Did I mention little boy tired? 🙃
It’s 9:31. Hoping to be in bed with eyes closed by 10.
🤞
I think I woke up somewhere around 7:00, so I didn’t get enough sleep. I did some morning routine stuff and then headed off to the gym for my weekly mega workout.
And boy, what a workout!
I think I was pretty close to being out of breath for most of the 2 hours. I just pounded away, exercise after exercise, pushing and pushing until I was just hammered.
With only one serving of pea protein powder as nourishment for the morning, that might have something to do with how exhausted I was.
Still, I did manage to up some personal bests in a few different categories, so that was good. It’s encouraging to see the improvement. After taking so much time off, I have been slowly trying to get back what was lost.
I’m not all the way there yet, but I’m getting pretty close. 🎉
Super successful mega workout today. Total of somewhere around 81,000 lbs lifted today across 19 exercises.
I showered and put on my church clothes and headed to the temple, getting there in perfect time for my initiatory session but not early enough to have been able to join a sealing session had a slot been available.
The temple was absolutely lovely, as always. 😊 And there was a bit of a funny adventure for the baptistry workers just before I got there. One of the young women doing baptisms had her hair dyed red, which turned the font red when she got baptized. 😆
It also turned the all-white clothing pink.
😆
Poor laundry is gonna have a tough time with that one. 😅
Anyway, I guess they ended up having to drain the font and refill it back up.
Quite the adventure. 🙃
But the biggest thing that came from my visit to the temple today was something quite innocuous that happened while I was in the waiting room next to the baptistry.
Last week, I had spent my time while in the waiting room working on memorizing some verses from the Doctrine and Covenants, versus I don’t think I’d worked on during this last week since then, so I started working on them again.
And I just loved the spirit and Power that came into me while focusing in on those verses from sections one, two, three, and four.
But I don’t think it was until the drive home that I fully realized what I had experienced.
After leaving the temple, I headed over to Walmart to buy some groceries, listening to LDS YouTube video podcasts while shopping and then while driving.
It was at some point while on the trip home, I think, that I realized a powerful truth in my own life.
I’m spiritually starving.
I’ve spent so much time watching all these interesting and exciting and uplifting YouTube videos that are good, and maybe even better, but they are not best.
Not for me right now, at least.
Just a few minutes that I spent reading and memorizing the verses in the Doctrine and Covenants just filled my soul in ways those videos just… Don’t.
I don’t mean to say that the videos aren’t valuable. I’m sure they have their place. I learned quite a bit of exciting stuff, interesting historical things, interesting church history things, interesting Temple things. Some stuff that even blew my mind.
But it was all intellectual.
Yes, I felt the spirit here and there, but just spending those few minutes in the scriptures, which I’ve struggled to do recently, just filled me up.
And that’s when I realized that I’m spiritually starving. Even though I’ve been spending so much time in “gospel” things: I’ve not been spending that time in the areas that truly feed my soul.
My soul truly does hunger. I wish there were some way to adequately convey the consuming Drive, the deep hunger that I have to become like jesus. I want to be free from all my pride, every manifestation.
I want to become.
All those videos that I’ve been watching… They are super informative, super interesting, even mind blowing at times, but they don’t do for me what I need right now. I hunger to have God’s heart, to love perfectly, to let my own self be swallowed up in God’s love so that I might radiate that love and light to everyone.
I hunger for that. I thirst for that. That is my everything right now.
And as potentially useful as these videos that I’ve been watching might be, they just don’t do for me what my soul hungers for.
I’m repeating myself. 🙃
So… It’s time to dig back in to the scriptures themselves, to let go of the commentary and all the interesting facts, even the ones that help me better understand the temple and the symbolism and the richness there.
My spiritual hunger right now isn’t in learning interesting connections and better understanding histories and what not.
My hunger is to have that soul-deep connection with God, to be able to communicate with him as I used to and to be prepared to receive from him what I used to.
And then to move even beyond that.
I don’t currently have words that I feel are adequate to describe the feeling inside of me.
There is such a deep longing…
…
I spent some time at JH Keith park on the way back to the house, cooling off a little bit from a long hot drive with no AC.
I spent a good long time chatting with Cory, affair chunk of the conversation about those things that I just wrote above.
Fought with Amazon customer service for a little while, getting passed off from one representative to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next…
Once again, they delivered my packages to a house on a completely different Street. They have the same house number as we do, but a completely different Street.
It was a pretty frustrating interaction, but I guess it’s good for me to practice.
I want to become like Christ, and my areas of growth and practice are not often going to be glamorous.
Spent a little while chatting with Heather and Hans, they getting back to the house not too long after I did.
It’s after 10:00, so I’m going to wrap this up and go to bed.
My muscles are… exhausted. 🙃
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful that I had the willpower to stay and push through all the exercises today. Boy did I want to end early! 😅
- I’m grateful that I’ve managed to stay free from injury in my workouts.
- I’m grateful that there is a sufficient diversity of equipment that I am able to work out just about my entire body using pulling motions that don’t compress my spine.
- I’m grateful that I was able to enjoy the peace and light of the Temple today.
- I’m grateful to be able to serve in the temple. One of the lady workers thanked me for basically being their little standby. Had I not been there today, one of the temple workers would have had to have changed into baptismal clothing in order to make sure that all the patrons were able to be baptized.
- I’m grateful that I was able to exchange garments without any troubles at the distribution center.
- I’m grateful for the opportunity to have to deal with no AC on hot days. I honestly don’t know how I did it in Arkansas for so long with no AC in that awfully hot and terribly humid climate in the summer. But it’s good to have the reminders of what it’s like to not have some of the modern conveniences and comforts that are easy to take for granted.
- I’m grateful for safety and my travels. I didn’t mention yesterday that I hit a bird driving down the highway. It was flying directly down the highway and not getting out of the way, even though I was honking to try and get it to get out of the way, but it never moved. I had hoped that it would have survived because I didn’t feel like I was going that much faster than it when I hit it, but it was dead with a broken neck when I fished it out from in front of my AC condenser. 😞
Success:
- I recognized my spiritual hunger, and I’m doing something about it.
Improvement:
- I’ve been letting myself get sidetracked with those videos instead of doing real personal study. It’s just been so easy to click play on new and interesting content. And though, as I mentioned before, the content certainly has its place and its usefulness, it does not fill my soul.
Thought of the Day:
I don’t know much about the gospel other than what I’ve learned from the standard works. When I drink from a spring I like to get the water where it comes out of the ground, not down the stream after the cattle have waded in it. . . .
I appreciate other people’s interpretation, but when it comes to the gospel we ought to be acquainted with what the Lord says. You ought to read . . . all the scriptures with the idea of finding out what’s in them and what the meaning is and not to prove some idea of your own. Just read them and plead with the Lord to let you understand what He had in mind when He wrote them.
~ Marion G. Romney
Hand of God In My Life Today:
Wow, what a hand in my life today showing me the power of what I’ve been missing compared to what I’ve been consuming.
Just… wow.
Love and hugs. 😊
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 