iStockphoto.com/Pali Rao
I tried writing a script for film over the Christmas and New Year break. I enjoyed it enormously, and thought I had done a fairly good job. I showed it to an actress/producer friend of mine, so she could comment and advise me.
She took some pieces of it pretty thoroughly apart! A painful process to be at the receiving end – but I am enormously grateful, because after a complete rewrite, I am now pleased again, and so very thankful to have had the chance to correct those errors that would have held it back badly and meant it would be far from being all that it could.
Which brings me to the subject I really want to address. We can’t rewrite life. What a lot of things one would change if that were possible! Perhaps there would never be a final draft good enough?
But this is the time of year when we tend to take stock of where we are, and make resolutions as to how we might improve. We need to do this every so often, a kind of re-setting of the spiritual compass.
Who do I really want to be? What qualities do I most admire, if I am honest, look to my own convictions, not what I have been told by other people.
Well, for a start, I want to be someone who has the courage to follow her own passions and insights. I want to be a self-starter, not someone who has to be told what to do, shown a need rather than seeking one. I want to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause,” not waiting for someone to show me one and say “go attend to.”
Our greatest aim is to become as much like God as we can in this brief life, limited as it is by physical bounds and mental inabilities, and sometimes emotional needs and misapprehensions. No one tells God “do this, do that.” We need to learn enough wisdom to see the needs – enough compassion to do all we can to answer them, and because we want to, not because someone commanded it.
The Most Important Law
Obedience may be the first law of heaven, but surely we can progress beyond the first to the second, third, fourth and onwards? When Christ was asked what was the most important law, he answered that it was love – always and unquestionably. Love God; love man. Everything lies in that.
But how to – that is the question. Love isn’t a nice squashy emotion. It is a series of actions, a characteristic, a pattern of behaviour.
- Love does not tell tales behind other people’s backs; it does not relay cruel gossip.
- Love does not rejoice in other people’s failures or mistakes.
- Love does not take advantage of other people’s ignorance or vulnerability.
- Love tries to build people up, never to tear them down.
- Love encourages, never humiliates, pointlessly criticizes or discourages.
- Love is generous of spirit, rejoices in other people’s successes, even when we may have failed ourselves – and what generosity of spirit that takes!
And if you love, you will certainly be hurt sometimes, because those you love will be injured in heart or body themselves, and you will feel their pain.
Often they will disappoint you, and disillusion is agony.
They may not love you in return, and rejection hurts more than we can imagine.
They may disagree on matters we think vital – but love does not deny freedom. And freedom is the right to disagree, without being made to feel guilty, cast aside, a betrayer or ungrateful. Even if they should be seriously wrong, they must still be loved.
And who knows – they may be right? And we may be wrong.
So love, and honesty require humility also.
And love forgives, but it is honest. Love does not deny fault, does not defend the wrong and lack the courage to be straight – but always, always it carries no grudge.
A Person of Honour
I would like to be a person of honour. I would like my promises to be so strong that people trust them. If I say I will do something, it should be good as done. If I say I will be somewhere, and at a certain time, I must be there – unless major accident or crisis prevents me.
I must be honest with myself. It is so desperately easy to make excuses, pretty much instinctive to say “I did it because” – and then think of some pleasanter reason than the real one.
We may fool other people, which matters least. We may fool ourselves, and that matters very much. As long as we make shabby or selfish things sound all right, we will not change them.
We will certainly never fool God.
I am reminded of Joseph Smith’s answer when he was asked why he did not make life so much easier for himself and simply deny the first vision. “God knows, and God knows that I know,” was his answer.
Well, God knows what we know also. Put like that, excuses are ridiculous – and dishonest.
And yet it is so easy to lie about why we failed to do this or that. Most especially it is easy to delude ourselves as to why we may say some of the cruel things we do.
I want not to say things to make myself feel better, at the expense of making someone else feel worse, and lie to myself that it is some sort of testimony, or thanks for what I have. Real gratitude is not a matter of boasting – “I’m so grateful I have.” It lies in using our blessings wisely, with thanks to God who gave them to us, and in sharing them with others, using them in service, whether it is a talent or a relationship, or whatever else.
I would love to be the kind of person who could honestly be told, “After spending a little time with you, I feel better.” I never want to hear, “I feel inadequate, miserable, lonely, and foolish.”
One of the greatest characteristics of real love is that we want people to succeed, to believe in themselves, to feel energized, comforted, uplifted, to feel as if they are good, valuable and loved, and above all believed in, and what they truly seek to do, they can accomplish.
All that takes time and care, putting yourself out of centre stage for a while, thinking of how the world looks from someone else’s point of view – being patient, gentle, generous of heart – and of word.
Other Stellar Qualities
I would like to be gentle, but not a wimp. And the two are not at all the same. I would like to have the courage to speak the truth, even when it is not comfortable, but to deliver hard news with tenderness, never condescension. I need to remember that I too am vulnerable, can make mistakes and fall flat on my face, be embarrassed, humiliated, discouraged, or lonely.
How much do we learn from pain, and failure, that we don’t seem to learn any other way?
I need to be wiser. I certainly need to be more patient.
I need never to retaliate, no matter how much I am hurt. That doesn’t mean I don’t stand up for myself, or for others. Defending is one thing, seeking revenge is quite another, and I need to be honest about the difference. Not easy.
I am building up quite a list. But this is the time. I have no idea how much longer I have to work on these things, but I need to be a lot further ahead than I am before I can afford to slack off. Not that that time ever comes.
I need to be more grateful for what I have, and use it more fully and more wisely.
Maybe more than anything else at all, I need to know more fully that God knows what He is doing. He hasn’t forgotten anyone, or anything.
A dear friend the other day spoke of someone else desperately longing for something ahead, and realizing that everything they were learning along the way was necessary for them to know in order to be the person who could have and keep what they were traveling towards.
Maybe that is me too? Maybe it is all of us?
Take this step well, with passion and courage, honour, kindness – and trust in both the wisdom and the love of God.
Let’s make 2008 a year of ever increasing light.