Jacob Cinco & Priorities

What’s up, muggles?

Happy Day After Christy’s Birthday Day. Make it the best one ever. The deuces. Real real old… Seems weird that she’s never gonna stuff me in the dryer again (at least for a while) or drive me to high school zombie-style with her forehead on the steering wheel looking through the gap between the dash while bumping Brandi Carlile as loudly as little Pedro could crank it. Anyways, Love you sister. Have fun getting married this year. One day when SerPost stops being in huelga I’ll send you the bracelets I purchased you when I was up in the mountains.

This week was pretty good. If I could possibly say something less consequential I can’t think of what it is. But it was pretty good. We had Concilio with the zone leaders and went to play soccer and this crazy Frisbee/dodgeball game Sister Turk invented. It was intense. And I definitely won’t brag about how my soccer team threw down another dynasty win streak. President taught from Jacob 5 and it was a solid 25 minutes of revelation-fest. So I’ve been in there reading since Wednesday. It’s got way too much to say but the first thing I realized is that I’ve been crossing my analogies pretty much my whole life. Specifically, Lehi’s tree vs. Zenos’ vineyard. First of all, I guess I just always assumed that fruit from Lehi’s tree would be the same as fruit from Zenos’ tree. But false. Fruit from Zenos’ trees doesn’t represent the same eternal life/love of God combo that it does in Lehi’s tree. I’m gonna truncate this train of thought right here and just say that when I realized that the fruit on Zenos’ trees represents covenants and the ordinances of salvation it made a lot of other things way clearer. Anyway, that was really cool. Here’s the other thing I learned. I’m not gonna explain the scripture chain from Jacob to Genesis to Moses and through D&C but it was a pretty cool process. I ended up thinking about Adam and the commandments in the Garden. I always saw them as this big contradiction of Don’t eat the fruit and multiply and replenish. And maybe it was in some ways. But, I realized it wasn’t so much a contradiction in terms as it was just more than he could do. Too much was asked of him and he simply couldn’t do it all. So he had to make a choice based on what would really be best for the whole plan (and maybe a little expedited by the fact that his wife was already peacing out). And then I kept finding this theme throughout the lives of all the prophets. From moving a nation through 40 years of straight whining to crossing oceans in Pre-Incan submarines to establishing the kingdom of God throughout the world with nothing but a book and 30 members to “be ye therefore perfect.” It is always too much to ask. It is always more than we can do. And it is never an accident. So it seems like much less of a surprise to me that we all have absolutely too much to do. School and work and church callings and family issues and untrimmed hedges and the outrageous price of hamburger meat. It’s just too much. And I don’t believe it’s a byproduct of the times. I’m convinced that God has, and always will, give us too much to do. For, He would see our priorities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from President it’s the meaning of the phrase “consistency to the purpose.” And if you forget what the purpose is you can waste an awful lot of time on school and work and untrimmed hedges and even the church callings.