream he walked by nearly every day of his life provided food for thought:  “Time is but a stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but when I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away but eternity remains.”

Getting my nature on didn’t come naturally. At first, stripping myself of the suburbs to connect with Mother Earth seemed a little too granola for a girl whose hiking is generally confined to full parking lots at outlet malls, but being outdoors lent a meditative quality to my thoughts that the agitation of day-to-day life in a major metropolitan area never would have allowed.

I still live in the sprawl, but I don’t restrict my headspace to my zip code anymore. My “woods” consist of a few vacation snaps on the fridge and a half-dead succulent on my kitchen table, but if nothing else Thoreau has taught me a little more about how to simplify and live deliberately, and that’s something worth putting on paper.