Strange Analogy?

I thought of, what you might consider to be, a strange analogy the other day. So I thought I would share it with you. There are two time periods in my life where I feel I’ve been the closest to God or felt the presence of the Holy Ghost the most in my life. The first is rather obvious, it is while I was on my mission. And the second is now. As I was thinking about these two very different time periods, and experiences, I began to see many similarities.

On a mission, of course, your life is dedicated to serving the Lord. There are many stringent rules you must follow. Some of these include: no movies, no television, no newspaper, no music (except in my case, Mormon Tabernacle choir, Janice Kapp Perry, and music composed prayer to 1800) but, only on preparation day., study the Scriptures an hour a day, companionship study one hour a day, be within sight and sound of your companion at all times, etc.

Strangely enough, I am once again following a lot of these rules. Somebody is always within sight or sound of me, I listen to the book of Mormon every morning for at least an hour, with my mom, while I’m getting ready. I guess that counts as companionship study and personal study. :-) I don’t really enjoy listening to music anymore except uplifting music like the Mormon Tabernacle choir or Christmas music. I can probably count on one hand the number of Cds I have purchased over the past six years. Whereas, I probably owned over 400 Cds prior to that. I’ve never really been someone who enjoys movies, to me they always seemed like a waste of time. But when I do watch movies now, I try to watch uplifting or at least somewhat clean movies. I do however, watch quite a bit TV, but not because I really like it, it just keeps me occupied. I am generally in bed by around 5:00 p.m. and there’s really not much else to do. I used to really enjoy reading the newspaper every day. Ask any of my classmates in podiatry school, and they will tell you that I always brought a newspaper to school to read during breaks. But this is something I cannot do now, and actually, I rather miss it.

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that these are the two time periods in my life where I have felt the closest to my Heavenly Father. The formula is rather simple, if we do those things to stay focused on the Gospel, we will feel an increase in the presence of the Holy Ghost in our lives. We can’t all live like missionaries, but we can change certain things in our lives, such as reading our scriptures, saying our prayers, having family home evening, avoiding music, television, movies, magazines, etc. that are not uplifting. By making even small efforts to do these things, you will notice a big change.

That’s my two cents.