On Purpose

Hey! Remember that one time when I wrote some blog posts? Yeah, me neither. I guess it hasn't been that long since I wrote a post (2 weeks?), but it seems like forever. I wish I had the time and energy and drive to write every night. I'm not really worried about having material to write about; there's always something brewing in my head. But school and work and homework and trying to have a social life tends to leave a person with little time for writing blog posts, especially when they're as long and rambly (let's just pretend that's a real word) as mine are. Anyway, let's cut to the chase.

So tonight we watched "Hitch." It's a great movie. One of those rare one's that kind of a romantic comedy that pretty much anyone can enjoy, even those that don't care for romantic movies(if it has any kind of romantic themes to it and I've seen it, especially more than once, you know it is good). Anyway, Will Smith has a line in there that my roommate, Miah (<tangent>I literally typed companion instead of roommate and had to correct myself. Strange how I've been home for almost 4 years and I still sometimes catch myself saying things like this</tangent>) and I both caught on to and were pondering. He says "begin each day as if it were on purpose." Miah asked "What does that mean?" The movie went on and it kind of slipped out of memory, but it was still in the back of my mind. Once the movie was over, I brought it up again, because I had a similar thought to him.

What does it mean to begin each day as if it were on purpose? As I pondered it, I was reminded of a talk that Elder Bednar gave in October 2008 entitled "Pray Always." He speaks of praying always and how we can make our prayers more meaningful. He notes how the Lord speaks in Moses 3:4-5 of creating all things spiritually before they are created physically.

 As we begin our morning with prayer, it is beneficial to ponder areas in which we struggled the day before or, just in general, things that we know we can improve upon. We must recognize our need for improvement and that we have potential to do better than we are doing. As we humble ourselves, express remorse for not doing better, determine to pattern our lives more fully after the Savior and plead with the Lord for strength to do better, we set a spiritual pattern for our day. As we go throughout our day, we reflect upon the things that we have determined to improve upon and look for times where we would normally struggle with that weakness. As we focus upon those things, we find that we gain strength to more easily overcome that weakness. As we do so, we should offer a silent prayer of gratitude to our Heavenly Father.

When we reach the end of our day and we kneel to close our day in prayer, we have another opportunity to reflect upon the things that we asked our Heavenly Father to help us with as we set out that day. We can recognize His hand in helping us to improve as well as consider ways in which we might still be able to improve. We can pray again for strength to do better in that area or other areas that we have identified where we have room to improve. In this way, we have more fully fulfilled the command to "pray always": in the morning, at night, and during all the events of our day, as we recognized opportunities to answer our earlier desire to improve and expressed gratitude when heavenly assistance was given us to fulfill those desires. In doing so, our prayers (morning, night and all those in between) and all the events of our day are not a bunch of solitary, unconnected moments, but are intertwined ("as if they were on purpose") threads that are bound together from day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year, into an increasingly stronger cord that leads us to become like our Heavenly Father and return back to him.

Life is not just happenstance. If we do not begin each day as if it were on purpose, we will "find that [we're]  left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays " (qtd. from "The Music Man"; also President Monson has quoted that on many occasions, which is where I was reminded of it). But as we begin and end our days in prayer, counseling with the Lord on how we can improve and let that be the focus of our day, we will recognize the slow but steady improvement that is the mark of a disciple of Christ and is the key to perfection. After all, we know that Christ received not of the fulness at first, but continued from grace to grace, until he received a fulness" (D&C 93:13).