Do as I say not as I do

Now that I'm a dad, I can better appreciate the significance of those words.

President Marion G. Romney gave a talk in the General Conference of the Church in October of 1982. I read that talk for the first time a couple of weeks ago in the March 2009 Ensign. I hope you will read it now, right now, so that you might understand my frame of mind as I write this. It's about self reliance, something that I have only recently decided to strive for, and something I wish I had been able to read and understand long ago. This talk has changed my life, and it's not too often that things affect me that deeply.

Allow me to put on my World's Humblest Man hat for a sec (I made it for myself), and tell you that if there is only one thing in the world that I'm good at, it's taking the Lord at his word. I have seen miracles in others, and I have been on the receiving end of miracles myself, and in every instance it was because a contract was fulfilled between the receiver and the Lord. I know that most of the time all it requires is the demonstration of faith on the part of the individual, and there are a plethora of ways to do that.

At this point I'd like to remind you of the title of this post. There are also a plethora of ways to shrink and further disqualify ourselves from the myriad blessings that are merely waiting for us. One thing that has changed in my life recently is that we are no longer on state welfare. If I have anything to say about it, we will never be wards of the state again. It just so happened that we were blessed enough to get off of it before I read the above article, and had I not read it, we probably would end up right back there should hard times befall us again. I laugh now, as I re-read the previous sentence. Hard times = getting a college education in engineering? Sorry, I'm distracting from the reason I'm writing this.

The point here is that I can see some positive effects in my life already, if only the realization that I have been acting in the direct contrast of faith. Now, I'm not advocating that we all start putting water in our gas tanks and pray that the car will still run. In light of the article, I am saying that I was depriving my family from depending on the Lord, and that was a bad place to be. I was also depriving myself of becoming a hard working, resourceful, and self-reliant man.

So the title of today's post is really for myself, should I ever need a refresher. I hope that I can look back on this journal entry someday and be able to count the blessings we will have received by following President Romney's council. I'm confident that we won't be able to count that high.